Generating Buzz & Ticket Sales: Your Audio Guide to Event Promotions

10 min read

We're actually no strangers to working with event promoters. Truth be told, they were among our biggest and best customers before this whole pandemic began. And appropriately so, considering how awareness marketing is one of the more noted specialties to audio advertising, as well as it being the name of the game when it comes to promoting events.

But now that live entertainment is back again, we wanted to take this opportunity to brush up on some campaign strategies and catch up on some of the latest features we have on AudioGO that can help generate a lot of buzz, and plenty of ticket sales, for your next big event.

Set a goal: reach vs awareness campaigns

If you're like many large event promoters (fairs, expos, and the sort) and your goal is to reach as many people as possible, then you’re going to want to choose a broad audience for your ad. This is what you call a Reach Campaign, and your impressions will go as far as your budget allows. Typically, each listener will hear your ad 1 or 2 times, but you’ll reach more people this way.

An Awareness Campaign, on the other hand, is meant for a narrow, specific audience to hear your ad more frequently within a short period of time, increasing the chances that they remember your event. This lends to a sort of stickiness that encourages listeners to take action, like buying a ticket.

To achieve this, use our Audience Guide in the top right corner of the campaign set up page, and continue refining your targets or increasing your budget until the ‘Estimated Ads Played’ is roughly 3-4 times your ‘Estimated Unique Listeners.’ This will ensure your ad gets heard by your selected audience 3-4 times.

But whatever your goal may be, it’s always best to keep your targeting not too narrow and not too broad. Again, let our Audience Guide show you the way.

The best event campaigns find the right balance in budget, venue capacity, and market size. Yours should too.

Make a landing page

Your landing page will house every detail about your event - the day, time, lineup, agenda, speakers, performers, location, etc.

Be sure to throw in some photos or videos from the last get-together you had, it'll help cultivate a strong sense of FOMO that gets people to buy. And have an FAQ page at the ready for common questions. Give the visitors of your landing page everything they need to make an informed decision right then and there.

Of course, you'll also want to include a call to action and a button for people to purchase their tickets from.

Don't forget about the social media handles too.

Create an event hashtag

This is another thing you're going to want to add to your landing page as well, an event hashtag.

We like it because it's great for branding and community building. You can use it to track questions, drive engagements, and just generally stay connected with folks who're attending your event or still sitting on the fence.

Even during and after the event, these hashtags can serve as a way to keep the conversation going.

Befriend social media as part of your audio campaign 

Multichannel marketing works. And the pairing of audio and social ads work especially well, for reasons we talk about at length in this case study on one of our advertisers who used Facebook and AudioGO ads together.

Though not to give too much away, but one of the main takeaways from that story - for why audio and social ads are such a potent duo, is because they're the #1 (audio) and #2 (social) activities people enjoy doing the most on their phones.

So, naturally, using the two channels as part of your promotional strategy is a fantastic way of maximizing your mobile ad strategy. 

Include display banners, and the right call-to-action

Thanks to our integration with Canva, we've made it easy to create your own banner ads right from the AudioGO platform. Should you ever need it. 

With thousands of ad templates to choose from, you can barely know design and still create professional quality banner ads. But make sure to check out this best practices post first if you want to make sure your displays get clicked.

Format-wise, we recommend your graphics be filed as png's, gif's, or jpeg's and we strongly advise using all 3 suggested sizes - 300 x 250 (wide), 500 x 500 (square), 300 x 600 (tall). This way we can host them on most desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

The best ad campaigns also include custom tracking URLs for added visibility on Google Analytics or their respective CRMs. In case you also need some help creating one, please refer to our very own tracking link builder here on the website: https://www.audiogo.com/tracking-url-builder

Lastly, don't forget to include a call-to-action like ‘tap your screen’ or 'buy now' in the audio portion of your ad as well. Direct call-to-actions like these typically see click-through-rates 3x greater than those without one.

Leverage display retargeting

Display retargeting is a tool that takes your campaign banner ads and displays them on websites your listeners visit after they've heard your audio ad.

The idea is that if you combine the catchiness of audio ads with the pervasiveness of display ads, your engagements would inevitably go up. And, more often than not, they do. In fact, by pairing audio ads with display ads, you can even quadruple the number of clicks you would otherwise get from running display ads on their own.

But the simple fact is this, you want to constantly be reminding people about your event. Even if people do want to go, they'll still want to think it over, or they might not be in the position to buy a ticket at that moment.

Retargeting solves for this by reconnecting with your listeners wherever they go, online and off, with a 1-2 punch to their ears and eyes that can help knockout your turnout goals.

Network effects: expanding your audience through collaborations

Working with influencers, other brands, and sponsors is one of the best and easiest ways to raise the profile of your event.

They have their own networks and their own communities for you to tap into. Take advantage of that.

Just make sure to it make it easy on them to promote your event by supplying blurbs and media kits to share with their followers on social media. Provide them with a tracked registration link too, that way you can tell where your new guests are coming from.

It's never a bad idea to cooperate with other like-minded companies and brands who can tell their audience about your event as well. Teamwork makes the dream work as they say.

Additionally, you're going to want to promote the heck out of any performers or keynote speakers to your event. This is yet another way to drum up interest.

But either way you look at it, it's always going to be important for you to leverage other people's following to expand the reach of your event.

Use music genre targeting, especially if you're a concert promoter

Pick music genres that match your event, your message, and your audience. If you're a concert promoter this is the feature for you.

Concert or music festival ads that are personalized to your listeners’ preferences are especially effective at driving up engagements. But if your event is general, it's not all that necessary to pick a music genre. It’s really up to you though.

Just keep in mind your listeners will be hearing your ad during scheduled breaks. So if you do choose to go with a background track for your ad, try to make it sound similar to the genres you’re targeting. Don't kill the vibe.

Use podcast and behavioral targeting for interest-based events 

But when it comes to personalization, nothing beats our behavioral targeting feature and the 60 different interests and user statuses you can reach listeners by.

Most event advertisers will find this tool useful in targeting hyper-specific audiences, like, high-income listeners, married couples, or even people with just interests in live events. That's actually a pretty popular option for obvious reasons.

Then there's podcast targeting for reaching like-minded audiences with common interests with your event like comedy, arts, and whatnot.

But the trick is to fight the temptation to overuse these targeting tools as things can get really narrow, really fast. So we always caution folks to, once again, keep their eye on the Audience Guide.

Marketing the right locations for your event, or venue 

Is your event a weekend thing? Is it in the afternoon or the evening? How long are people willing to drive to come out?

Ask yourself these questions, then consider the following location options: 

Zipcode: our most granular option of them all. With this, you can narrow listeners down to their very neighborhoods. 

Designated Market Area (DMA), also known as a media market, is really just industry-speak for an area that gets the same radio stations.

Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), is a city and its surrounding suburbs.

Cities: for anyone streaming within city limit.

Counties: this, and either of the above four options are all fine choices for local venues as most people don't travel any more than a couple of hours to show up to an event.

Large-scale festivals, state fairs, and overnight events that people drive long distances for are another story. For those types of events, state-level targeting can become a viable option.

And, again, the best ad campaigns always have some element of personalization to them. So the next time you're in San Francisco, it might be nice to include a shoutout or reference to the city in your marketing.

Setting Your Budget

You can get started for as little as $250 on AudioGO, which works out to 13,888 ad plays.

$250 may be okay for a small campaign on a really short schedule, but it may not guarantee the results you were looking for. So when considering how much to dedicate to your audio campaign, please be realistic about what it can accomplish.

For event promoters, the general rule of thumb is that the greater the capacity, the bigger the budget. But the least you can do is run a couple of awareness campaigns (see above to remind yourself how to set one up) so that you're hitting your target audience 6 to 8 times.

Like the good-ole 'Rule of 7' dictates, it takes roughly that many interactions before somebody actually takes action on your ad. So consider that as you try to determine your budget as well. 

Timing is everything

Depending on the event, most people won't commit to anything much more than a week out. So they say it's best to plan a significant ramp up in your ad spend then.

The best time, though, to start getting your event onto people's radar is anywhere between 45 to 90 days out. Overnights and events that require more advanced planning may even require longer timelines.

One way to drum up some early interest for your event is by offering early-bird specials. This is a great way to incentivize your audience to commit to your event early.

Another benefit to running early birds is that you'll also get a sense of where interest is at, and what kind and how much marketing has to be done to sell out your show.

Getting Heard

Now that you’ve taken the time to understand what makes an effective promotional campaign, the rest is simple. All that's left for you to do now is get your event heard by clicking the link below!

Create Campaign

For more information about our ad solutions for event promoters, please visit: https://www.audiogo.com/entertainment