Facebook has just released a suite of long-requested and long-awaited options for advertisers.
As event marketing specialists, our clients often put a lot of stock into the number of people who express interest in a Facebook event. Whilst the ROI and conversion potential of high attendees is a wider discussion, Facebook has now validated the work you’ve put into building an event audience by introducing a new feature to target historic event attendees.
How did event audiences work in the past?
Previously, Facebook only allowed you to target audiences that had clicked ‘interested’ or ‘attending’ to an active/current event. This meant that in order to build audience pools or generate social proof through higher event numbers, you had to build your Facebook event well in advance or sometimes repurpose an old event to carry these numbers across (the latter is a workaround we don’t encourage).
How have event audiences changed?
You can now build a custom engagement audience of attendees who RSVP’d to your past events. You can also incorporate your previous events into a single audience pool.
What does this mean for me?
If you’ve spent money on generating event responses, or engaged a street team who’ve assisted with raising numbers organically, then the benefits of this feature speak for themselves. For frequent producers, promoters or venues, you can carry audiences forward on an event-by-event basis. For larger annual events, you have a second chance to convert people who already recognise your brand.
Now, before you go all Bradley Cooper and get excited over limitless possibilities, bear in mind that the feature isn’t coupled with a renegade license to target just anyone. You’re limited to people who’ve interacted with your event up to 365 days in the past — or currently, no earlier than December 2016.
This might sound limiting, however our data shows an increased drop-off in conversion results for event attendees (of festivals or larger scale events) who do not purchase after four weeks. This means that you can form a foundation pillar of event attendees in the prospecting stage of your campaign and tactically integrate them into your conversion activity.
Resources
This feature is one of several Facebook are currently rolling out. We’ll continue to spotlight new options as they become available.
