Venue Marketing Tips to Promote Events and Sell More Tickets
If you're looking for venue marketing tips and tricks to promote your events and increase your tickets' sales, read this to the bottom.
Arranging and holding events can be a challenging activity since it requires a great deal of patience, management skills, and specific information about your industry. Above all, a flexible and problem-solving approach is the seed you need to sow for successful events and venue marketing attempts. Not having the proper tools and tactics for venue marketing is like driving blind.
Here we have discussed four handy venue marketing tips that can take your experience one step higher and also introduced a feature-rich WordPress plugin in this regard named Modern Events Calendar. MEC is the best WordPress event calendar for effective management of events on your website with the vast capabilities it can offer. You should be aware that both the long-term and short-term marketing performances are necessary to help you reach the maximum potential for growth.
If you are interested on choosing the best WordPress event management software, you should read this: Best WordPress Event Calendar Plugins 2020 Ultimate Guide
So let’s get down to the beneficial practices we have put together. They will come in handy for improving your venue marketing attempts and see positive results right away:
Create a High-quality Website
Your website is the bullseye of your brand and events. Therefore, it should have an eye-catching design and operate without any problems.
You should use the experience and skills of a web designer and also a copywriter to create the impression you want others to have in mind about you. Opt for various visual elements, colors, videos, and testimonials to let users have a real perception of your venue.
Provide complete and correct contact information, such as your address and phone number, and optimize every single item on your website for mobile since a considerable portion of the traffic comes from mobile and tablet devices.
User-friendliness is what matters most these days if you want to have a successful website. Luckily, there are numerous free plugins and themes available for WordPress that can provide you with powerful features for your business. Check out the following items for the most critical factors you need to consider:
Fast-loading Website
You can speed up your website’s loading speed by optimizing your content and website elements using the dedicated plugins for this purpose.
Additionally, choosing a hosting service with the best quality can make a significant difference in the website’s performance as well.
Proper Navigation Menu and Important Pages
An easy and understandable navigation menu can help your users head straight for what they have been looking for.
Event websites need to have all the necessary details like contact information, FAQ page, and event locations. So make sure you have included all of them.
Keep Away From Off-putting Features
You might have experienced visiting websites that play random music all of a sudden or drive you up a wall with a bunch of ads that appear from everywhere.
Avoid having these features on your website at all costs since they can decrease user engagement extensively.
Another significant factor in venue marketing tips is the localization of the site on Google. Follow all the relevant practices and update your business listing on Google with accurate and up-to-date information.
Don’t forget about the appearance on Google Maps because your event locations can be discovered better by people around your place.
A business website cannot be considered a good site without implementing SEO principles.
Appearing on the top results of Google is where you can attract the most people to your events. Hire a professional SEO expert to improve your on-page and off-page SEO to rank for keywords your audiences use on Google.
Choose a Practical Calendar Event
What can be more critical than the events calendar on your website? After doing your best for uploading the events’ details on the site, you want to bring as many eyeballs to them.
This is where the features and compatibility of your event management plugin come to light. You should be able to easily make highlights for your events and display them to the website visitors in a stylish design.
Don’t limit your events to a single page so that you won’t have to guide everyone towards it. Instead, you can implement and display the event on the homepage, sidebars, and even footers in an engaging way.
This way, people get a notice of it no matter which part of your website they are currently visiting.
Conveying a sense of emergence is a great marketing technique you can use for your events. Countdown timers are best for this purpose as they can engage users to click on the event and make reservations soonest possible.
Also, if you have plans in different event locations, showcasing them on a map catches the sight of website visitors.
They put their trust in you more than before when they see various event locations pinned on the map in different cities or even countries on a large scale. Displaying the number of events as a slideshow can likewise increase your reputation.
Make Your Event Sale Easy
The way you sell your tickets online is just as important as the event calendar tool you use. A professional ticket selling system lets you have exact information about the number of attendees, their contact information, and other details so that you can streamline your activities more proficiently.
Insights and reports are among the venue marketing tips for better event management. When you have exact information about your attendees before the big day of yours, you can make customized content, messages, and emails in an attempt to increase engagement.
Your ticketing system should clearly show the total number of tickets, the available event sale amounts, price, and the sold-out ones.
This way, you let your website visitors have a clear understanding of your plans. Furthermore, you should make the payments as simple as possible for users. Try to provide various options on your website and include all the popular payment gateways available.
Combining an eCommerce platform with the ticketing feature makes it easier for you to sell your tickets online and manage the tasks.
WooCommerce, as the most popular eCommerce platform of WordPress, brings you a set of practical features for free that not only makes this experience easier for you but also allows users to enjoy their online shopping experience like no other.
Promote Your Events Widely
After making your website, events calendar, and ticket selling system ready, it’s time to spread the word to the best of your abilities.
You don’t want to hold your event without letting people know about it beforehand.
The following venue marketing tips are proper for fruitful event promotion:
Social Media
The significance and impacts of social media on the life of people are obvious for everyone nowadays.
Facebook is an excellent platform for both creating and promoting events. Thanks to the algorithms of Facebook, sharing events on this platform increases the chances of being seen by more people. For instance, Facebook shows the events that users are going to attend to their friends, which puts those events at the disposal of a broader range of prospects. The platform also supports reminder features that send notifications to people as the events’ date approaches.
Instagram is also another perfect marketing asset for businesses. You can make use of the Instagram stories and refer people to your event’s page by the swipe-up option. Also, it allows you to set timers for your events that users can choose to get notified about it. Questions and polls are other practical tools for increased user engagement on Instagram.
LinkedIn is a great place to promote events and let other people in your industry know about your plans and activities. As you may know, when a user likes a post or leaves a comment on it, all his network connections get notified about it. It is a powerful and free way of advertising your events on a large scale.
Twitter threads can help you with your activities, but try to keep them limited. Share three to four tweets about your special guests or organizers, the place it is going to occur, and the content and plans during the event.
Email Marketing
Send emails to your attendees at different intervals to give extra information or notify them about your upcoming events.
If you currently have a weekly or monthly newsletter, you can include your events’ information in the next versions you are going to send. Your email signature is an excellent place for this notification as well.
Contrary to what most people think nowadays, you should never underestimate the importance of email marketing tools and techniques.
Many business owners ignore email marketing attempts since they believe social media can bring them more engagement and revenue. But, email marketing still has many advantages compared to social media.
Personalization: You can’t personalize your posts on social media since you publish the same content for all, and everyone sees that. However, you can segment your audience based on their preferences, age, gender, etc., and send them the most appropriate content.
As indicated in the research of Campaign Monitor, the emails with the name of recipients in subject lines get opened 26% more than the other ones. Don’t worry about these groupings and customizations since there are so many free tools available for it.
Measurements: When you use email marketing tools, you are well-aware of all that happens from the beginning to the end. You can check insights to see who has opened the email, who has clicked on your CTA buttons and even measure the number of unsubscribed users form your mailing list.
Fortunately, with the growing popularity of smartphones, there are different applications that people use to check their emails directly on their phones every day. This can give a high chance of directing more traffic from mobile phones to your website.
Modern Events Calendar and Revenue Marketing
The Modern Events Calendar, as the name mentions, is the best WordPress event calendar that is developed under the latest design trends. Aside from the original stylish layout, the new Fluent-view add-on lets you use Fluent skins for your calendar. It can magically change the view of your events to become more appealing.
This beautiful event calendar, with its versatile features, is all you need to engage your audience and increase headcounts at events. MEC is a mobile-friendly WordPress event calendar that lets your users view and sign up for the events quickly from mobile phones without any difficulties.
After installing this plugin, you will have a world of options and customization features for creating and displaying your events.
No matter if you need a single event or recurring ones, you can fully customize them to the last details. Images, details of hosts and organizers, locations, and event descriptions are all provided in an eye-catching design.
As earlier pointed out, various view options can assist you significantly in increasing user engagement. MEC is equipped with so many view options, and you can implement them on different parts of your website by copying the associated shortcodes. Countdowns, map views for event locations, sliders, carousels, and timetables are some of the available event display options of the plugin.
If you want to sell your tickets online, purchasing a PRO version will let you activate a booking feature alongside so many other practical options.
By using this feature, your participants will be able to buy a ticket for each event sale and pay the required fee by various means such as Credit Card, Stripe, and PayPal. If you use the WooCommerce plugin, purchasing the WooCommerce integration addon permits you to integrate your plugin with this platform. This way, your users can add their event sale tickets to their carts as a single product and finalize their purchase all at once.
The developer team has kept the importance of social accounts in mind and published their product with great sharing and integration features. It is fully integrated with Facebook, Google Calendar, Meetup, and other famous platforms, meaning that you can easily import your data from these websites into MEC in just a few clicks. By synchronizing your Facebook account with the Modern Events Calendar plugin, your chances of attracting more attendees to your events increase dramatically. Event API addon is another functional capability by which you can share your events on other websites that don’t use the WordPress CMS. It generates an API for each of your events, and you can copy it on other sites to show them without having to change the design or details.
Considering the impact of email marketing and services on businesses, Modern Events Calendar comes with default options that let you send customized emails to your participants within the plugin.
More importantly, you can integrate it with popular email tools such as Mailchimp so that you will have no concerns about your marketing plans.
Mailchimp Integration
With our Mailchimp integration, you can add your existing submission data to your newsletter list. To enable this feature, you should get an API Key and List ID from your Mailchimp account. Following this you can send emails with modern event calendar.
Modern Events Calendar plugin lets you create all types of recurring and single events that are fully customizable. Events can be personalized to the last details and then be displayed on your website engagingly with eye-catching layouts.
You can choose from full calendar views, sliders, countdowns, carousels, etc. and display events most engagingly. These views are compatible with popular WordPress page builders such as Elementor and Visual Composer. Additionally, you can add a booking feature to each of your events so that your users will be able to purchase tickets and make reservations online.
30 Day Money Back Guarantee
You’ll be amazed by the high quality of our products, but in case if you gave it an honest try and didn’t like it, you should know that “Customers Satisfaction” is one of our most important goals.
Summary
The event industry is a rewarding but challenging field of activity that requires proper tools and skills to guarantee a successful experience.
The venue marketing tips stated in this article can increase your event attendees considerably and, in turn, increase your revenues.
The MEC plugin is a professional WordPress event calendar that entails all the necessary features you ever need to overcome the hurdles of managing events. Give it a try today, and enjoy the simplicity it brings to your business.