It’s perhaps the most pressing question you may ask yourself: “How can I sell more tickets now?”
You planned your concert and spent months thinking about every detail. The problem is you haven’t sold nearly enough tickets but the concert is just a month away.
The good news is it may not be your fault. The economy still hasn’t fully recovered and getting people to spend money is never easy. Plus, there are many free gigs going on all the time which makes persuading people to pay for yours that much harder.
Of course there are longer term approaches you may use to sell out your concerts immediately, but they do not always apply. Most importantly, they require thinking in the long term, and sometimes you need a quick and highly effective way to boost your ticket sales. Here’s what you can do.
Telemarketing
It’s true that online marketing tools have led many people to move away from telemarketing, but it’s still a tremendously powerful way to drive last minute ticket sales. If your email marketing and social media promotions have failed to deliver enough ticket sales, you can bring in telemarketing to cover the shortfall. The simple act of calling people up and encouraging them to buy tickets before it’s too late is tremendously powerful. Remember, it’s always easy to persuade people if you’re speaking with them personally.
Video Marketing
Videos are an excellent way to grab hold of your audience’s attention without requiring a big promotional budget. You can use videos to promote your event to a large audience — videos may go viral fast — and if you do something effective which creates a buzz, your tickets will be gone in a flash.
Ask For Referrals
It’s one of the most effective traditional ways for increasing ticket sales at the last minute: ask your attendees. For this you need a base of attendees who have been at your previous events. What you do is ask your loyal fans to mention your event to their friends and acquaintances. This quickly drives up the number of ticket buyers, since people who like your concerts generally know other people who would like your concerts — and also because people tend to trust their friends’ recommendations.
Send Out RSVPs and Event Reminders
Sending out RSVPs and reminders is a good way to stay connected with your guests, boost your own credibility, and increase the attendance rate at your events a good deal. Why? Though you may have sent your guests an invitation earlier, they might have missed it. So send out another reminder email asking for RSVPs, as it will help encourage the laggards to buy the tickets they’ve been meaning to pick up.
Better yet, combine your email promotions with telemarketing, and follow up on the emails you send out with a phone call.
Search / PPC Advertising
If you need a very fast push to bring in ticket sales, invest your budget in Google Adwords, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! search engine pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Of course you must be very specific in your keyword selection and target only the local area. This is because it’s too late for people to travel, you need local attendees.
Doing this requires you be confident using PPC advertising already. If you are not, better leave this option for your next event when you have some breathing room to experiment.
Social Media Advertising
Social network advertising is an enormously powerful way to produce astounding results at lightning speed. Remember, there’s no time to get on Twitter and set up an account, and putting up a brand new Facebook Page won’t work either. “Organic” methods, done at the last minute and while thirsting for ticket sales, generally produce poor results which are often even dangerous to your brand.
Instead, get some ads running. For concerts, the best place is Facebook. You want to be on the social network where potential attendees at your concerts are probably hanging out, and that’s probably Facebook. Facebook ads are also easier to set up than Google Adwords.
Email Marketing
Did you forget email? If you don’t already have an email strategy for your event, this might be one of the reasons you’re seeing low ticket sales. Despite all the noise and hype about social media, email is still one of the most effective ways to drive concert ticket sales. If you already have email marketing, perhaps you should take a look at your analytics and see if something went wrong.
A good way to sell more of the best tickets is to send out an email with an offer of something extra to drive sign ups. It’s better to offer a value-add than a discount since discounts can upset people who’ve already bought their tickets.
Affiliates
Finally, you can tap into people who already have a network of concertgoers. Create an affiliate program that gives a generous commission to people who drive ticket sales (you can even invite the blogger or whomever to attend for free) and contact bloggers one by one.
Do not just copy and paste a standard message. Instead, read the blog and about page, and contact them the way they like to be contacted.