If there’s one thing nightclub owners know, it’s the value of booking celebrities for their venue; a celebrity booking can be a great way to boost attendance. But while booking celebrities for a nightclub is a great move to boost turnout, a lot of bookers make the mistake of thinking all they have to do is line up the celebrity and wait for the crowds to come.
The fact is, knowing how to book a celebrity is an important step, but it’s not the only one you need to worry about. As great as it is to have a celebrity at your venue, people aren’t going to show up all on their own – you have to effectively market the booking. But with all the money you’re spending on the booking itself, you might not want to pay too much for a marketing campaign. So today we’re going to take a look at some cost-effective tools you can use to market your booking and make sure as many people know about it as possible beforehand. Read on for more information!
In terms of being able to reach the widest number of people with a marketing campaign, there’s no question that Facebook should be your first stop. More people use Facebook than any other social networking site, and the ability to reach potential event attendees on Facebook is more robust than anywhere else.
With Facebook, there are a lot of ways to reach people who might be interested in attending your event. In order to do it most effectively, you should already have a Facebook page set up for your venue. In an ideal world, your venue’s page already has a lot of followers; that is, people who enjoy your venue and are interested in hearing about upcoming events. In that case, you can simply use your venue’s page to create an event. Your followers will automatically get notifications that you’re hosting a celebrity on a certain night, and they can decide for themselves whether or not they want to attend.
And with Facebook’s Ads Manager, you can create your own advertising campaign, and Facebook will look at the information you provide (for example, the kind of event, who’s attending, what kind of venue it is, and so on) to create targeted ads for people who might be interested. As we all know, Facebook collects information on all its users’ behavior; some of that is information that the user has provided (like their profile information, status updates, the pages they already like and groups they’ve joined), and some of it is information the user hasn’t explicitly provided but is still relevant (such as websites they visit, their location, etc.). With this combined information, Facebook can identify your target market for you. Not only that, based on this information they’ll also put targeted ads in the feeds of users who don’t follow your business but would be interested in your event.
What’s great about using Facebook’s Ads Manager is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to identify your target market. Because Facebook already collects all that data, you’ll be able to target potential customers by geographical location, the pages they like, and their age group without having to do all the legwork. So instead of spending time trying to figure out who fits your target market, you can simply input the types of people you want to reach and let Ads Manager do the rest. There is a bit of a cost associated with using Facebook’s Ads Manager, but it’s relatively cheap. And given the increased potential of reaching people who might otherwise never have heard about your event, it’s definitely worth the investment to ensure that your event is a success.
Bandsintown
While Facebook is an excellent way to reach a wide audience, there is one drawback: the targeted ads on Facebook are still best guesses based on users’ behavior. In other words, unless someone follows a particular celebrity’s page, there’s no way to tell for sure if the people Facebook targets in their ads for your event will be interested in attending. Luckily, Bandsintown helps take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation.
Although the amount of people using Facebook is far greater than the number of Bandsintown users, your ads are guaranteed to be much more targeted and specific with Bandsintown advertising. Bandsintown users specifically note artists they’re interested in seeing; based on the information the users provide, Bandsintown will send them notifications when those artists (and similar ones) are playing shows or making appearances at venues in their area. So assuming the celebrity you’ve booked is an artist, Bandsintown Promoter can help you find and target their fans. Not only that, but you can use their pre-made email templates to send out notifications to potential customers informing them of your event.
So while Facebook is a great first step to targeting a wide variety of people, Bandsintown is another excellent option for making sure that the people you reach are more likely to attend your event.
Finally, Instagram is quickly becoming one of the go-to methods for promoting events. And if you’re on a budget and can’t afford to spend any money on advertising, there’s no better place to get free promotion. If your target audience is in the 18-29 age range, Instagram is the best place to reach them: according to Pew Research, 53% of that age group uses Instagram.
There are a variety of ways to use Instagram as an advertising tool. You can post pictures and short videos promoting the event, and you can create an event-specific hashtag that can spread across your network and theirs. If you don’t have a ton of followers, don’t worry – you can pay for users in your geographical area to post about your event on their accounts and use specific hashtags for the event.
It’s also a good idea to have the person you booked promote the event on their Instagram account as well. Celebrities tend to have high follower counts on social media, so they’ll be able to reach a much wider audience. Plus, since the people they’re reaching are fans of the celebrity, they’re much more likely to come to your event if they’re in your geographic location. You might need to negotiate this as part of the booking package beforehand, but in some cases the celebrity will be happy to help. After all, it doesn’t reflect well on their brand if they have an event at your venue and nobody shows up.
Instagram also offers an advertising program which you can use to promote your event. So instead of you posting a picture about your event on Instagram, you can pay for Instagram to promote your event by adding it to the feeds of users in your geographic area as a “Sponsored” post. And, much like Facebook Ads Manager, Instagram will help you target the audience you’re hoping to reach by compiling user data to identify the audience that’s most relevant to your event.
Depending on what social media accounts you use, there are plenty of other ways to increase awareness of your event. The key is to reach as many people as possible; not only that, but to reach as many people as possible who are likely to attend. So if your venue has a sizeable following on Twitter but not Instagram, you can apply the same principles to a different platform. And now that you know some of the options available to you, you should be able to boost attendance at your next event – without breaking the bank.