by jonc | Dec 11, 2018 | Promote
There are copious amounts of websites that will offer to list your event and help your event reach a larger audience. So, in theory, boosting sales for your event. Unfortunately, too often, organisers are left feeling that the time taken in creating the event listing was not worth it due to lack of increased sales.
Whilst event listing is one way of approaching event promotion, to see any measurable increase in sales takes a range of tools and strategies.
OMNICHANNEL PROMOTION
For many years ‘multichannel promotion’ or marketing has been the favoured method of interacting with potential attendees. By communicating with them on various platforms, it enabled companies to reach wider and more diverse audiences. Whether it was a print ad, word of mouth, or social media, a multichannel strategy has been the tried and tested method of promotion for many years.
However, consumers are now looking for a more connected and seamless experience for promotion and marketing. Omnichannel refers to the multichannel sales approach that will also provide the attendees with a more integrated experience. The attendee needs to switch from desktop to a mobile device, to the event itself, with the experience being completely consistent.
Keep the message and promotion of your event unified using the following marketing techniques:
Email Marketing:
Plan and develop your communications with your potential attendees well in advance. As well as planning for different audiences, different audiences will call for different types of email.
Reconnect via email with those already booked into your event. This will help build excitement for the event and help develop a relationship with the attendee and reinforce that you are building a brand/event experience.
Having a plan and getting everything set up and organised in advance may seem time-consuming, but the payout will be worth it in the long run.
Social Media:
Setting up a dedicated hashtag for your event that will be used throughout your social media promotion is an effective way of creating a cohesive message.
Creating engaging visuals and videos to draw attention to your posts about your event is another great form of promotion. Make sure again that all your posts are visually consistent, as this will help build your omnichannel approach to promotion, which will help make your attendees feel valued.
Social media is amazing for highlighting announcements and generating hype surrounding your event. Promote things such as new speakers for conferences or updates in your event’s timetable or special features.
Paid social media ads are another great way to expand reach and engagement for your event., We would recommend this approach if you have a definite audience you know you are targeting. This will focus your advertising on those who are more likely to be interested in your event generally but may not know that your event is running.
PR:
It is far too easy to get wrapped up in the digital side of event promotion and then forget to put time into more tested methods such as PR.
Sending out a press release to various media outlets and listing your event in relevant business journals and newsletters is still worth the time it takes to create them. It creates a more well-rounded promotional campaign.
Direct Mail:
As we all know, we live in an increasingly digital world, yet this only adds to the power of physical, tangible marketing techniques like direct mail.
Target VIP potential attendees by sending out a physical invite to the event or a promotional box encouraging attendance to your event.
Website:
Having a great website is an incredibly compelling component of event marketing.
It is a base for them to come to when looking for all essential information regarding the event to potential attendees. Whether the event is hosted on your existing website using something like our embeddable widget or you wish to build something new just for your event, the goal needs to remain the same.
The website should be where you drive all your promotional materials, so all the important information must assist in driving ticket sales.
An issue with some event listing sites is that they can drive traffic away from your site and feature events like yours that may appeal to a segment of your demographic. This means you could potentially lose sales to your competitors!
At Helm Tickets, our goal is for our organisers to succeed. Our features can help you create an omnichannel promotional campaign that can help draw in new attendees and increase attendee retention. To learn more about promotional strategies, keep an eye out for our blogs on marketing and promotional techniques.
Create your omnichannel promotional campaign with Helm Tickets!
by jonc | Nov 22, 2018 | Promote
Instagram is a powerful tool for creating a real buzz around your event. With a stunning feed and relevant content, you can build huge levels of engagement.
Enhancing your Instagram marketing and promotion takes a bit of effort and planning. Yet, the payoff from this can be an increased engagement from loyal followers/attendees and a greater outreach to potential followers/attendees of your event.
THE HASHTAG
With the all-important hashtag, consistency is crucial! If you are posting anything on Instagram connected to your event, be it a post to your feed or your stories, make sure you include your chosen hashtag. This keeps all your content in the same place and encourages users to share their content all in one easy to view location.
It has uses beyond directly featuring it on Instagram itself. Including it on all promotional materials, such as on your website, marketing emails, and print, provides a greater reach to a larger audience.
Another way to gain greater reach via Instagram hashtags is running and hashtag incentive. These incentives are a great way to encourage users to share your hashtag and your event. Your incentive can be anything from photo competitions to tagging friends and family alongside the hashtag for free tickets.
Hashtags offer several benefits for event promotion and increase your reach and engagement concisely and effectively!
USER-GENERATED CONTENT IS KEY
User-generated content is any content created by your users, in this case, the attendees of your event. It has become increasingly popular with many large brands and events featuring carefully created content. It has become frequently popular and effective with Instagram users.
Its popularity with users is usually down to the authenticity of the content. The content builds trust with the users because they have created it. This content is organic and will carry an accurate representation of your event.
It also offers you a greater library of content to choose from. Having a good mix of this user-generated content and branded content works well in creating a diverse range of content on your feed, which again drives that all-important engagement.
If all this wasn’t enough to encourage user-generated content on Instagram for events, here is how it affects your users and audience as a whole. It builds a real connection and relationship with your audience. Sharing their posts of the event and their experience makes them feel appreciated. It grows users’ loyalty as it shows your appreciation as an organiser for their attendance. Don’t forget to tag and mention them in the caption!
UPDATE YOUR BRANDING AND PROFILE
Updating your branding and profile to promote your event helps bring an added feel of legitimacy to your event. That it is as important as the brand itself. Adding your hashtag to your profile picture alongside your logo or creating a custom logo puts your event at the forefront of your image. It will be one of the first thing users see so is an effective way of subtly promoting your event. Just make sure you keep this consistent across all social media channels!
Keep your bio short and sweet but with the added extras of a link to your event and your hashtag. Again, not the obvious way of promoting your event, yet it is one of the first things users will see when visiting your profile. Keeping the link in the bio keeps it quick and easy to find when promoting your event in your feed or stories. Add in a simple call to action “Link in the bio” in posts to drive traffic to your profile and event page.
These are just a few of the basics of promoting your event using Instagram. It is a powerful tool when utilised and offers a huge reach to potential ticket buyers with not too much effort. Next time find out how to utilise Instagram Stories to your advantage, how geotags can help you reach a larger local audience, and how to build event hype with influencers!
by jonc | Nov 20, 2018 | Promote
CREATE ENGAGING WRITTEN CONTENT
Content marketing is an integral part of any great marketing strategy, especially when it comes to marketing your event to drive ticket sales. The more relevant and concise the information, the greater your chance of reaching your target audience and market.
Here are some of the essential tools we recommend to optimise your content creation:
Grammarly
Grammarly is unquestionably one of our favourite writing tools. It offers a desktop app, website and most importantly, a Google Chrome extension. For those using iOS, there is also a keyboard available for when you are producing content on the go!
Grammarly will check your writing for spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice and style errors, using an advanced artificial intelligence. It absorbs your writing style and learns from it.
Another perk is when it flags up an error in your writing it does more than tell you the error, it will also inform you about why it has flagged the error, in theory eventually making you a better writer.
It offers both a premium and free product, the free product is perfect for hitting all the basics. Yet, the premium version will look at your writing in more detail and find more comprehensive errors, complete genre specific checks, as well as offer more vocabulary advice.
Hemmingway App
Hemmingway App is the perfect free tool if you are looking to create great concise content. It is available via the desktop app or on their website.
Its main function is to check for sentence structure errors, for example, the overuse of adverbs or a passive voice. These errors check are only available using the premium version of Grammarly, so it is worth using these tools together to create written content.
It can also provide with information such as how easy your sentence is to read, split into two categories: yellow and red depending on the level of difficulty.
Another great feature is that you receive a readability score for your writing. You also get a reading time, word count, character count, sentence count and paragraph count. So if your aim is to write something quick and concise about your upcoming event this is definitely the tool to use!
Readable.io
Readability is a huge factor when it comes to how people are going to absorb the information you are trying to convey. You can always go old school and read what you have written out loud- if you stumble over your words maybe look at revising. But there is a great alternative that takes this to the next level.
Readable.io is a web-based app that will give your writing an overall readability rating based on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and the Gunning Fog index.
Of course, if the writing about your event is going to be more descriptive and you want to more creative, then reading ease doesn’t have to be as important. But if clarity is what you are after then this tool is amazing at cutting out anything non-essential.
This tool is $3 a month, however, there is a free option that gives you 10 minutes of use a day!
Headline Analyzer
Creating an engaging headline is one of the most important parts of creating written content for your event. It is the first hurdle you have to get over to compel your readers to continue reading, so it is definitely worth investing extra time to create something that is going to resonate with your audience.
Headline Analyzer is a free tool by CoSchedule that can score your headlines quality and SEO value. It breaks down your word balance into Common, Uncommon, Emotional and Power, all of these are factors in creating an engaging headline for your content. It will then go on to analyse the length, keywords and sentiment.
It will even show you how your headline will appear in search results!
This tool is great for giving your headline a quick once over if you are unsure about how engaging it may be for your audience and you want to create something that is going to bring in the readers!
Creating great written content for your event is a valuable tool when trying to drive ticket sales. It can help drive more traffic to your website, as it gives you a greater chance at appearing in search engines. From there, it can help drive that traffic into ticket sales. Refining that content with the tools mentioned above just gives you and your event the upper hand, making your written content as engaging as possible!
Make the most of your engaging content with Helm Tickets today!
by jonc | Nov 5, 2018 | Promote
Buzzwords: SEO
Whether you’ve overheard someone speaking about the Internet of Things at a conference or your go-to news sources are putting ‘blockchain’ and ‘cryptocurrency’ in every sentence, trends and emerging tech can become commonplace quickly.
With that in mind, we’ve taken a look at one of the most common buzzwords: SEO (or ‘search engine optimisation’). Here are some simple explanations and tips. SEO – once understood – can increase and support the success of your marketing and sales strategies.
Although there are many different aspects of SEO, and sometimes there are unanswered questions, generally, SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Simply: it’s flagging your website as being relevant to your target market. You want your website, blog or event page to appear to those searching for your sector.
SEO is the process of enhancing your online presence to improve your ranking on search engines organically.
Often misunderstood, a variety of factors can affect search engine rankings, but on a basic level, a search engine decides the order in which to list pages based on how relevant it believes the content is for the searcher. This could mean the page has plenty of keywords relating to the query. Several external links are included, suggesting the page is trustworthy and that information is appropriately researched.
SEO sites Search Engine Land and Column Five collaborated to create a beneficial infographic for understanding the different components of SEO. The periodic table below splits SEO into ‘On the Page’ (factors you control on your website, e.g. content, alt-text on images, internal links) and ‘Off the Page’ (how your website appears to outsiders, i.e. how trustworthy and popular it is. This could include backlinks from other websites and shares on social media). The table also ranks different processes and behaviours that positively or negatively affect a website’s SEO ratings.
As well as key information you can add to your blog or website to improve your ranking, several behaviours can also decrease your ranking. Attempting to ‘cheat the system’ to appear higher on Google will be detected by the search engine, and your website will be banned from results. Actions that could lead to a ban include ‘cloaking’, which refers to showing the search engine a different page that users see.
Tips for good SEO
Don’t:
Overuse keywords
Keyword stuffing is the practice of jamming keywords repeatedly onto the page in the hopes search engines will decide the page is extremely relevant…
Search engines are more intelligent than that! There’s no ‘magic number’ for the number of times your keyword should appear on a page – it depends on much text there is. Yoast’s SEO plugin suggests that 1-2% of your copy is your chosen keyword on our blogs. The freemium tool will guide you in optimising your content for SEO. For context, this blog is [x words] long, and ‘SEO’ is found [x times]; this equals a keyword density of [x%].
Fill your page with ads.
Search engines will know! Not only will ads distract from your message, but search engines can detect adverts, which will negatively affect your ranking.
Do:
Use headers
Choose some keywords to target and use them in the page title, link and headers throughout. Don’t overuse the keyword but including it in relevant headers and titles will improve your ranking as search engines will know the content throughout the page is relevant.
Secure your site
As well as content being important, search engines will also look at the ‘architecture’ of your site. Is it mobile optimised? Does it load quickly? Importantly, is it secure? If you’re selling tickets to an event, customers must trust your website. SSL secures our ticket embed, so any transactions will always be secure. Not everyone understands web safety; therefore, it can be really beneficial to secure your site with SSL. It’s straightforward to do and costs very little.
Hopefully, we’ve provided you with a simple way of understanding what SEO is and how it can greatly improve your brand’s visibility. Plus, by using Helm Tickets as your ticketing platform (particularly utilising our embed tool, which includes backlinks and keywords), you’ll quickly improve your own SEO ranking.
by jonc | Oct 18, 2018 | Plan & Create
5 reasons why you should use Helm for your Christmas events
We love Christmas at Helm Tickets, and we’re thrilled to be the chosen platform for so many of your Christmas and New Year’s events. Like Santa, we know our organisers have lots to prepare for the big day, and we want to make this as easy as possible. So, if you’re still wondering why you should use us for your festive event, wonder no more.
Here are 5 reasons you should:
- Get paid BEFORE your event! At Helm, you will receive your ticket revenue monthly, even if your event hasn’t happened yet. We never make you wait for your payment. We’ve run events ourselves, and we know how helpful it is to have the money upfront to pay deposits, staff, catering etc. This helps your cash flow and makes running your event easier for you, our aim in everything we do. Just think of us as your own little elves.
- Simple, fair and transparent pricing. We don’t believe in confusing or unfair pricing systems, so we charge one single percentage amount for our booking fees. We don’t tie you into contracts or plans, we don’t charge extra for any of our features, and we don’t have any hidden fees or charges. Ever. Leaving you with more money to spend on all those festive treats!
- Sell your tickets through your own website (or grotto). With Helm Tickets, you can easily embed your box office so people can buy tickets to your event on your own website. This means more direct visitor traffic to your website, and your attendees stay on your site for longer, increasing your potential for sales. We bet Santa wishes he had such an easy system for his grotto!
- Easy to use. Our platform gives you access to all the features you need whenever you need them. All our features are available to everyone (elves included), and you only need one account to handle everything to do with your event – no need to sign up for things like separate payment accounts. You can even synchronise your HubSpot and MailChimp accounts with your Helm account for even easier use.
- Memberships. Much like Santa’s naughty or nice list, our unique memberships feature allows you to set up groups for specific things. You can charge a recurring fee to any members you have and give them access to specific benefits, like free or discounted tickets. This is a great way to boost your cash flow through guaranteed membership income, and it increases the likelihood that people will attend your events. Much like leaving a carrot and eggnog out on Christmas Eve, making people (and reindeer) feel appreciated helps ensure repeat attendance at your events.
We hope this has helped you decide to use Helm Tickets for your festive events. We’d love to have you on board, and we’re happy to help with any questions you might have.
