How Online Ticket Sales Boost Audience Engagement

Event-goers have a lot more alternatives to choose from than ever before. And your event’s success really comes down to the number of attendees.

So, what can be your competitive edge in this cut-throat market? And how can you find a larger target audience for your event and make them loyal to your brand?

Here’s the answer: Build and maintain a great relationship with your audience. And to do that, you’ll have to plan and create interaction with them on a personal level. A high level of engagement with your target audience is the key to skyrocketing your sales and having them come back for more.

In this article, we’ll discuss why high audience engagement matters and how online ticketing platforms can help you find a more targeted audience for your events. We’ll also share the best ticketing platforms to help you reach those goals.

Why Engaging Your Target Audience Matters for A Business Selling Tickets Online

There’s a correlation between customer loyalty and audience engagement that nobody can deny. In fact, an “Engaged customer” generates 23% more revenue than one less connected to your brand.

If you don’t have any particular strategy for improving your audience engagement, you’re missing out on the opportunity to interact with your potential ticket buyers. And that means you’re leaving a lot of money on the table for your competitors to grab.

Source: Hiver

But building relationships to improve audience engagement with potential ticket buyers won’t yield instant monetary results—it takes time to build trust with your target audience and make them see you as an authority in your niche.

With consistent effort on your part, they’ll start trusting your business, and their loyalty will follow the trust you’ve built. As a result, they’ll stick around with your business in the long run, converting them into repeat buyers.

By this logic, an engaged potential customer has a super high chance of becoming a loyal customer. These loyal fans will not only be your repeat ticket buyers, but they’ll spread the word to their social circle, referring them to your events.

We all know that word-of-mouth marketing is one of the absolute best forms of promotion you can get when selling tickets online. It’s free, and you’ve already established rapport with the potential customers before they’ve even gone to your landing page.

A ticket buyer who spreads the word to other potential buyers is the most valuable weapon in your business’s arsenal. So, you want your audience to be so in love with your brand that they’ll naturally spread the word.

Here are a few more reasons why you, as an event organizer, should care about audience engagement:

Growing Audience

Audience engagement requires an audience to begin with. Having a sizable audience is what every business aims for. It boosts sales, establishes brand stability, and gives you an edge in your market.

When people start engaging with your content, you start trending and hitting the charts. That’s particularly true in the case of social media, as that’s how its algorithm works.

Plus, people are drawn to what others love. The best way for them to demonstrate their interest is by engaging with your content. So you need to invest in engagement to get more people interested in your event.

Boosting Anticipation

If you have tried your hand at marketing, you would agree that a powerful tool to increase sales is building consumer anticipation. This is one of the reasons why companies announce launch dates quite early in the marketing process.

How does engagement increase anticipation? Once people engage with your content, they want their input to be considered. It means customer engagement increases anticipation because audiences value validation.

To put it into simpler terms, people will look forward to something if they know that they were/are going to be involved. If you ask them for the type of events they’d like, or certain details about their tickets (prices, seating, etc), you’re showing them that you care. Not only that, they’ll now know that your event is on the way, so they have something to look forward to.

Audience anticipation really does help you sell more tickets online, as you’ve hooked them. Other ways to build anticipation include regularly sending out marketing material that builds. Start off by sharing there is a special event happening soon, but not what it is.

Then share what it is, but not when it will be. When sharing about this, ask people to guess more details about the event so they’re included in the rollout of the mystery.

Making Your Potential Ticket Buyers Feel Valued

How can you convert your potential buyers into loyal fans and make them trust you as an organizer? All you need to do is make them feel heard and consider their opinions.

You need to humanize your business so it will be easy for your target audience to build emotional bonds with your event.

Make them feel that they are interacting with real humans who acknowledge them—you don’t want to come out as an event organizer who makes them feel anonymous.

Engage with your audience to improve their experience and make them more involved in your business; the whole process will feel more personal.

Finding New & Improved Solutions

A great thing about high audience engagement is that you get to interact with your target audience regularly, and they share their thoughts on their experience with you—good and bad.

This might be about a particular event or their overall experience with you as an event organizer. Your audience would gladly share their feedback with you.

Think about it this way: Whether you are selling tickets online to a match, concert, theater, or even a circus, it really is a product that needs to meet your audience’s expectations. And who is better than your audience to tell you about their expectations of you? They know their needs and wants better than anyone else.

Encourage them to let you know their needs and then strive to fulfill them in every possible way through online surveys, for instance. Analyze that feedback, both good and bad, to see what’s working and what’s not.

Create and execute an action plan based on it, and that’ll open doors for you to innovate your business, giving you a competitive edge to sell tickets online.

What Kinds of Engagement Are We Talking About?

Getting participants fired up before an event is the secret sauce to nailing it. Sky-high levels of engagement not only whip up excitement but also transform mere on-lookers into active registrants.

If you seize the pre-event window, you’ll magnify its impact tenfold. Whether it’s an online, in-person, or hybrid event, the sooner you engage your audience, the better. Here are a few ways to engage your audience:

Create Buzz On Social Media

With over 4.89 billion social media users worldwide, it’s the best way to drive audience engagement and find more ticket buyers for your event.

Source: Statista

Here’s how that works:

Send Out Marketing Kits

Whip up some social media marketing kits and dish them out to attendees, speakers, and sponsors. Load them up with the event’s branding, logo, dates, and even some catchy text, social handles, and hashtags to go with it.

This engagement tactic works wonders if you sell tickets online in tight-knit industries. When your audience scrolls through LinkedIn and spots their peers flocking to your event, FOMO (fear of missing out) strikes them hard.

Post Frequently

Now, you need to take charge of your event’s social accounts and posts. Tag your speakers and sponsors whenever you post about them. This increases the odds of them sharing your posts, which means more organic reach for you.

Keep Room for Advertising in Your Budget

Social algorithms can be a real pain. If you’re not willing to fork out some cash to boost your posts, chances are they’ll get lost in the vast expanse of people’s feeds. Don’t count on them making an effort to seek out your page. Keep that budget flexible for some post-boosting action.

Calls To Action

Now, if you’ve got a solid fanbase, you need to rally them. Get them engaged by launching a photo contest that ties into your event’s theme. Or throw a poll at them, asking for their opinions on a burning industry topic. You can even host an AMA (ask me anything) session with one of your expert hosts.

This builds the hype and signals that your event will be a dynamic and downright fascinating affair. Get them excited, and they’ll be lining up for those tickets.

Work With Industry Media

Engage with industry media to create excitement around your event. Get creative by snagging interviews with your speakers as subject matter experts or having them pen guest columns on timely subjects.

Pitch it to industry media outlets once you’ve cooked up this enticing content. And if one of those press outlets takes the bait, sprinkle in a mention of your event (along with a registration link) in the story.

While your event might not be the star of the show, this kind of content carries higher editorial value than a simple press release and is bound to captivate the interest of your target audience.

Leverage Email Marketing To Target & Engage Audiences

Death, taxes, and waking up to an inbox full of emails—these are the only certainties in life. Email has become the go-to method of communication worldwide, with over 4.6 billion users projected by the end of 2025.

Source: Statista

Surprisingly, many event organizers have yet to embrace this powerful marketing tool. However, utilizing targeted strategies for audience engagement can help you reach the ticket sales numbers you’ve been longing for.

Targeted email marketing places your event directly in front of potential buyers, who are likely to say yes to buying tickets from you. They want to hear from you; now it’s time to decide what to say.

Engage them through hyper-targeted, personalized, high-quality, visually appealing newsletters, and see the magic work.

How Can Online Ticketing Platforms Help You Target Audiences That Are Actually Interested In Your Event?

The problem with most strategies for pre-event engagement is that you need an already established audience with which you want to interact.

Whether you’re doing social media marketing, using your own website, or leveraging email marketing, you need an established fan base to increase your reach and find a more targeted audience.

For social media marketing, you can reach a larger target audience for your event organically only if your fan base engages with your posts and shares them a lot, helping you hit the trending charts. That’s just how the algorithm works for most social media platforms.

And for email marketing, you need an email list, which you’ll have to build using different strategies, including lead magnets, opt-in forms on your website, etc. (It takes time and isn’t easy to do).

But there’s a way to save time and effort, not only in finding new hyper-targeted audiences for your event but also in engaging them and turning them into loyal ticket buyers—partnering up with the right online ticketing platform.

The right ticketing platform will already have built an audience on its social pages, an email list, and traffic on its website for events in your niche. Plus, they’ll happily share your message with their audience to boost your ticket sales. After all, they’ll also get a commission on the tickets sold. So it’s a win-win for both when selling tickets online.

Choosing the right platform and letting them engage the audience on your behalf can’t go wrong. They have tons of experience doing so, and it’s their audience they’ve built by putting so much effort in, so they’ll make sure to get everything right, as it’s their image on the line too.

Online Ticketing Platforms Ideal for Targeting Audiences: TicketsCandy V.S. Eventbrite

Choosing the right online ticketing platform means access to hyper-targeted audiences already interested in the events you host.

Here we compare two online ticketing platforms with the tools to help you reach a larger target audience and sell tickets online successfully:

1. TicketsCandy

TicketsCandy stands tall among its competitors as the best online ticketing platform for promoting your event and finding the most targeted audience to engage with your brand.

TicketsCandy leverages tools like social media, newsletters, and even paid promotions to drive engagement to boost your ticket sales.

It uses its user database for newsletters to send targeted email campaigns, promote upcoming events, and provide relevant information to subscribers. These emails include event announcements, exclusive discounts, reminders, and personalized recommendations.

Plus, TicketsCandy has an established audience on its social media accounts, so it leverages them to promote your event to an audience already interested in buying tickets.

TicketsCandy offers advanced marketing solutions to grow your event interest quickly and sustainably over time. You can integrate promotion tools on Google, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms, using paid advertising, newsletter promotion, and leveraging partner websites.

2. Eventbrite

Although Eventbrite is a household name in the online ticketing industry and it does provide some solid marketing solutions, it ultimately comes up short compared to TicketsCandy when it comes to providing the right tools to event organizers to promote their events.

It doesn’t offer any services like running paid ads, email and social media marketing, etc., as TicketsCandy does. However, it lists public events in its search directory and on major search engines.

That means there’s a chance that some of their website visitors may get interested in your event and decide to buy your ticket. Besides that, you are on your own when promoting your event to your audience.

Wrapping Up

Audience engagement won’t happen on its own. It requires intentional planning, preparation, and the right online ticketing partner.

As someone who has put a lot of effort into organizing your event, you can’t really afford to hear crickets. An audience that feels like they don’t matter to you and is left unengaged won’t stick around for long or be of any value to you.

But with high audience engagement, you can ensure loyalty and, as a result, high ticket sales. Need help getting there? Sign up for free with TicketsCandy—the best online ticketing platform—that’ll help you reach your audience, engage them in the right way, and boost your ticket sales.