When you were in college, you threw the Ramen noodles on the wall to see if they would stick and, therefore, were edible. We can’t agree that discount Ramen noodles can ever really be described as edible. But throwing them to the wall is a good way to measure your cooking success. But with marketing success, not so much. Throwing event marketing strategies at the wall and seeing what works is a surefire way to make your event flop. We have a better way. Match up your event marketing strategy with its corresponding stage in the sales funnel. In this article, we’ll show you how event planners can use sales funnels to fuel marketing success and sell bowlfuls of event tickets.
Why Your Event Marketing Strategy Needs a Sales Funnel
Your event sales funnel is a visual representation of your attendee’s journey from prospect to ticket holder. Wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, your sales funnel illustrates the essential truth that only a small portion of your audience will ultimately purchase event tickets.
In the following section, we’ll explain why taking the time to develop your sales funnel and its stages will help you target your event marketing strategy and increase ticket sales. But first, let’s have a quick refresher on the basic stages of the sales funnel.
- Awareness: You expand your audience by focusing on brand reach and reputation through paid ads, SEO marketing, hashtags, influencers, and more.
- Interest: You hold onto their attention through content marketing, email lists, lead magnets, and more.
- Decision: You go deeper with case studies, content that spotlights benefits, speaker interviews, and more.
- Action: You make clear calls to action and sweeten the deal with promo codes, group rates, and bundles.
- Loyalty: You encourage previous attendees through surveys, community-building, and special promotions.
1. Spot (and Fill) Holes in Your Marketing
Where are you losing people? Perhaps those who signed up for email updates aren’t clicking through to read the content. Or maybe no one is showing up to your Live events with speakers. Still, maybe, previous attendees aren’t returning.
Use your sales funnel to refocus your event marketing strategy so that it resonates in the stages where people tend to walk away from the sales journey.
2. Identify Next Steps for Each Sales Funnel Stage
It’s called a customer journey for a reason. Most people are not going to buy event tickets the first time they find your website. In fact, Marketo, a marketing automation platform, reports that only 4% of your website visitors are ready to make a purchase when they land on your site for the first time. Your sales funnel gives you a road map to keep the other 94% engaged and journeying toward purchasing tickets.
3. Make Better Sense of Your Data
Your marketing data only tells half of the story. Social media mentions, engagement rate, email click-throughs, and cart abandonment rate mean so much more when you combine them with the stages of your funnel.
For example, your social media mentions may be down, but the branded search volume for your event is up. Both of these metrics relate to the awareness stage of your sales funnel. And taken together, they indicate that overall awareness of your event may not be suffering. Instead of doubling down on social media, perhaps you should rethink the channels you’re using to reach your target audience.
4. Match Your Messaging to Your Target’s Mindset
If 96% of your website’s visitors aren’t ready to make a purchase, then why are they there? Your sales funnel helps you answer this and other key questions about your target audience’s mindset during each stage. Using your sales funnel, you can tailor your event marketing strategy to appeal to your audience’s mindset during each stage.
Creating a comprehensive sales funnel includes identifying your audience’s pain points and motivations as they advance through the customer journey.
- Awareness Stage: Potential customers may look for answers to problems related to your event niche. Your content can draw them in by providing them with valuable, free information.
- Interest Stage: They begin to look closer at your event. They find your free information helpful, and they wonder if they can get even more value from attending your event. Your event marketing strategy at this stage is to emphasize the benefits of your event.
- Decision Stage: Prospects begin weighing the cost of your event tickets. They decided during the interest stage that they want to attend your event. And now, they are seriously considering the cost in terms of time and money. Your event marketing strategy at this stage of the sales funnel is to reassure them that the benefits of your event outweigh its costs.
- Action Stage: They’ve decided that, yes, your event is worth the money and effort to attend. Still, following through on purchasing tickets requires overcoming a considerable amount of inertia, and you know what Isaac Newton said about an object at rest. Your event marketing strategy at this stage is to get the ball rolling by making them feel they got a deal with promo codes, group discounts, or free perks.
- Loyalty Stage: You’ve heard it said that it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire one, and this is the stage where you have the best chance of turning prospects into attendees. You can do this through community-building and exclusive offers.
5. Set (and Meet) Realistic Conversion Goals
Your sales funnel, like your marketing data, helps you set goals and measure success. Calculate your initial conversion rate by measuring your reach against actual ticket sales. You then have an idea of how many website visitors, social media followers, and email sign-ups you need to reach your attendee goals. You can also use the data combined with your sales funnel to effectively increase your conversion rate.
Learn More Event Marketing Strategies at The Event Planner Expo
Throwing noodles at the wall never did turn you into a cooking guru. So, why keep throwing marketing strategies at the wall? Instead, create a smart event marketing strategy that draws upon the power of your sales funnel. Tailor your marketing methods to correspond with your audience’s evolving mindset at each stage of the sales funnel. Your targeted approach will keep prospects within the sales journey and result in more event ticket sales.
Attend The Event Planner Expo and say goodbye to haphazard marketing strategies. Learn the latest trends from event industry pros and fill your sales funnel to bursting. Reserve your booth (while you still can!) for the high-energy tradeshow floor today!
