By Lewis Lindsay, Co founder & Managing Director at SA Agency

You’ve spent countless hours, money and energy planning and creating the perfect event, and now it’s time to promote it. But what’s the most effective approach? Relying on organic social media posts, word of mouth promotion, or even hand-written invites, will only take you so far. The fact of the matter is, if you aren’t promoting your upcoming event with Facebook and Instagram Ads, you’re seriously missing out. 

Due to the decline in organic reach, the effectiveness of your social media content is extremely limited, being seen by only 1-2% of your entire audience. So, unless you already have a large following and an impressive email list, you won’t see many results. 

The solution? Facebook Advertising. With more than 2.38 billion monthly active users, advanced targeting options, and loads of data, it’s one of the best platforms to promote targeted campaigns for your event. 

Here’s a quick look at how to harness the power of Facebook Advertising for your next event: 


1) Campaign Objectives â€“ Unlike other forms of advertising such as magazine ads or billboards, Facebook allows you to optimize your campaign based on specific objectives; and for events, that objective is purchases. By using this objective, you are telling Facebook what your goal is for your campaign, and in return, Facebook will only show your ads to individuals who are most likely to not only click your ad, but purchase a ticket. Pretty cool, right? 

Even better, Facebook gives you the ability to track your return on ad spend, so you can see exactly how many tickets you’re selling and how well your ads are performing. 


2) Power of the Pixel– If you’re not familiar with the Facebook Pixel, it’s time to get acquainted. In order to run any successful Facebook or Instagram campaign, you MUST have this in place. So what is it exactly and why does it matter? 

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you embed in your website or event page, that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by tracking the action people take on your site. You can use this data to make sure your ads are being shown to the right people, drive more sales and measure the results of your ads. 

3) Establish Customer Personas– Another added benefit of Facebook Advertising is the ability to target multiple audiences. So once you’ve established the customer personas for your event, develop copy and creative that speaks directly to their unique pain points and demonstrate how your event helps solve their problem. Next you’ll want to set up different ad sets for each persona to see which audience performs best.  

4) Keep it Relevant â€“ Facebook recently changed their Relevance score reporting to Ad Relevance diagnostics. These diagnostics can help you determine whether the ads you’re running are relevant to the audience that you’re trying to reach. If your ads aren’t resonating with your audience, you can use these diagnostics to determine what adjustments you need to make to your campaign to improve your score. 

Here’s how your campaigns are rated: 

  • Quality Ranking: how your ad’s perceived quality compares to ads competing for the same audience.
  • Engagement Rate Ranking: How your ads expected engagement rates compared to ads competing for the same audience.
  • Conversion Rate Ranking: How your ads expected conversion rate compares to ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience.

Having high relevance ratings is crucial to the success of your campaigns. It means that Facebook is more likely to present your ads to your audience at lower costs, and it will also help you determine your ideal target audience.  

So be sure to watch your scores regularly, and modify your copy, creative and targeting as needed until you find the winning combination.  

5) Test Your Heart Out– Yet another reason Facebook is ideal for promoting events, is the ability to split test your campaigns. From testing which audience works best, to your copy, creative, delivery and placements, testing will help you determine your top performers. 

Once you know the winning combination, you can then scale your campaign by increasing your budget on the top-performing ads. This will help you increase sales while lowering your overall cost per conversion. 

6) Leverage Retargeting
–With the Facebook Pixel properly installed on your site, you can set up retargeting audiences to re-engage those who haven’t committed to purchase. This is one of the most powerful and effective ways to increase ticket sales for your event. In fact, recent figures show that retargeting can boost ad response by up to 400 percent! 

So how does it work? Let’s say someone visited your site in the last 14 days, but didn’t buy a ticket. Simply retarget that audience with a series of ads using ethical scarcity language to prompt them to make a decision. 

So, there you have it! A beginner’s guide to the power of Facebook Advertising for your next event. Implement the tips above and watch the ticket sales come in! You’ll never promote another event without Facebook again! 


Lewis Lindsay is digital marketing agency owner.

Having retired from professional football due to a lengthy knee injury Lewis now runs a Facebook Advertising Agency specialising in selling out events.- SA Agency – Lewis is based in Bournemouth, UK but often travels for work. 

Adam Parry
Author: Adam Parry

Adam is the co-founder and editor of www.eventindustrynews.com Adam, a technology evangelist also organises Event Tech Live, Europe’s only show dedicated to event technology and the Event Technology Awards. Both events take place in November, London.