Selling Out Your Event: Marketing Tips

Everyone hopes to sell out their event but it doesn't always go that smoothly. It is totally possible for a small event organiser to sell out their events, follow the steps below to maximize your sales. 

Start promoting your event as early as possible

Start promoting your event as soon as you have details confirmed, don't wait until your tickets are on sale. Once you have an event date and location you can start by promoting a 'Coming Soon' event and get your brand out there. Set up all your social media profiles and start promoting your event, tickets don't have to be on sale, you don't even have to have a set schedule for the event, start promoting the date and your brand. 

Consider using limited Early Bird tickets to encourage quick sales as soon as your tickets are available, these could be discounted, and then once those have sold you can up the ticket price and start selling regular tickets. 

Think local when promoting your event location

Once you have your event location booked, do some research into local companies in the area that you could work with. If there are any local attractions get in contact and offer an exchange, if they advertised your event you could promote the attraction to your guests. 

For small events its unlikely that you will get guests traveling across the country, promote your event in local facebook groups for the area and drop leaflets into local businesses. 

Hold competitions

If your tickets aren't selling as well as you'd like, consider offering a couple of tickets for free as part of a promotion. Encourage the sharing of your promotional posts and select a random winner to receive tickets, this helps spread the word about your event, but do be careful not to break social networks promotional rules.  

If you have any staff or friends that will be helping out with your event ask them to promote on their personal social media accounts, promotions look a lot less spammy when coming from a genuine person. 

Use mini-events to promote your main event

We're not suggesting you hold multiple main events, that'll be a lot of work! Mini-events can be anything from a webinar, a live stream, social media contest or even just a blog post. 

Use these ideas to promote your main event and keep pushing traffic to your event page where guests can purchase tickets. 

Don't give away all of your content

It can be tempting to promote everything that will be happening at your event but how about surprising your guests and creating a sense of mystery. 

Give out hints of a special guest and encourage people to guess who it might be on social media. You can choose to keep the secret until the event and surprise your guests or, if your tickets are close to selling out, announce it very close to the event to encourage urgent purchases to sell your last few tickets. 

Offer multiple ticket types

Not everyone will be going to the event for the same reason, having multiple types of tickets gives guests the options of how they want to interact with your brand at your event. 

Common types of tickets are Early Birds, VIP, After Party, and discounted tickets for groups of people such as seniors or students. 

Selling tickets doesn't have to be hard work, plan your marketing strategy and narrow your target audience. If all the right steps are taken, then there really isn’t any reason why your event shouldn't sell out and be a success.