Behind the Scenes

7 tips to sell more tickets

By Ryan Moss
23 Oct 2022
12 min read

Being able to sell more tickets is always exciting. When you’ve worked hard planning, booking acts, securing venues and marketing your event, the goal is always to get more people through the door and enjoying themselves.

When you’re competing against so many other people putting on events, it can be tricky to spread the word. Ticket sales often spike when they’ve been announced, dip in the middle and spike again when the event is close to going ahead.

It’s ideal to try and aim for a steady stream of ticket sales. In this article, we’ve taken a look at 7 ways to sell more tickets to your event.

Offer discounts and deals for a steady stream of ticket sales

You can offer a range of tickets to your customer. For example, you might start by placing a super early-bird ticket on sale when you announce your event. This ticket could have a limited allocation and be at a lower price, incentivising people to grab a ticket as soon as possible; so they don’t miss out on the event. To do this in the Beta Promotion Centre, create a new listing, and when you get to step four, you will be able to set the allocation and the date and time the ticket will stop being on sale.

Next, an early-bird ticket could go on sale. Slightly more expensive than the super early-bird ticket and with a similar allocation. Ideally, you’ve built up anticipation with the last set of tickets, enticing the customers who missed out previously to make their purchases.

You can also consider group tickets. These tickets will be at a higher price than the rest but allow a group of customers to attend the event together. Attendees are more likely to come to the event if they have friends they can bring along, and you can make the purchase cost-effective to incentivise the sale.

Using super early-bird, early-bird, and group ticket tiers is an effective way of offering discounts, taking advantage of deals and providing a steady stream of ticket sales throughout the event marketing process.

Make the information clear

Ensure that you’ve placed all the information for your event in the listing. If you’re putting on a club night or a gig, this includes who’s playing, event’s location, age restrictions, the start and finish time and the music genres on the night.

Potential customers are more likely to buy a ticket if it’s clear what the event is and who is playing. For people viewing the listing who are unfamiliar with your event, this will help provide context and give the customer an idea of what the night is all about.

Tagging artists and genres will help to bring in new people, too. When you tag artists and genres on your listing in the Promotion Centre, it makes your event accessible to people who are searching for events with the genres and artists you’ve tagged.

Clicking an artist’s name will bring up their Skiddle profile, where fans can see their upcoming events, biography and Spotify playlist sample. We’ll let them know when their favourite artists are playing, so don’t forget to tag and get the benefits.

Expand your network with reps

Reps can be an effective way of expanding your network of potential customers. In the Beta Promotion Centre, you can find the ‘Manage Reps’ section on the left hand side of the menu. There are a few options when setting up reps. See the below image for those options.

If you are promoting an event in a big city with multiple universities, you could have several reps selling tickets to your event. Ideally, they’d be selling to groups of people that don’t overlap, spreading the word about your event to a large customer base where social interaction thrives.

That could create a feedback loop. If the reps do well, you have a cross-selection of groups spreading the word to their immediate circles, giving your event a word-of-mouth boost across the campus.

Regular attendees of your event could also be reps. Those people could sell tickets to people they know who like similar things. Your reps can earn money or prizes such as VIP access or a chance to meet artists on the bill, and you can sell more tickets for your event.

Use social media creatively

You can use social media to sell more tickets. Picking the platform where you have the most success is ideal, but if you promote across multiple platforms, creating engaging content can aid you when selling tickets.

Posting footage of previous events to Twitter and Instagram can build anticipation for the forthcoming event. If you’re promoting a club night or a gig, clips of the crowd going wild to popular songs provides potential attendees with the context of your event. Excitement is infectious, and it gives people a chance to see what they’ll be missing out on if they don’t attend.

You can leverage the audience of the acts you’re booking, too. If you’re promoting a club night in a busy city, chances are your headliner will have a sizeable audience on social media. Make collaborative posts with them to engage with their audience. At the very least, you’ll want to make sure that both parties announce that the headliner is playing.

To take the process a step further, you could create bitesize video content with the headliner talking about your event. Or, on your website, publish a piece of written content with the headliner and give your readers an insight into their journey so far and what to expect from the performance.

Use Skiddle’s tools

Skiddle offers a wide range of tools to help promote your event and sell more tickets. These include E-Flyers, listings, Facebook retargeting and Facebook pixels.

Listing your event with Skiddle is free and allows you to access our monthly visitor base of two million people. The picture below shows you how to access the listings tab in the Beta Promotion Centre.

Listing your event gives you access to the other tools we offer. In step three of creating an event listing, you can write a short description of your event. Ensure that you include all the relevant information for the event and write a description over 100 words. This makes your event eligible for Facebook retargeting. It’s a PPC strategy where we can show ads for your brand to people familiar with your event. Custom audiences are created, which then become lookalike sources. A lookalike source can be created from Facebook followers, people who have engaged with Skiddle’s Instagram page or anyone who has viewed a URL on Skiddle that contains the word ‘festivals’.

E-Flyers & RapidScan Mobile Box Office

E-Flyers are direct emails sent to Skiddle’s customer base. We target customers based on their proximity to the venue’s postcode, their age and include targeting based on a customer’s favourite music genres and the artists they follow on the Skiddle website.

We tend to target a radius of 10-25 miles for club nights. It depends on the size of your event, so if you’re promoting a larger event, the targeting will fall toward the extended radius.

When booking an E-Flyer, we tend to target 10,000 people. They’ll get word of your event in their inbox, and when they click the flyer, it will take them to the ticket purchasing page. That’s a wide range of people to potentially buy tickets to your event.

You can use RapidScan’s Mobile Box Office to sell tickets on the door. Of course, we hope that you sell out your event well in advance. However, if you find yourself with several tickets available when the event goes ahead, the Mobile Box Office makes it easy to sell the remaining tickets.

Taking into consideration the points we made about social media earlier: if you do find yourself with tickets left when the event is ready to go ahead, you can make some noise about that via social media. A catchy advertisement of the remaining tickets on the door might bring in those last-minute attendees.

Make use of the press

If you are organising a large-scale event, using contacts from the press can help sell more tickets.

Targeting magazines, websites and newsletters with similar audiences to yours is a good starting point. They can publish news stories when you announce the event. If you wanted to go further, you could try to organise a piece of content in a magazine that caters to the event you’re putting on. The article could be an in-depth look at the history of your event or a long-form piece that highlights something special about the upcoming event.

The websites of national newspapers often cover popular events in the city. You can usually find the journalist’s details via Twitter or when you click on their name at the top of an article.

Contacting people from the press helps sell more tickets because it spreads the potential audience for your event. You’re no longer solely relying on the audience you’ve built via social media; you’re spreading the word across different channels with large audiences.

Optimize your website

We mentioned earlier that regular content on your website could help you sell tickets, but you need to ensure that the content is optimized. The better SEO techniques you employ, the higher your event’s website will rank on search engines.

Using tools like Google Analytics can help you research keywords relevant to the things your audience might be searching for. If you’re hosting a website through a platform like WordPress, you can download plugins like Yoast SEO, which gives you feedback on keyword density, keyword length and the strength of your SEO. The plugin’s website also features in-depth guides, so you can learn more with each post you upload.

Got a question you need an answer to? Give us a call on 03333010301 or ask us a question over on our Skiddle Promoters Twitter account by clicking or tapping on the button below. Alternatively, you can also find a list of our most frequently asked questions over at https://help.promotioncentre.co.uk/