Sold Out: Digital Ads Drive Event Attendance
Chapter Leadership Brief 9.20.24
By Lynsie Slachetka, Founder & CEO
aJuxt Media Group
Did you attend the 2024 FRDNY conference? If you did, you likely saw or interacted with marketing or social media specifically targeting fundraising individuals in New York City who were likely to attend. For the past two years, aJuxt Media Group worked with AFP-NYC to ensure packed Fundraising Day NY Events and I’m here to tell you how we did it.
The short answer is digital advertising. The long answer, well, is long. Digital ads are just one piece of your sales funnel. The base of the funnel must be strong and intact for it to be useful.
A Trustworthy Foundation
Before donors are going to purchase an event ticket, they first have to learn about and trust your organization. This is where having strong brand messaging is vital and evident in all your marketing materials, from website to brochures to social media profiles. Having a well-maintained, responsive website with event landing pages is key to completing event conversions. A slow load time is all it takes to make your carefully planned advertising ineffective. Forty-seven percent of website users will not wait more than 2 seconds for a website to load. Once on your website, users form an opinion about your site in 0.5 seconds. You read that right! Your website has less than a second to capture a user’s attention.
Close to 90% of buyers report being influenced by social media content. And 75% of B2B buyers look at social media before making a purchase. As your sales funnel begins to make an impression on potential event attendees, your social media pages should be reinforcing your organization’s mission, sharing testimonials, and providing event information.
Smart Audience Targeting Delivers Results
Digital ads are worthless without accurate and informed audience targeting. While certain social media platforms allow you to target ads based on your existing users or followers, this assumes that your current users are spot-on and the exact audience you want to reach. Rarely, if ever, is this true.
Over the Top (OTT), Pay Per Click (PPC) and Display digital ad campaigns often fall victim to prioritizing quantity over quality leads. Targeting can become more expensive the more you define an audience, which can lead to ad vendors opting for broader targeting/cheaper clicks, which may result in clicks but not registration conversions. For aJuxt clients, we opt for fewer clicks from highly-qualified potential attendees that are much more likely to convert.
Drive Event Attendance with Digital Ads
Recently, aJuxt helped promote an event for a nonprofit client. Using a digital ad campaign with display ads, OTT and PPC that targeted specific job titles and industry topics, aJuxt delivered a nonprofit client 13,000 website sessions that led to 225 direct registration conversions. To put this in perspective, the average conversion rate for B2B events is 2-5% and this campaign delivered close to a 25% conversion rate.
It’s worth noting that within any digital campaign retargeting is key. As potential attendees begin to see and engage with your media, retargeting ensures that they are reminded of their interest and provided additional opportunities to learn more and purchase tickets.
Once you have secured your attendees, everything mentioned above, plus branded emails, blogs and more, keep your donors loyal to your organization and ready to be rallied for your next event.
Smart Marketers Know When To Outsource
Now is a great time to check in with your internal marketing staff. Many nonprofit marketing departments are asked to be experts on all things marketing, branding and advertising. This isn’t always feasible with limited personnel resources. Identifying areas where partnering with an agency would be the most productive, is an excellent way to utilize a media agency.
Before you balk at the potential cost, many firms like aJuxt Media Group offer an a la carte menu of services allowing you to outsource a portion of your workload—social media marketing, digital ad buying, event planning—freeing up your staff to give the remaining projects the attention they deserve.
The clichés are true: practice does make perfect and time is money. If an agency can identify your target audience and launch an outreach campaign in half the time it would take you, that’s a savings you can’t afford to pass up.
To learn how aJuxt Media Group can help you drive attendance to your next event, check us out on LinkedIn or online at aJuxt.com.
Lynsie is an adventurous audience development specialist, social media strategist and integrated marketing professional whose motto is to keep it “Targeted, Focused, and Strategic. Then the brand story can be heard.” Lynsie is known for diving into analytics and finding the hidden egg that unlocks authentic brand audience engagement.
Lynsie’s career in communications spans over a decade. She has extensive knowledge in digital advertising, search engine optimization, social media management, and brand reputation management. Lynsie worked for Hearst Digital Media Services and was co-owner of a Tallahassee-based marketing agency, Voxy Media Group, before stepping away for new ventures. She’s a Midwestern gal with a heart for the world. Lynsie loves communications—the art of effective advertising. She also loves her kids, hubby, kayaking and exploring.