Setting up a Facebook Event that results in a great turnout requires a bit of strategy. There are lots of different strategies out there to help you market your Facebook events and everyone has their favorite. This week, I’m going to share a simple strategy you can use to get more people to attend your event.

Tips on using Facebook ads to improve event attendance

• • Choose the ad objective of “Engagement.” The first step when creating an ad is choosing an objective. You must go through the Ads Manager to do this. Simply choosing “boost event” is not the same thing.  

• • Optimum audience size might be bigger than you’d expect. I often see event planners target too small of an audience based on interest and demographics. If you have a great image and event title, and you’ve chosen “Engagement,” you can rely on Facebook’s algorithm to find people interested in your event.
  • The bigger the event revenue, the bigger the event budget. For the initial event promotion, I would not recommend spending less than $5 a day, and for many events, the spend should be much more than that. Take into consideration how much profit you need to make per ticket for the event. This will help you determine how much you should spend for engagement. If you’re advertising 30 days out, I recommend a budget of at least $150. However, sometimes it’s better to spend that same amount in a two-week period to show your ad to the same person a few times in closer frequency.

• Use a custom audience to improve attendance. Set up a Custom Audience of people who have responded going or interested to the event. Create a second engagement ad using a similar event image or even a set of images for this Custom Audience. Run this ad the last few weeks before the event to promote anticipation and remind people to attend.
• Bonus: Prompt for ticket sales. Using the same Custom Audience, you can set up an ad with an objective of “Traffic” and a call-to-action of “get tickets.” This will display your event in a way that will encourage people to purchase tickets.

Let the Holiday Event Planning Begin!

"The Holidays" is a magical time of year when people want to get out, be social, and spend money. November 24th is Small Business Saturday, and a lot of people will be looking forward to supporting small businesses on that day. As you promote your holiday events, be sure to try out some of these tips to improve your attendance.