Let the Countdown Begin: Marketing Tips To Sell Out Your NYE Event
With New Year’s Eve just weeks away and 2018 already in the rear view mirror, there really is no other moment throughout the year that gets this sort of attention. Many people are inclined to do one last splurge—or a purge if you will. Whether it’s sparkly outfits, flutes of fancy champagne, or hundred dollar tickets to the swankiest party on the last night of the year, everyone wants to close the last chapter and start the next one with a bang.
For anyone in the events industry, we are well aware that planning a New Year’s Eve party can be one of the most difficult events to plan. When you mix the biggest event night of the year with people’s high expectations, hopes, and anticipation for the coming year — that can be a lot of pressure.
With every venue and promoter planning similar events with inclusive midnight champagne toasts and hyped live performances, the competition is high and the ability to stand out is challenging.
If you’re an event promoter, there’s one thing that always comes to mind: How do I sell out my NYE party and maximize ticket sales?
In preparation, we’ve rounded up all the marketing essentials you need to make sure your countdown party of the ages stands out from the rest.
Create an Event Landing Page
First things first—start early. Design and launch your landing page for your event with a call-to-action so interested visitors can be easily re-directed to your event ticketing page to buy tickets. Be sure to install conversion tracking so you can keep track of who engages with your campaign for future re-marketing.
Pro-Tip: Promote your upcoming event before your on-sale with ToneDen’s Event Announce Playbook.
Know Your Event Marketing Lifecycle
People buy tickets during two periods of the NYE lifecycle:
- When tickets go on-sale
- Usually a last minute surge the week of NYE, typically right after Christmas
Start ticket sales as soon as you can after Halloween and be sure to test multiple audiences so you can pinpoint which target groups are most likely to purchase immediately. We’ll show you how to do this below.
Tiered Pricing
It’s no secret that early bird pricing is the easiest way to create awareness and drive sales in the early months of your event cycle. Tier your pricing in late October and early November to prompt early-bird ticket sales and motivate valuable word-of-mouth marketing.
With timed batch ticket pricing, you release batches of tickets at specific milestones with increasing prices the closer you get to the end of the year. This multi-tiered approach helps boost ticket sales after your initial early bird pricing, creating a sense of urgency, well in advance of your event. A little bit of fear-of-missing-out marketing tactics go a long way.
Why should splurging be limited to just tickets? Offering a limited number of VIP ticket options that include perks such as bottle service or premium entry and seating is another great way to incentivize party-goers.
Pro-Tip: You can leverage ToneDen Event Playbooks to obtain FaceBook Messenger Subscribers and send auto-messages during each price increase milestone to generate immediate sales.
Engaging Ad Creative
Utilizing the perfect imagery, headline and supporting text, your ad creative needs to grab attention on an emotional level. A viewer should get a glimpse into the vibe of your event and why it stands out in comparison to your competitors. Learn more about The Anatomy of a Perfect Ad.
With video marketing, it’s certainly not “up and coming” anymore. It’s here and it’s going to stay. Leveraging or re-purposing video content to create a montage of your NYE event increases your click through rate and conversions. In fact, Facebook released a statistic that video ads perform 80% better than still image ads.
Here’s a great example of how ToneDen Partner Radiance NYE uses highlighted moments of their past events to generate excitement for their NYE party:
Pro-Tip: Keep your videos at least 15 seconds long and less than 59 seconds, so your ad can be placed across all networks: Facebook newsfeed, Instagram feed, and/or Instagram Story. ToneDen’s algorithm will automatically serve the ad on whichever network(s) you’re getting the most conversions.
Preparing Your Ads & Targeting Your Audience
Once you have your event landing page, ad creative, and ticket pricing strategy in place, you are now ready to identify and reach your audience. Placing the right message in front of the right audience at the right time cannot be underestimated, and is an integral part if not the most important part of your marketing efforts. Sending highly targeted ads to segmented audiences = a higher return on advertising.
If running your ads through ToneDen, the platform will automatically recommend target audiences for your campaign and pinpoint new audiences based on their similarities to your existing customers using data sources such as your website traffic, Facebook, Eventbrite, Spotify, or Mailchimp — boosting the efficiency of your campaigns while maintaining lower cost-per-acquisition.
Tip: Include as many audiences as you can based on your budget and duration of the campaign. Need help figuring out how many audiences you should include that’s within your budget ?
Use this equation below to make sure you’re on the right track:
Campaign Highlight: Minimal Effort’s NYE Party
Minimal Effort is a large scale event in Los Angeles held biannually for Halloween and New Year’s Eve. Last year, Founder Cyril Bitar launched a week-long conversion campaign for their NYE festival on Facebook and Instagram through ToneDen:
With a budget of $315, ToneDen’s audience building tools were split among a handful of different audiences including people who visited their website, pre-saved audience based on Bitar’s promotion company Underrated, and lookalikes of users who performed purchases. With ToneDen’s budget optimization algorithm, these budgets were automatically steered to get them the best return on ad spend. This meant ToneDen automatically found the best available audiences across their ad sets to take their marketing dollar even further.
Minimal Effort added $13,106 in revenue, which was a 41.6x return on ad spend. For every $1 they spent, they made $41.
Re-Targeting Your Audience
The final stretch before the event can get stressful as you focus on closing last-minute attendees, while raising excitement for those who are already going.
Conversion campaigns ensure that you target potential attendees who were served your ad but had not purchased a ticket yet for whatever reason. Thankfully, re-targeting is built into these campaigns, but it’s also important to set-up additional ads to target people that had either previously engaged with your event, entered your ticket giveaway, or visited your website. Be sure to include these audiences within your campaigns to stay top-of-mind, with last-minute messaging that drives urgency.
Host a Flash Sale or Ticket Giveaway
Data capture is essential for re-marketing. They’re easy ways to drive excitement — and sales.
Using ToneDen Event Playbooks:
- Host a Ticket Giveaway to capture data on potential attendees and use ToneDen to Facebook Message the winner to all entrants with a link to purchase a ticket.
- Host a Flash Sale to get last minute ticket buyers into the mix.
- 38% of tickets sell during close-out. Run a Close-Out Campaign and sell out your event.
ToneDen is your one-stop to support all your NYE event marketing needs. Ready to toast the year ahead?
