Marketing Your Event: Strategies for Maximum Attendance

The UK events market is a vibrant one, but the market is crowded and can be tough. A growing number of independent festivals and event organisers have had to cancel shows and events in the 2024 season: the BBC, Sky News and Standard have all covered this topic in 2024. Whether you’re organising a festival, product launch, activation, networking event or conference, the fear of not having guests turn up or selling enough tickets to turn a profit is very real. So how do you make sure that as you start planning and organising your event, you’ve got the right strategy in place to set yourself up for success? 

Our marketing team has sat down to put our heads together and give you a guide to a successful strategy for maximum attendance. With decades of combined experience in the events industry, the wider food and beverage industry and on top of the latest marketing trends, here’s our top tips for your event.

Understand your audience

Selling tickets and marketing your event is no different to marketing another service or product. Rule number one is that you have to understand your audience, their habits, what wider interests they have and much more. Every event will require resources and budget to sell tickets and both of these can be deployed in the wrong place if you don’t properly understand who it is you need to get in front of. 

A useful exercise here may be to develop buying persona profiles or an ideal customer profile. These are slightly different and the latter is probably used when targeting business more than individual consumers but broadly the principle for creating them is similar: have a source of truth for the profile or profiles of the people you want attending your event. Some questions to think about here might be: 

• Where does your target audience hang out?

• How does your target audience communicate?

• What does your target audience care about?

• What causes does your target audience care about? 

• Where does your target audience shop? 

• Where does your target audience work?

• What does your target audience read? 

By understanding the answers to these questions, you’ll find it easier to craft messages, plan creative assets, pick channels that will amplify your message, and identify opportunities to get your event in front of your prospects. 

Depending on the maturity and scale of your event, you may already have a good or at least some understanding of your personal answers to these questions. I’m sure the organisers of Glastonbury will not be reading this article. But if you’re reading this because you’re organising a networking event for people in your industry, launching your product and want relevant or potential buyers and partners to attend, hosting a conference for certain working professionals or a first time festival organiser looking to sell tickets, then we’d absolutely recommend starting here above all else. 

Craft your message, stance and creative

Before you start putting together a ticketing link, webpage, blog post, and social posts about your event, it’s worth considering what your key messages are. To establish your message, we recommend starting with the following questions: 

• Why would someone attend this event?

• What will they get out of it? 

• Why can you deliver this event better than any other competitor?

You could be delivering anything from a new skill, new connections, or a better idea of how your product can make their life better - the most important thing is that your attendees know what to expect and what exactly they will get out of attending. 

Of course, you’ll need to ensure you also include the fundamentals of your event in your message: when, where, what guests can expect, and, perhaps most importantly, an indication of whether they’ll be fed and watered. It sounds obvious but it’s easy to forget and you don’t want to leave guests confused. 

In terms of look and feel, the creative associated with your event should fit the feel of the event itself, as well as reflect your brand nicely. If you’re hosting a casual networking event at a brewery, a trend-led graphic poster with informal language could do the trick. If it’s a corporate seminar or conference, you’ll probably be looking at a sleek, no-frills design with potentially a more businesslike tone.

Understand how you’ll get in front of your audience

By answering the questions above, or if your event is running for the 2nd, 3rd 4th+ time, then you’re probably going to have a good understanding of who it is you’re targeting and how you’re going to get in front of them. The good news here is that there’s a finite number of ways you can reach the people you want to attend your event, the challenge though is picking the right mix of ways to reach them. You don’t want to spread yourself too thinly nor do you want to back a single route to selling tickets. So is there a general rule of thumb for marketing your event? We’ve compiled the opinion of event organisers we’ve partnered with and summarised some key strategies below.

Start with channels that are built for events.

This may not be applicable to every event type but a good starting place is to make use of existing tools built for advertising events. Eventbrite is probably the stand out tool for doing this but there are other options including TicketTailor and G2 to name a few. Even piggy-backing on native features inside Facebook for example shouldn’t be sniffed at. For example, creating events and then marketing them using Facebook Event Ads could be a route to get in front of your audience.

Distributing your event

Getting your event in front of the right people is called event distribution. Generally their are 3 ways to think about this and the channels you chose to market your event through will fit into one of these categories. 

Owned Media

This refers to channels you completely own. Your website, your blog and your content will be the main three. When advertising and selling tickets for your event you’ll need to think about how you’ll attract people to your site and any content you’ll need to produce in order to get them there. 

Earned Media

Are there any publications, influencers or news outlets that might be interested in covering your event? If so this is earned media. Are you organising a food festival? Perhaps infiltrating a relevant influencers social following may be a good way to reach your target audience? Are you organising a networking event in a particular industry? Are there magazines that are dedicated to that industry and are they interested in featuring you? 

Paid Media

This refers to channels like facebook ads, google ads or paid partnerships, usually with the aim of driving traffic back to your website. Picking which channel to use here comes back to the people you’re trying to target. Is it working professionals? Maybe using LinkedIn would be best. Do a lot of people search google for the type of event you’re hosting? Google ads would be the answer?

Maximising attendance will require a mix of all three outlets, picking what to do within them will come back to the questions you ask at the very beginning though.

Leverage partnerships and other brands

When building your own reputation as an event organiser, there is nothing wrong with leveraging other brands to help you along the way. When looking at your ideal customer it’s worth trying to answer what shared or common interests they might have that either directly or indirectly correlate with your event. 

At Togather, we host our own networking events for event organisers in London, and we think very carefully about the venue and suppliers we will be showcasing there. Big name foodie brands with a large following in London are likely to attract people for that reason but so too are small independent family run businesses with a focus on sustainability as are the latest trending TikTok food trucks. The brands that we feature at our event help us to maximise attendance. 

So can partners that could potentially co-host or co-run events. Imagine you’re a winery hosting an event for prospective stockists. Is there a cheese producer with an existing network and following that could partner on the event?

This example is perhaps quite specific, but the principle applies to any event. “Piggyback” existing networks who share a similar audience via partnerships or sponsors.

Retarget the people that express interest

If your distribution channels are working well for you, then you’ve probably done a good job at attracting traffic to your website to buy tickets. In a lot of cases, you’ve probably had to pay for this traffic. We’d highly recommend setting up a level of tracking so you can understand when potential customers are visiting your site and better still adding tickets to a basket but not checking out. 

In the latter instance you’ve almost certainly got someone interested in attending your event and potentially just need one final nudge over the line. In this scenario, you can create audiences of these people and retargeted them on social channels like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to turn the prospect into a sale. 

Offer experiences 

We’ve written a full guide to the latest event trends but one key point to highlight is that guests attending events want more than just the talk, the product launch or the headline act. Events in part are a reflection of someone's personality, interests and beliefs and experiences offered at events that can reflect these traits will help maximise attendance. In practice this means thought and consideration about the venue or space, how it’s set up and interactive elements that go beyond the main reason for attending. 

As event organisers this is free licence to get creative as it may be that interactive element of an event, for example showcasing the latest technology, that people remember and that makes maximising attendance and selling tickets the following year that bit easier.

At our recent networking event we got in self serving beer company Boxbar in who were the talk of the event and showcased some of the latest tech in the events industry. 

Make your guests feel like they’re part of the event, not just attending it. 

One trend we’ve seen written about a lot is making your guests feel like they’ve been someway involved in creating the event. If you’ve been a part of putting it together then it’s likely you’ve got more reason to see the fruits of your labour.

This comes back to being creative as an organiser, but could include examples like: 

• Polling your event’s followers on instagram about what food truck they want at the event.

• Giving guests the ability to vote for, name or choose any awards that may be given out.

• With a key focus on sustainability, is there a way to let attendees choose to offset emissions from your event. How about a charity beneficiary?

There’s a lot to think about, and every event probably requires a slightly different approach, but setting aside some time to plot out your strategy at the beginning of your event-planning journey could really be a game changer for your event. 

About Togather

At Togather we’ve worked with some of the UK’s largest festivals and public events as well as thousands of individuals and companies organising events. We’re on hand to help you find the right suppliers you need for events and our expert team are on hand to help you find routes to maximum attendance. If you’re interested in learning more you can contact our team below.