How to Time Your Social Media Campaigns During Ticket Sales!

The act and venue are confirmed. Advance sales start in a few weeks. But what now? This question leaves many event organizers at a loss. And whether it's email marketing, social media or traditional newspaper ads: without a sensible schedule, your marketing often falls flat. The reason lies in the life cycle of advance sales. If you don't align your marketing with it, you may miss the moments when potential customers are most likely to buy.

Your marketing should consist of a diverse mix of measures. In our experience, depending on the event's target audience, paid social should make up around 40 percent of your total marketing budget.

In this article, we use two idealized types of events to show you what share of your social media marketing budget you should spend at which point during advance sales:

• Early-booker event: long sales cycle or sold out immediately

  Early-booker events include, for example, multi-day festivals whose tickets are expensive and whose attendance requires planning. They also include all concerts or theater performances whose tickets sell out shortly after going on sale due to high demand.
  
  

• Late-booking event: spontaneous purchases and events that don't sell out

  Late-booking event are those for which tickets tend to be bought at short notice or on impulse, such as parties, concerts, or satire and theater performances, sometimes with a largely regional audience, and which usually don't sell out completely.

If you're not sure which group your event belongs to, take a look at the

event analytics in the Cockpit.

Phase 1: Announcing the event

Your event marketing doesn't necessarily kick off when advance sales start, especially not for early-booker events. If you start your promotional activities earlier, they aren't yet aimed at selling tickets directly. Instead, the goal is to raise awareness of your event, your label or your venue among your target audience. You should already be advertising on social media at this stage. Regular posts let you reach your loyal customers who already follow your channels. Well-structured paid Meta campaigns connect you with more people who share similar interests and build your reach organically.

With information about the event and "save the date" posts, you can engage with your community several months before the event. Depending on the event, you should increase your posting frequency days or weeks before advance sales start. Announcement posts, behind-the-scenes glimpses and details on when tickets go on sale help you raise awareness of the event even further.

This phase is highly relevant for early-booker events. Ideally, when advance sales start, you'll trigger a "fear of missing out" (FOMO) in many people, so they stock up on tickets right away. In phase 1, for early-booker events that won't sell out without advertising, you should spend up to 20 percent of your social media marketing budget.

For late-booking event, this phase isn't unimportant. However, you shouldn't spend too much of your advertising budget on it. You'll definitely need it later.

Phase 2: Start of advance sales

Phase 2 coincides with the start of advance sales. You should continue to raise awareness of your event, reach new prospects and, above all, sell your first tickets.

It's a good idea to reflect these goals in your posts. To do so, you can share emotional impressions from past events and announce the acts you've booked. This keeps building the hype around your event. Still, don't forget to promote your advance sales. Run ads with clear calls to action for buying tickets. You can also boost your advance sales with early-bird tickets. These quick buyers can later encourage others to buy tickets too.

Early-booker events sell many or even all of their tickets in the first few hours and days. It therefore pays to spend around 40 percent of your social media marketing budget during this period. If you managed to create FOMO among your target audience before advance sales started, a large share of your ticket allocation will be sold shortly after tickets go on sale.

For late-booking event, the event announcement and the start of advance sales often coincide, so that your advertising can trigger purchases right away and you get the most out of a carefully spent budget. In other words, phase 1 often isn't about promoting the specific event, but rather about building and nurturing your community.

As a result, phase 2 is when your event marketing really gets going, and you link directly to ticket sales at the same time. Since late-booking event rarely create FOMO when advance sales start, it's mainly your loyal customers who buy tickets at this point, unless you offer attractive early-bird deals. However, you'll make most of your ticket sales later on. That's why you should invest only around 20 percent of your social media marketing budget in phase 2.

Phase 3: The sluggish dry spell

Two to three weeks after advance sales start, events with a long sales life cycle see a significant drop in ticket sales, regardless of event size. This doesn't necessarily need to worry you: the initial excitement around the start of advance sales has faded, the early-bird ticket allocations have run out or the deadline has passed, and ideally, many of your loyal customers and your most engaged target audience have already stocked up on tickets.

Especially when there's a long stretch of time between the start of advance sales and the event, you need to stay top of mind with your target audience. You can get creative with your posts and campaigns during this time. You can introduce your acts in more detail, offer a behind-the-scenes look at the event, or entertain your community with emotional photos and videos from past events. You can also launch a promotion to celebrate holidays and discount days such as Christmas or Black Friday, giving your ticket sales another boost.

For early-booker events, you can keep running image-building ads during this phase. This will pay off at the latest with your next event. Use your social media channels to stay in touch with your target audience and keep them updated on news. If your event isn't completely sold out yet, you'll still sell a few tickets during this phase. Invest around 15 percent of your social media marketing budget.

Phase 3 is more important for late-booking event. Your marketing won't always trigger purchases directly. However, it's important that your target audience keeps the event in mind, or rather that they put it in their calendars and talk it over with the people around them. Without FOMO, your customers rarely buy a ticket the first time they come across an event. But with successful marketing activities at this point, you can increase the likelihood that they'll buy shortly before the event. So invest around 20 percent of your social media marketing budget here.

Phase 4: The final days before the event

The final days before the event look very different for early-booker and late-booking event.

By this point, early-booker events have sold most of their tickets. In the best case, the event has been sold out for weeks. With countdown posts and impressions from before and during the event, you can get your community excited for what's coming. Combined with a great event experience, this is the best possible advertising for your next event (which is already back in phase 1). If you still have a few tickets left at this point, a final advertising push is worth it. This way, you can still win over the odd spontaneous buyer. Set aside around 25 percent of your social media marketing budget for this phase. Quick tip: put your next event on sale already and start generating revenue for the upcoming edition.

In contrast, advance sales for late-booking event are now entering the crucial phase. These days determine whether the event succeeds or fails. When it comes to advertising, now is the time to go all out. At this point, you can most efficiently reach last-minute deciders, win over those who are still on the fence and gain the most new customers.

Emotional content is an effective advertising tool. Countdowns let you convey that the event is just around the corner. Always pair your posts with a call to buy tickets. Not only is this the phase where you'll make the most ticket sales, it's also where you should invest the most in your ad campaigns. Around 60 percent of your social media marketing budget can go into this phase of advance sales.

Depending on how well tickets are selling, you can offer a discounted last-minute ticket category shortly before the event to sell off the remaining allocations. Be very careful with this for recurring events. After all, you don't want to train your loyal customers and early bookers to become last-minute buyers and ruin your ability to plan ahead!

If your event is already fully booked shortly before it takes place, you can of course scale back your marketing spend and save the remaining funds for future events.

Now you're ready for your marketing campaign. The TICKETINO team wishes you every success with your event!

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