How to activate the perfect pre-awareness campaign to have a sellout ticket onsale

Activating a successful pre-awareness campaign can be the difference between selling out your event and not. When done right, they can build anticipation and excitement for your onsale, as well as giving you great data and insights as to how successful your onsale will be. 

At Event Genius we’ve worked with a wide range of promoters, from those organising intimate local events to huge global festivals, and so have experience in knowing what kind of pre-awareness campaign works for events of all types. 

Our Campaign Managers work with our partners one-to-one to help create bespoke campaigns for their events, but there are a few actions that all pre-awareness campaigns should have to ensure they reach their potential.

Create a website and monitor SEO

This may seem obvious, but you’ll be surprised by how many event organisers don’t do this. But even more importantly than ensuring your website is functional and includes all the relevant info, is making sure it has good SEO. Before even thinking about shouting about your event, you need to make sure that fans can easily find your event on Google.

If you don’t have your own website and would like to speak to us about building your website as part of a wider ticketing contract, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can also find out more about our website building services here.

Run a waiting list

Capturing the details of those interested in your event is imperative to a successful onsale. Not only does it give you a direct means of communication to market your ticket sale, but it also gives you valuable insights on ticket sale expectations as well as data to use throughout your campaign.

Setting up a waiting list function – much like the ones we run via our Festicket and Ticket Arena websites – is the ideal way to capture this data. 

Create a Facebook event

Social Media is an ideal channel to ramp up excitement pre ticket sales, particularly by creating a Facebook Event that people can join to hear updates from you. This event can then be used to keep your audience engaged, teasing the onsale and communicating lineup announcements, as well as pushing upsells, such as cashless credit, and more throughout the campaign. Those who have responded to your event will receive a notification whenever you post in it. 

Communicate with wishlisters via email and social media

Once you start to build your database of wishlisters via your waiting list and Facebook events, it is important you continue to engage with them in the run up to your ticket sale. Communicate any important announcements to them, such as the lineup and time and date of the ticket sale. And make sure you send them a link to your store when you open sales. 

This is also a good opportunity to push any content you have created to only further excitement. 

Produce content

Creating content – whether written, video or audio – gives potential customers a deeper insight into your event experience. You can achieve this via a trailer video, or articles on the activities beyond the music, the food and drink on offer, a city guide, an interview with yourself or headliner, or simply a great lineup playlist.

Content also does wonders to keep your wishlisters engaged without constantly feeding them sales-y material or practical information.

Run a PR campaign

Whether you have aspirations to become a popular local event or an international powerhouse, achieving good media exposure is essential. Get together and write up your USPs – you may be a new event to a local area, the first in a particularly special setting, or have an incredible lineup – and settle on the angle and publications you want to target with a press release. 

What’s more, successful PR can work wonders for SEO. Backlinks from high-quality websites will boost your own website’s score and make Google see you as the main authority on your event.

If you’d like to speak to us about how Event Genius can help you drive the perfect pre-awareness campaign and sell out your event, get in touch today, we’d love to hear from you! 

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