5 reasons you should invest in social media advertising for your regional event
Dreading the possibility of having empty seats at your event or simply want more people to know what’s on in your region? We have the perfect solution to fill the gaps and increase your brand awareness without moving from your chair – social media advertising.
It might feel like a daunting maze at first, but paid social media is the fast lane to a sell-out event and a powerful tool in any regional event’s marketing toolkit.
What’s more, paid social is a fraction of the cost of out of home or above the line advertising, which puts it within the reach of even the smallest regional event.
With an advertising budget as little as $500 (sure, you could do less, but we wouldn’t recommend it), you have unfettered access to the billions of active users scrolling social platforms.
Want to know more? Here are our top five reasons you should invest in social media advertising for your regional event.
1. Paid social gives you a laser-focus to reaching new, aligned audiences
Through social media ads (just to be clear, we’re not talking about boosting), you can target audiences who are most likely to engage with events like yours.
Unlike a billboard, you don’t need to waste your time serving a cultural event to a rev-head or a quirky country charmer to someone who’s got no intention of leaving the big smoke.
Through Meta, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn, your audience selection can be customised, filtered by location, interests, and hobbies to name a few.
This is powerful stuff – especially when your event is niche.
A few years ago, we were engaged by the southern hemisphere’s toughest triathlon, Hell of the West, and we opted for paid social to ensure we were targeting serious athletes, not casual weekend runners. This meant all ads were targeted, and landing in the laps of people most likely to compete.
If this is your first time running paid social media ads and you don’t already have a clear target audience, check out our resource to narrow it down.
Paid social platforms also have inbuilt tools – such as Meta’s Advantage + Audience – that can automatically find audiences who will engage with your post based on previous content engagement and website interactions.
Ad hack: If you’re advertising on Instagram and Facebook, utilise the Meta Pixel to target loyal customers who have interacted with your website and find others similar to them.
2. You’ll be able to leverage an immediate and direct call to action
If your end goal is conversion, you’ll need to move customers down a funnel from awareness to consideration to action, a targeting dance beautifully executed by social media ads.
With choices of using direct and user-friendly links to your social media page, event information, or ticket purchasing site, audiences can take action straight away without having to search for more information, or even leave the platform.
And then there’s a multiplier effect. Social media is all about interactions, not just between you and your audience, but between audiences in the comments – something no other advertising platform can offer.
This kind of engagement and two-way conversation weaves a sense of excitement and community around your event, influencing discussion and word-of-mouth.
It’s no wonder 29 per cent of event organisers, according to Eventbrite, continue to see paid social ads as an effective promotional tool.
Ad hack: Use social media advertising to promote time-sensitive promotions like early-bird deals, and use the deal as an exclusive opportunity and provoke a healthy amount of FOMO.
3. Supercharge your reach far and wide
If the goal of your social media campaign is to gain awareness within wider audiences, as opposed to encouraging attendance from your current followers, a reach campaign is the way to go (or more specifically, the campaign objective to set).
Organic reach is fantastic for nurturing long-term relationships, but when it’s time to sell tickets, you need to cast a wider net. In simpler terms, if a customer doesn’t know about the event, how can they get their hands on a ticket? This is where social media advertising swoops in to save the day.
Your promotional content won’t just sit within your cozy circle of followers, it’ll break free and source new audiences who don’t even know you exist… yet.
Ad hack: Collaborate with influencers on your content to open the interest in your ads to a whole new, already invested, audience. This content can be boosted or advertised to extend the reach.
4. Extend the reach of your budget
Social media advertising spend offers an innovative and intuitive alternative to traditional marketing.
Online, you can set budgets that match your goals and resources, and platforms like Meta let you fine-tune your campaigns for maximum return on investment, even whilst live.
There are also options to set daily or lifetime budgets – which are allocated over the entire campaign time-frame – granting you flexibility and control over the spend depending on what makes the most sense for each specific campaign.
Budgeting for event promotion can feel like a tightrope walk, but platforms like Meta can do the thinking for you and allocate budget to custom placements at any given moment based on what the algorithm has predicted will provide the best results.
This flexibility also allows you to turn ads on and off as events sell out, which is handy if your event is known to. You can’t do that with a billboard!
Ad hack: Many platforms, such as Meta, give you the option to pay only when someone takes the specified action you’re trying to influence (e.g. clicking through to a website), meaning every dollar is going towards a viewer interacting with your post, not being thrown into a void of potential.
5. You can fine-tune on the go with insights
Paid social media advertising can help you demystify your audience and reveal the magic behind the customer curtains. These insights provides the perfect opportunity to understand who’s checking out your content and where you can turn up (or down) the volume.
Metrics like click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and engagement levels will become your new best friend and can help you fine-tune your strategy on the fly – this is especially helpful if it’s your first time hopping into the paid social media space.
Investing in a paid strategy or outsourcing paid social media for your event’s first year can prove a strategic move for a lean event committee as an agency’s event advertising blueprint in the Meta backend can be copied and used for years to come.
Remember; insights aren’t a one-hit wonder, keep track of your insight reports once campaigns have ended to be swimming in valuable data to optimise for the next event.
Don’t shy away from replicating successful tactics and abandoning those that weren’t to create an optimised and completely personalised advertising process, saving time and resources in the long run.
Ad hack: If you are advertising for an event with a similar audience to a previous campaign you have run, save the past audience to apply to the next event campaigns with ease.
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