The Independent Event Marketing Guide: from VenuePilot

From Concept to Sell-Out: Your Ultimate Guide to Event Marketing 

You've poured your heart and soul into creating an incredible event. Now, how do you make sure people show up? Effective event marketing is the bridge between your brilliant idea and a sold-out success. But what if there was a way to not only streamline your marketing efforts but also elevate every aspect of your event operations, all while keeping costs down?

This article will walk you through the essential steps to market your event effectively. And along the way, you'll discover how a comprehensive, free-to-use venue solution platform like VenuePilot can be the secret weapon to elevate your entire event journey, from promotion to execution.

The Foundation: Crafting Your Event Marketing Strategy

Before you even think about posting on social media, lay the groundwork with a solid marketing strategy.

• Review Past Data: Before planning your next event, dig into data from previous years. What worked well? What didn't? Analyzing past attendance, sales, and audience engagement can provide invaluable insights for optimizing your current strategy.
• Define Your Target Audience: Who are you trying to reach? Understanding your ideal attendee's demographics, interests, and online behavior will inform all your marketing decisions.
• Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): What makes your event special? How do you want to position your event in the eyes of your customers? Is it a unique speaker, an exclusive experience, or a groundbreaking topic? Highlight what sets you apart.
• Set Clear Goals: Do you want to sell a certain number of tickets, generate leads, or build brand awareness? Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals will guide your efforts. 
  • Use a tool! there are a number of free planning tools out there that really help!
  • Check out: Shortcut, Trello, Monday.com, and other task management tools, and synchronize them into VenuePilot using webhooks or Zapier
• Budget Allocation: Even if your marketing budget is small, allocate funds strategically. Consider free and low-cost options before investing heavily in paid advertising. VenuePilot offers an all-in-one budgeting solution that allows you to make projections and forecasts for your entire event, including offer sheets, all completely free.

Essential Event Marketing Channels & Tactics

Once your strategy is in place, it's time to get the word out.

• Social Media: This is a no-brainer. Identify the platforms where your target audience spends their time.
  • Engaging Content: Share visually appealing graphics, behind-the-scenes glimpses, speaker spotlights, countdowns, and user-generated content. Use the VenuePilot image editor to create captivating graphics and fliers!
  • Hashtags: Use relevant and trending hashtags to increase discoverability.
  • Paid Social Ads: Target specific demographics and interests to maximize your reach.
  • Tracking VenuePilot supports tracking pixels on every event page and at the account level that are easy to install, making your social ad campaigns more effective by allowing you to track conversions and optimize your ad spend.
  • Live Streams & Q&As: Build anticipation and engagement.
• Email Marketing: Build an email list of interested individuals, use a previous list, or work with partners to acquire high quality customer leads.
  • Personalized Campaigns: Segment your audience and send tailored messages. VenuePilot lets you tag your events by genre or type, making it easy to segment your audience based on their past interests and send highly personalized campaigns.
  • Early Bird Offers & Reminders: Create urgency and drive early registrations. Use VenuePilot's presale features to easily set up and track early bird offers, monitoring their performance automatically to inform your pricing strategy.
  • Seamless Integration with Marketing Platforms: VenuePilot integrates with popular event marketing platforms like Hive and Cymbal, offering easy sync of all customer purchase and opt-in data with a one-click export to these and other platforms. This ensures your email campaigns are always up-to-date and highly targeted.
  • Post-Event Follow-up: Keep the conversation going for future events. Leverage the VenuePilot "Will Call Emailer" feature to re-engage your audience after the event, sending follow-up communications and promoting future events.
• Content Marketing:
  • Blog Posts: Write articles related to your event's theme, featuring speakers or addressing industry trends.
  • Videos: Create short promotional videos, interviews, or testimonials.
  • Infographics & Guides: Offer valuable, shareable content. VenuePilot's powerful built in image editor can help you craft graphics in platform!

• Website/Landing Page: Your event's dedicated online hub.
  • Clear Information: All event details (date, time, location, agenda, speakers, pricing) should be easily accessible. VenuePilot provides powerful and custom website tools, including integrations with artist databases to automatically sync links and artist data to your event pages, helping predict sales.
  • Strong Call to Action (CTA): Make it effortless for people to register or buy tickets. VenuePilot allows you to customize your button text super easily for the best messaging, guiding your visitors effectively.
  • Mobile-Friendly Design: Ensure a seamless experience across all devices. VenuePilot is optimized for mobile devices, with over 80% of VenuePilot customer traffic originating from mobile, ensuring a mobile-first approach to your event pages.
  • Easy Integration: Use the VenuePilot customized widget, or easily embed your event with copy-and-paste code that can be tailored to match your site's look and feel, ensuring brand consistency.
• Partnerships & Sponsorships: Collaborate with complementary businesses or organizations to cross-promote. This can significantly expand your reach. You can also utilize Handstamp Sponsorships and Brands to onboard and manage sponsorships, which is seamlessly linked with the Handstamp integration on VenuePilot.
• PR & Media Outreach: If your event has a newsworthy angle, pitch it to local media outlets or relevant industry publications.
• VenuePilot also offers powerful distribution tools to find fans where they are, automatically pushing event information to platforms such as Bandsintown, Spotify, YouTube, Jambase, and more. All VenuePilot links are shareable, separately optimized, mobile-friendly, and accessible, containing Google structured data for maximum reach on organic search.
• Handstamp event detail links increase sharing, allow customers to securely store their tickets, add to Apple and Google Wallet, and more!
• our Ticketbuyer app allows customers to easily resend their own emails
• Offline Marketing (where applicable): Consider flyers, posters, local community boards, or radio ads, especially for local events.

Bring event marketing to new heights (and Operations) with VenuePilot

While these marketing tactics are crucial, the true game-changer lies in having a robust, integrated platform that supports your entire event lifecycle. This is where VenuePilot steps in.

You came for marketing advice, but you're about to discover the best ticketing and operational venue solution with every tool you could possibly need, all designed to make your event a resounding success. No contracts and $.75 per ticket is the only fee we charge.

VenuePilot isn't just another ticketing platform; it's a comprehensive ecosystem built for event organizers like you. It's free to use for many core functionalities, with low fees on premium features, and boasts a wealth of quality integrations that truly set it apart.

How VenuePilot Elevates Your Event:

• Effortless Ticketing & Registration:
  • Seamless Online Sales: Create customizable ticket types, manage pricing tiers, and offer discounts with ease.
  • Branded Experience: Design a ticketing page that perfectly matches your event's aesthetic, reinforcing your brand identity.
  • Mobile-Friendly Interface: As mentioned, VenuePilot is built mobile-first, ensuring attendees can purchase tickets on any device, anywhere.
  • Built-in Analytics: Track ticket sales in real-time, understand your audience, and make data-driven marketing decisions.
  • VenuePilot tracks all sales data related to events and artists, and integrates with Google Analytics for comprehensive insights. This means when you plan for next year, all your financial and audience behavior information is readily available for seamless review and analysis, including a powerful top fans report that keeps you always in the know about your biggest buyers and supporters.
  • Enterprise Box Office & Season Ticketing: For larger organizations, VenuePilot offers robust enterprise box office capabilities and comprehensive season ticketing features, providing advanced tools for managing complex sales workflows and loyal subscribers.
  • Performance Tracking with Tracking Links: Leverage tracking links on VenuePilot to monitor the performance of various ad campaigns. Generate illuminating and shareable reports to understand which channels are driving the most conversions and optimize your marketing spend.
• Integrated Marketing Tools:
  • Email Marketing Integration: Connect directly with your attendees for pre-event announcements, post-event surveys, and future promotions, utilizing the segmented data from VenuePilot.
  • Social Media Sharing: Empower attendees to share their purchase with their networks, amplifying your reach through word-of-mouth.
  • High quality and attractive event and ticketing pages, fully accessible
  • Promotional Codes & Discounts: Easily create and manage marketing campaigns to boost sales.
  • Future Event Promotion & Subscriber Growth: Every single VenuePilot event automatically generates a profile and event page on Handstamp.com. Use this powerful integration to encourage customers to follow and subscribe to your future events, building a loyal audience. You can even market to these contacts via email and SMS on handstamp!
• Operational Excellence from Start to Finish:
  • Attendee Management: Manage attendee information, track communication, and build lasting relationships, enhanced by event tagging and segmentation capabilities.
  • Comprehensive Event Sections: VenuePilot includes custom sections for production, hospitality, settlement, offer sheets, similar shows nearby, and custom notes for tracking things like staff and volunteers, giving you a centralized hub for all operational details.
  • Closeout Reports for Full Financial Overview: Gain deep insights into every aspect of your event with closeout reports that track bar and food sales, as well as merch and ticket sales. All this data seamlessly syncs back into your budget, providing a full profit & loss (P&L) statement for the show, along with historical data for crucial year-over-year comparisons.
  • Access Control & Check-in: Streamline entry with efficient scanning solutions, reducing queues and enhancing the attendee experience.
  • Real-time Insights: Monitor event progress, identify bottlenecks, and make on-the-fly adjustments to ensure a smooth operation.
• Quality Integrations for Every Need: VenuePilot understands that your event ecosystem extends beyond just ticketing. That's why it offers a wide array of high-quality integrations with popular tools for CRM, marketing automation, payment processing, and more. This ensures a seamless workflow and eliminates data silos. Your ability to easily install tracking pixels, for example, is a direct result of these robust integrations.
• Cost-Effective Solution: The fact that VenuePilot is free to use for its core functionalities means you can allocate more of your budget to marketing and enhancing the attendee experience, rather than costly software licenses. Its low fees for advanced features make it an incredibly economical choice without compromising on quality or functionality.

The VenuePilot Advantage: More Than Just a Platform

VenuePilot isn't just a collection of features; it's a philosophy built around empowering event organizers. It recognizes that successful events require not only brilliant marketing but also flawless execution and intelligent management. By consolidating these critical functions into one intuitive, user-friendly platform, VenuePilot enables you to:

• Save Time & Reduce Stress: Automate repetitive tasks and manage all aspects of your event from a single dashboard.
• Maximize Revenue: Optimize ticket sales, understand attendee behavior, and make informed pricing decisions.
• Enhance Attendee Experience: From smooth registration to efficient entry, provide a seamless and enjoyable journey for your guests.
• Make Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage comprehensive analytics to continually improve your events.

Conclusion: From Marketing Dreams to Event Reality

Effective event marketing is non-negotiable for a successful event. By strategically applying the tactics outlined above, you'll significantly increase your chances of attracting your desired audience. However, to truly supercharge your event marketing and ensure operational excellence, integrating a powerful, all-in-one solution like VenuePilot is the smartest move you can make.

Don't just market your event; empower it. Discover how VenuePilot can transform your next event into an unforgettable success, allowing you to focus on what you do best: creating amazing experiences.