Funnels. For event marketers who spend a good chunk of their time researching the latest and greatest methods of event marketing trends, funnels are a term they know all too well. Sales funnels, click funnels, marketing funnels…funnels, funnels, funnels. What are these so called “funnels” everyone speaks of? Well, it’s a strategic marketing protocol that is put into place in order to improve revenue in any type of business.
In all industries, it is essential that you have a process in place that details your marketing efforts step by step so that you have somewhat of a cycle that improves sales. In the events industry, an advertising strategy is utilized when you’re looking to increase registrations and/or ticket sales. It’s imperative that you construct a timeline to distribute your marketing content in order to maximize the effectiveness of your event marketing funnel.
In this article, we will help you understand how to distribute your budget during each stage of your event marketing funnel to ensure an increase in your ticket sales.
Event Marketing Funnel: How to Spend Your Event Marketing Budget
The most crucial component in your event marketing funnel is learning what the typical event advertising cycle looks like. You must track when people purchase tickets because there is a curve that exists. Typically, you’ll notice a spike in sales when you first announce that tickets are available. That’s providing that you did an excellent job of building up the excitement leading up to the sales date. The next time you’ll see a boost in ticket sales is days prior to the event. So what can you do between these two time period to increase ticket sales? We’re glad you asked!
To nurture prospects into buying tickets between the time you announce that tickets are now on sale, and right before the event, you’ll need to wisely distribute your advertising budget into multiple stages.
We recommend:
- Using 40% of your event marketing budget during the event announcement stage of your funnel.
- Using 20% of your event marketing budget during the maintenance stage of your funnel.
- Using 40% of your event marketing budget during the closing stage of your funnel.
Now, these percentages do differ depending on the type of event you’re organizing. For example, if this is a nightlife event, you would want to spend some of the announcement stage budget for pre-event promotion as well. Those events require a little more excitement building.
For those who are planning a family event, you’ll want to use a larger portion of the event budget during the announcement stage, and then split the event marketing budget for the maintenance stage of your funnel and the closing stage of your funnel evenly. The reason for that is that higher income audiences tend to plan ahead and so they’ll be your early bird ticket buyers.
If it’s a tiered event, you’ll want to capture all demographics of ticket buyers. Which means you should use approximately 10% of your event marketing budget on the announcement stage of your event funnel. Then, you can split the remainder of the budget by tier. So, it would look like:
- 30% to be spent on the 1st tier of ticket sales
- 10% to be spent on the 2nd tier of ticket sales
- 10% to be spent on the 3rd tier of ticket sales
- 40% to be spent on the closing stage of your event funnel
The key for event marketers in New York is to allot the proper percentage of the event marketing budget strategically depending on the type of event.
Our Event Planner Expo will take place Oct. 3, 2019 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. For more information on the Expo, learn more here.
