How To Use Your Fanbase to Drive Ticket Sales

Catch the eye with User Generated Content

Have you ever left a review on your favourite event’s page? 

That’s User Generated Content. 

We’ll call it UGC for short, but essentially, it’s any type of content created by people instead of brands. 

So, reviews underneath your Skiddle brand page, phone videos of your headline act and front-facing camera shots of your attendees having fun at your event all count as UGC. And the best thing? You can use it to drive ticket sales. 

An Instagram page full of clips of a headliner getting wild crowd reactions filmed by your fanbase will make your event look unmissable. It builds excitement, anticipation and a fear of missing out, which can lead people to buy tickets. 

Plus, UGC gives your event authenticity. With that comes an increased chance of sales and a reputation that can help your event’s popularity for years to come. The stats reflect this, too. Marketing platform Stackla found that 90% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support.

As we said earlier, fan-filmed clips are a great way to use UGC, but so are customer reviews and customer images. A simple way to implement this is to ask attendees to tag you in any images they upload of your event, then share them on your social media afterwards. Send a quick direct message to ask for permission. 

You’ll be on your way to success in no time. 

Create an exclusive group for your audience

Punk and acid house are worlds away in terms of sound.

But they were driven by a sense of shared interests. While you might not be packing out fields in Blackburn or Burnley, you can create a community around your event and make people feel part of something bigger. 

We can help you here. Create discounts in The Skiddle Promotion Centre and offer them seasonally to the group to keep them engaged. Or, use The Promotion Centre’s ‘Passworded Tickets’ tool to create exclusive, super-early bird tickets for your community members only.

This gives your members an incentive to purchase tickets, and with your super-early bird tickets, you’re taking care of those all-important early sales and getting customers to commit. Both of these tactics will drive sales and lead to a higher attendance rate. 

But what are the options for creating online communities?

Instagram’s Broadcast Channel feature lets you share links, messages and polls with your followers, but you can only create one if you have over 10,000 followers. 

WhatsApp is free to use and its ‘Communities’ feature can help you reach your fanbase. You can send announcements to everyone and create groups where you can share offers and encourage interaction between members. 

Over time, your fans will feel engaged, you’ll keep promoting your community and more people will want to join. As your membership climbs, your sales will grow. 

Leverage the group membership to create a street team

Once you’ve got a healthy following in your online community, why not create a street team and ask the members of your group if they want to join? 

A street team is a group of fans who volunteer their time to help promote bands, artists, DJs, record labels or, in your case, events. They get out on the streets, chat with the general public and use their enthusiasm to sell tickets, raise awareness and drum up interest in your event. 

Want to give out flyers and sell tickets in the town or city centre? Get your street team to help. They can use their wit, charm and personality to strike up conversations with the general public, find out what they like about events and make connections with new people. 

In a student-heavy area? Task your street team with flyering at Freshers Fairs and have them sell tickets with our Reps feature. That way, members of your street team can earn commission or ‘money can’t buy’ rewards, giving them the incentive to keep trying to appeal to new people. 

All of this can help you crack new markets and take your promotion to the next level. When combined with our Reps feature, it’s a no-brainer. Discover more about Reps here. 

Make the ticket buying process easy 

We’ve all been there: endless clicking to buy something we really want. 

Don’t do that to your customers. 

Instead, make life simple by using our Ticket Widget feature.

Customers can go directly to your website and within a few clicks, secure tickets for your event, something they’re excited about. 

Our Event Brands feature can help, too. It houses all your events on a sleek page, meaning customers can browse and buy within minutes. 

With a quick, easy and efficient ticket-buying process, you’ve got a higher chance of making those all-important sales. People are turned away by long-winded and complicated processes, and these simple tips will put your engagement through the roof.

Tap into competition marketing

The chances of winning The National Lottery are 1 in 45 million. 

Yet, every week, people up and down the country pick out their numbers in the hope of bagging a life-changing amount of cash. 

Now, we’re not saying people are going to treat a competition for event tickets like something as widespread as The National Lottery, but you can tap into the thrill of winning with your marketing to drive sales.

People love to win things, especially if it’s something of value. So, why not hold a competition on social media to give away tickets? Instruct your entrants to like the post, tag one or two people they’d like to bring with them, share the post to their story and follow your account if they don’t already. 

With competitions, you’re broadcasting your event to multiple networks. Sure, only one person wins, but the people who entered? They’ve now followed your Instagram page and know about your event, which might encourage them to buy tickets this time or in the future. 

Not only have you engaged your existing fanbase, you’ve spread the word about your event to the people they follow. That’s doubling up on your chance of success.