It’s Magic In the Making…
Today is Thursday. Two days have passed since I slid into the DMs eighty-three of my most engaged followers and tested my ability to influence them to promote my event. And guess what happened?
Well as of Tuesday morning, exactly one week after my initial announcement of tickets to “Champagne Dreams”, the New Year’s Eve launch party I’m hosting to officially debut my new company, Upscale Mobile Entertainment— five had sold.
Last Friday, I created a unique flyer for the headlining DJ along with a promo code offering a 70% discount off regular prices for those who applied it at check-out. I limited the quantity for that offer to 25 tickets. That was also the day I officially announced the DJ to the public. We both posted the flyer our respective audiences in synchronicity, which led to multiple reposting across our shared community on Instagram. On the first day, four people bought tickets.
The other special offer I was promoting was the Early Bird ticket, which was priced at 50% off regular admission. My goal with these tickets was to present them as a deal worth catching. My experience in event planning has shown me that many people tend to make decisions and take action when they are about to lose something or when it is almost too late. The offer was set to expire the following day, on Wednesday at 9pm. And I wanted to resound a countdown within the local online community to rapidly raise awareness and inspire more people to buy tickets.
Finally, I created an additional promo code to offer to the people who follow me on Instagram and have demonstrated that they truly enjoy my content. I wanted them to feel seen, acknowledged, and rewarded. And if by making them feel chosen, it would generate enough goodwill for them to do a favor for me in return.
I was testing to see what would happen if I first, selected folks who liked or interacted with my most recent six posts, then messaged them with an invitation and promo code to purchase discount tickets, which had been reduced by $55, AND — also asked them to repost my flyer with a countdown to the expiration of Early Bird tickets in their instastories.
I planned to repost their mentions of my flyer in my own instastories, believing that the reposts would act as social proof that people were in support of my party, and thus would encourage others beyond my sphere of influence to buy the Early Bird tickets before they were no longer available.
I was intentionally trying to create an echo chamber with my flyer ricocheting through Instagram during a concentrated period of time to achieve a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) effect.
The most important factor was to give something to my audience BEFORE asking them to do something for me. I often receive DMs from people simply asking me to repost a flyer. But in those requests, the person asking never offers me anything, not even a compliment or an acknowledgment. As a result, the request comes off as selfish. Even though it would cost me absolutely nothing to reshare someone else’s content, and would literally only take seconds to do, the idea of being asked to help out with no personal gain to me would make me reluctant. It might actually turn me off.
Knowing how this sentiment might exist in others too, I spent time crafting a warm message that emphasized the value I have for the person and expressed my commitment to making it easy and financially accessible for them to attend my party by shaving down the cost of their ticket.
I also knew that by giving people TWO CTAs (calls-to-action) — to buy and to repost, they would be inclined to do the one that required the least from them, especially if they weren’t going to purchase tickets.
It was so cool to watch the ripple effect of my messages. By 11pm on Tuesday evening, sales jumped from five to twenty, and twenty-four people had reposted my flyer on Instagram. As of 10:43pm on Wednesday (yesterday), twenty-four tickets had sold, including seven of the Early Bird, and people were still reposting the flyer, even though the promotion was over. Essentially, within the first 24-hours of executing ‘Operation FOMO Echo Chamber’ on Instagram, ticket sales grew from 5 to 24 — almost five times as many tickets sold in the first seven days.
Before I began writing this article, I checked sales again. They now stand at twenty-nine, and approximately thirty-six people have reshared my flyer to their own followers, 43% of everyone I messaged. Four people used my promo code, eleven people applied the DJ’s code. And full-price tickets are beginning to sell. These ones priced at $80 will be the highest grossing, so the next push is to figure out how to keep the momentum growing without boring or overwhelming my followers with too much promotion…
I’ve identified two willing participants to sell tickets as Party Ambassadors. Yesterday, they each received their own unique promo codes to sell $60 tickets to folks within their network. In exchange for their efforts, I will give them a $10 kickback on each ticket purchased with their code. I’d like to find more people willing to agree to profit-sharing in exchange for selling tickets but I’m not certain if searching and asking more people to become resellers is the best use of my time when I can instead focus on designing original, seductive animated graphics and investing in a paid ad campaign on Eventbrite.
While the progress of sales so far is promising, in order for me to truly profit from this venture I’ll have to compel about 100 more people to buy tickets at full price. And I know repeatedly telling them to do so won’t get the outcome I seek.
I must focus on crafting the next segment of this communications campaign in another way. I thought I had it figured out: I was going to pay for ads on Instagram and go on auto-pilot for a few days to focus on the party decor and logistics. But after researching, I believe a better and more effective approach will be to design hand-crafted, drip-release, artful content instead of handing the responsibility over to the Algorithms. My objective is to create lore about “Champagne Dreams” and to begin to assign non-tangible, aspirational qualities to it. I want to paint pictures in the imaginations of my viewers to have them form desirable associations with my party that they find themselves entranced and excited, discussing it about it with others, and choosing to attend — without me directly asking…
This is where I am as of now, December 22nd — nine days away from the launch party. Also weighing on my mind are the decisions I must make today about what decor and marketing items are truly necessary to make the party successful, and which ones will have to go on the “nice-to-have” list. My hesitation lies in not wanting to overly invest by purchasing items that will only bring a negligible return on investment and may not move the profit margins significantly. Also, there’s no way to predict how many more tickets I will sell, and how many people will actually attend the event. Uncertainty I already knew I’d have to face.
I’m really gonna have to trust my heart and my intuition. Still, the most urgent sentiment lies in maintaining excitement and interest in this party, and you better believe I still have some tricks up my sleeve.
Stay tuned…
~SuperGoode
