Welcome to our new blog series, the Field Guide to Digital Event Marketing! In this series, our Digital Marketing Manager and AdWords expert, Amy, will walk you through a beginner’s guide to making the most out of online marketing for your event.
First up, here’s a quick overview of how digital marketing is a crucial step for selling out your events!
How do you promote your event online?
Maybe you start with a Facebook post or a tweet announcing your event to your fans. You’ve updated the calendar on your website, and you’ve even made sure you’re listed on event discovery engines like Eventful. So now it’s time to watch the ticket sales roll in, right?
Well, you could be doing even more to maximize your ticket sales. Before you start tossing money at every one of the infinite number of ways to market your event online, it’s important to understand which methods will give you a meaningful return on your investment.
On average, consumers purchased tickets to five events last year — two-thirds of those online ticket purchases were driven by digital marketing. But how, specifically, did they hear about the events?
Paid search advertising is one major component of any digital marketing strategy. As a service provided by all the major search engines, paid search ads push certain results front and center for millions of Internet searches every day.
At 67% of all global searches, Google is the most popular search engine, so it’s no surprise that their search advertising platform, Google AdWords, is the most widely used and most effective option for paid search.
Based on your targeted search keywords, you can bid on keywords which AdWords then presents to people who search for those keywords. The basic model for paying for this service is PPC (meaning “pay per click”). So if 300 people search your keywords and see your ad, but only 30 people click the ad, you only pay for the viewers who actually visited your site.
Interested in getting your events listed on paid search results? Over the next few weeks, we’ll be digging deeper into ways to get the most from your AdWords account, as well as some other digital marketing tips to help you sell out your events.
For now, here’s what you’ll need to get started:
- Sign up for an account with AdWords.
- Review AdWords learning tools.
- Review Google AdWords policies.
- Determine a budget that works for you.
- Choose relevant keywords to your industry.
- Begin writing ads.
- Set your proper campaign targeting.
Now you’re ready to start making the most out of AdWords!
Missed the other posts in the series?
I. Finding New Customers and Helping Them Find You
II. Intro to AdWords and Writing Your First Ad
III. AdWords for Advanced Users