There’s less than a month to go until New Year’s Eve. The hype of the holidays is building, and your guests are starting to think about their plans. Are you in them? If you’re not a part of the conversation now, your guests are going to plan their night somewhere else.
Follow these 10 tips to set up your marketing campaign now and accelerate it through to the night of NYE.
1. Define your theme
There’s a lot of competition at NYE — why should someone choose your event over another? You need to make this clear upfront and provide people with the benefits of attending your event. The best way to do this is to create a theme and stick to it. People connect with events that have a focused theme. It’s what aligns customer expectation with customer experience. Define your vision, create the essence you want your customers to experience, and design everything – including your imagery, benefit-driven messaging, and your interior – around these items. Never lose sight of this theme throughout your marketing efforts. This is what drives consistency for the public’s perception of your event and what gets people excited about attending.
2. Set up your event landing page now
You need an event page and you need it to be launched now. This gives you time to market your event and garner visitors to your landing page to start making their plans around your party. Keep in mind that it’s important to have a section of your website or a specific landing page dedicated to your event. Simply having a sentence description on a third-party ticketing company’s website isn’t going to cut it. People want to know the vibe of your party, understand why they should attend, and get a gage at what they can expect by attending — something a page dedicated to your event can provide. Plus, having your own page allows for greater SEO opportunities, allowing guests to find out about your event in search results. Make sure you also include a call-to-action for users to buy tickets. The best solution is for your customers to buy tickets directly on this landing page and not be redirected to another website. Redirects oftentimes leads to cart abandonment.
3. Incentivize guests to purchase tickets early
Encourage people to pre-purchase their tickets by creating supply and demand. Showing them your price will increase as the event gets closer creates demand for the few supply of early bird tickets. You can set your tickets to increase price by the week, day or even hour leading up to your event. You can also set your tickets to increase by quantity after x amount of tickets are sold. This encourages people to buy early and have time to share their plans with others. Plus, when guests pre-buy their tickets, you’re generating revenue before the night of your event.
4. Establish your social channels
It’s imperative to have an online presence that matches the style of your offline presence. Therefore, your social channels should be updated to reflect the theme of your event. Change your profile pictures and cover photos on your social channels to coincide with your event images. Add an events section on your Facebook landing page that gives full information about your NYE event. Integrate your ticketing page into your Facebook fan page for people to buy tickets directly through social. Keeping it all consistent between your website, social channels, and venue will strengthen your presence and increase awareness.
5. Engage through social
After you establish your social channels, it’s time to engage with your guests through them. Customers now make purchasing decisions on multiple platforms — including social — and they expect you to be there. Post your event on your social channels using referral tracking codes to track where your guests are purchasing from. Do contests or ticket giveaways to build engagement and interaction. Run Facebook ads to target a specific segmented audience, encouraging them to buy tickets to your event. The best way to do this is to craft different benefit-driven advertising copy for your different audience segments, then use Facebook to target these different audiences with your specified content. This personalized content becomes relatable and will drive more sales than one mass message.
6. Make it easy for guests to share
Speaking of social, make it easy for your guests to share your event and their ticket purchases on their own social channels. Include share links on your event page and make those links even more apparent after they buy their ticket. The majority of people attend NYE events based on where their friends are going. Allowing your guests to share your event in one click turns them into promoters and builds your organic word of mouth promotions, without you having to do any extra work.
7. Set your promoters up for success
Your promoters are a big part of your marketing efforts. Make sure they understand the theme of your event and know how to talk to it. Then, turn them into a mobile box office. It’s best to use a ticketing company that has a mobile app so you can do this. The mobile application will allow your promoters to sell tickets directly through their device through both cash and credit purchases. Consumers get a digital ticket, and that buying information is synced with the rest of your ticket purchases. This makes your promoters even more powerful, and drives more customers through your door.
8. Leverage partnerships
Chances are you have relationships with third-party outlets, such as your booked entertainment, sponsors, key social influencers, and media outlets. Tap into these relationships and leverage a partnership with them so they’ll promote on your behalf. Not only does this increase the amount of messaging that goes out, but it also exposes you to a new audience you may have otherwise not reached. Plus, the validity from these types of partners enhances your event’s credibility.
9. Strategize your lines the night-of
Create a different line for a different type of customer, such as a line for your pre-sale customer and a line for customers paying at the door. This is another way to encourage pre-sale and allows your staff handling pre-sale checkin to only focus on that task and increase line speed. On the other hand, it allows your staff selling tickets at the door to only handle that task, aiding in long waits for door sales. The more organized your lines are, the faster your speed of night will be, the happier your customers will be, and the faster they’re through your door to spend money on drinks.
10. Track and measure your efforts
You’ll never know how successful your marketing efforts are if you don’t track and measure results. Use referral tracking codes to track all of your marketing efforts mentioned above, including your event page, organic social posts, paid social posts, guest social posts, promoters, and third-party partners. Use a unique referral code for each promoter and partner to truly track your efforts. You’ll be able to track where guests are purchasing tickets and what marketing efforts are driving the biggest results. This sets you up for success for next year to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.
Whitney Larson is the president and director of marketing at Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io or fill out the form below.
