Speaker 1: you You All right.

Speaker 2: Hey, everyone. Happy Thursday, and thanks for tuning in. You've got Ali, the co-founder and CRO of Tone Den here. So every Thursday at around 10 a.m. Pacific, I run through general strategies and best practices on Facebook advertising for event marketing. This pertains to both events that occur in person and events that are online. Despite them being vastly different experiences, the good news is that, at least from a marketing standpoint, they're incredibly similar. You're going to use very similar strategies, at least as it comes to Facebook advertising, to drive attendance and drive sales for both of these. I do this every Thursday. Feel free to ask questions in the stream and in the chat at any point in time. To go ahead and get started, everyone, it's interesting because this sentiment started to change, especially in the past years, everyone's needed to fully embrace digital marketing. But the usual response that I get back when I ask someone in the event space about what their opinion is on event advertising, I usually hear, or on Facebook advertising, I usually hear that it's like a black hole that kind of just sucks up your marketing budget and doesn't really do anything for your event. And to be honest, I don't really blame people for having that initial opinion. The reason why is because when people look at the data that's being fed back to them when they run a Facebook ads manager campaign, a lot of the time it's basically just like click and impression data, which is what you're seeing on the screen right here for one of the live Facebook ad campaigns that I have. And while this data is certainly helpful if you're a media agent, media company like the New York Times or the Atlantic or Fox News, it's not really that helpful if you're trying to sell tickets. But what a lot of people don't know is that if we change a few of the ways that Facebook reports, and if we install something called a Facebook pixel, all of a sudden, that campaign that we have, instead of just relying on click data, we can actually see our sales performance, meaning for every dollar we spend, how many orders are we driving, and how many tickets are we selling on average for every one dollar we end up spending. So you'll see that in this case, we went from just knowing that there were 14 clicks in our campaign to seeing that there were actually 11 online orders and our return on ad spend is about 5X, meaning for every $1 we spend, we get about $5.60 back in gross ticket sales. And this revelation's huge because it turns Facebook from this cost center that doesn't really do anything for you from a marketing standpoint into this revenue generator for you where if you actually figure out how to optimize your Facebook ad campaigns and get these costs lower, you can really start to drive a lot more attendance to your events. So that's kind of step one from a best practices standpoint. It's understanding that you can actually measure for what you put in, how much you get back in sales and in attendees when you end up running Facebook ads. So that's kind of the first piece of the puzzle on that. Now, once you understand that you can actually see your sales from your ad campaigns, you can actually get a lot more tactical. So when you run an ad campaign on Facebook, you could take the same ad creative and you could basically serve it to different groups of fans. And the reason why this is important is because Facebook's not just gonna tell you how much you, or how well, excuse me, you performed at the campaign level. You'll actually be able to see for each different target audience that you have, how that audience performed relative to another. And what you'll notice here is that not all audiences in this case are created equal, some actually perform a lot better than others. So you'll notice that this top audience really only drove one order and has a 3x return on ad spend, whereas both of these bottom audiences have five orders associated with each of them and a significantly higher return on ad spend. Now here's why this concept of like A-B testing or using multiple audiences is important for your campaigns. It really just boils down to the fact that you're hedging your bets, and you're giving yourself the opportunity to fix things that aren't really going that well from your campaigns, and instead invest in what's working, right? A lot of the time when people end up making ad campaigns, they usually only use one audience, which is kind of like putting all your eggs in one basket, or rather it is like putting all of your eggs in one basket. If that audience ends up ticking off, then your ad campaign's great, and you're gonna see a lot of attendance for your event. But if that audience was incorrect, and had the wrong targeting in it, there's nowhere that your budget can go to find new attendees at a more profitable rate for you. So by utilizing multiple audiences in conjunction with having conversion tracking installed, you can then have the agency to actually reallocate budget from bad audiences that are really expensive into good audiences that are performing well. And the end goal or conclusion when you end up spending your marketing dollars in that way is that you get a lot more back. So instead of spending $97 and just having it all focus on this top audience that has like a three extra try on ad spend, that'd get me like $300 worth of sales. But because I'm utilizing multiple audiences, I can take that same, we'll call it 100 bucks, and get a 5.6 extra try on ad spend and make 560 bucks instead of $300. So I'm getting an extra $200 worth of sales because I'm actually taking the time to use different audiences within my campaign. So it's these little kind of subtle things that effectively get done in an advertising campaign when you set it up in a particular kind of way that's actually gonna make you more money. And the good news is that the only thing that it really costs is time, right? Time, but it's not a lot of time. It's more like an initial investment just to understand how Facebook as a platform works. And then once you're able to figure that out, you can utilize tools to go ahead and make that process go along faster. That's really what we've done over here at ToneDen. In this case though, the UI that you're seeing is one of our event marketing tools called Eventbrite Paid Social Ads. This is built specifically for Eventbrite customers, but we do have our own advertising product within ToneDen Core that you can go ahead and check out. What we've done over here is built our own version of Facebook Ads Manager specifically for event creators. One of the first things that you'll notice is for the amount of marketing dollars spent in this campaign, this is our own campaign by the way. We dog food our own product over here. Before the marketing dollars spent on this campaign, in this case about $220, we've gone ahead and pulled in over $1,200 for the gross ticket sales, which is great. If you scroll down, a lot of that revenue data that often gets buried in your Facebook book ad campaigns, normally when you're going into Facebook, you see stuff like this. We're able to basically put that front and center so that you have a lot better of an understanding of how your campaign is actually performing. Now, once again, where this gets significant is that we're not just going to show you how much money you're making at the ad campaign level, we're going to also show you for the different target audiences that you're using, how each is effectively performing, which is what you're seeing in these rows right here, right? Each of these rows is effectively a different group of fans that is going ahead and being targeted, and these final columns like orders, cost per order, and total purchase value are effectively the financial results of targeting that specific type of audience group. Now, the reasons why people actually used Homeden or Eventbrite-based social ads, instead of just hopping into a native Facebook ads manager, has to do with the fact that, one, we make it really easy to utilize these multiple audiences in your campaigns, so you don't have to spend a lot of time in Facebook building out these audiences and figuring out what works and what doesn't. But then, two, we have our own budget optimization algorithm, meaning if you are spending in an audience, and that audience really isn't performing well isn't getting you a really good customer acquisition cost or return on ad spend, we're going to go ahead and effectively double down on the audiences that are working and are getting you a better return on ad spend automatically. So you don't need to worry about babysitting your campaigns. That's something that is automatically going to happen when you utilize our platform. Now, moving on from there, guys, this is how these campaigns are effectively created. We have our own version of the Facebook Facebook Ads Manager interface, their guided creation interface, but specifically for event marketing. So we begin by going ahead and putting in a link to our event, we could go ahead and choose a custom link, we could promote a Facebook event if it effectively exists, or if you are an Eventbrite user, we can actually choose an Eventbrite event from this dropdown to go ahead and advertise to. But in this case, what we'll do is I'm going to make an example campaign for our live stream webinar called Spotify Marketing 101. So I want to show you guys how to effectively market a live stream event, because a lot of those are happening right now, and I think people want to learn about it. So this is the landing page for our live stream marketing event. It's a tool called Streamlinks, where we'll go ahead and effectively collect someone's email and then remind them two times before the live stream effectively occurs. But if you're doing a live stream through a platform like Zoom or Eventbrite, you can still direct people there, and we should be able to track whether or not those individuals are converting. We'll go ahead and put in the ticketing or registration URL right there and press continue. From there, we'll go ahead and select an ad account, a Facebook page, and an Instagram account to advertise from. We're built on Facebook's marketing API. When you connect your Facebook profile to ToneDen, that allows us to recreate the ads manager experience for you. From there, we'll go ahead and select an ad account that we want our campaigns to appear and a Facebook and Instagram account that we want to be advertising through. Now in this event details section, because this is a live stream, most of our audience is U.S. based, so I'm going to go ahead and just keep the locations as United States. If I was doing a local event though, I could type out something like Los Angeles, and it would make sure that I'm effectively advertising just to people in the L.A. area. And then from there, an HRH event, 18 should be good enough here. Now moving through, I'm actually going to clear out these audiences and give you a decent idea of what targeting effectively looks like. So each of these colorful boxes that you're seeing in the center of your screen, call this Facebook interest audience, each of these boxes that you're seeing in the center of your screen is effectively a different group of fans that's being targeted on Facebook. On Facebook, these are effectively known as ad sets. And usually within a good advertising campaign, you're using anywhere between, I'd argue, like two to five ad sets on that. And those ad sets or audiences, I'm using them interchangeably here, you really want to be going after two different kinds of fans. So one's going to be new fans, meaning individuals that may or may not be familiar with your brand. And then the other is existing fans, meaning individuals that have already engaged with you on like Facebook and Instagram, perhaps they've gone to your website and you have your pixel on there so you can go ahead and retarget them. Perhaps they've gone to your Eventbrite profile and you have your pixel on your Eventbrite profile and you're able to target them too. Just making sure that we're hitting the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. But moving on, this is how you'd go ahead and target individuals with an interest audience. And because this is a live stream, I'm gonna switch back to United States-based targeting on that end. So we'll go ahead and leave this blank. when you leave it blank, it defaults to the United States on that end. So from this Facebook interest target audience section, I'm gonna go ahead and type in, in this case, I'm just gonna type in individuals that are interested in Spotify on that end. One moment. One sec.

Speaker 1: One sec.

Speaker 2: All good, well you go ahead and type in interest audiences in there and then in this section that says Facebook group remarketing audience, we'll go ahead and select ToneDen, ToneDen.io, a pixel, and then for the custom audience, we'll go ahead and do that. Once again, audience one is going to be basically reaching out to new people, so you'd go ahead and type out new interest there to go ahead and target individuals, and then this bottom audience called Facebook group marketing audience is where we're going to effectively go ahead and put in our Facebook page, our Instagram account, our pixel, and then a mailing list if you've got one. When we effectively do that, guys, when you put in your Facebook page, we're automatically going to create two audiences for you. One's going to be basically anyone that's engaged with the Facebook page in the past year, and the other's going to be anyone that's engaged with events associated with the Facebook page in the past year. The reason why that's significant is because the people that are visiting your Facebook page and engaging with your Facebook profile, and the individuals that are engaging with your Instagram account for the past year, and the individuals that have RSVPed your Facebook events, are highly likely to actually buy tickets to your events, or attend your free events on that end. What we're doing is, instead of you needing to create a ton of different audiences and spread out your budget, we stuff them into one, which is this Facebook group remarketing audience. Now, if you are a MailChimp user, you can go ahead and create that same audience using the MailChimp group remarketing audience, and we'll automatically pull in your mailing list into there, too. Similarly, if you're an Eventbrite user, you can go ahead and use the Eventbrite group remarketing audience and do the same thing right there, too. So you choose your Instagram account, your Facebook pixel, and then from your Eventbrite org, if you've got emails associated with Eventbrite, that's going to go ahead and take things off. Now, for some reason, guys, my interest targeting is not working. It might be my internet on that end, but with that being said, you usually want to use these two audiences when you're going ahead and building out campaigns. That's gonna get you in front of the majority of people. One second. Cool. Moving on from there, guys, when we're talking about how long we want to go ahead and run our ad campaigns for, it's interesting because when we're talking about things like music marketing and social marketing, we want to run these really long, continuous-based campaigns. When we're going ahead and running these campaigns, we actually want to apply burst spending instead. When you're doing social marketing, you want to have these long, continuous campaigns that continuously send people back to your Instagram profile and whatnot. When you end up doing events, you actually want to constrain your spend right when your event goes on sale and then right when your event's effectively about to occur. The way that I would think about it is like you basically got this camel with two humps on it, with the humps representing your peak sales periods. You usually move a lot of tickets right when your event effectively goes on sale and then right when your event is about to close out. There's kind of this awkward in-between period where people are a lot less likely to buy. Now on that end, that does change a little bit if you've got a high-demand event, right? Like if you're doing a high-demand event like a Beyonce concert, or if you are selling to an older demo, perhaps like it's a kid's show like Paw Patrol and you're dealing with parents, people tend to buy ahead of time for those things, in which case it is okay to not do as much of a concentrated spend at the beginning and end and just spend things evenly. But for a lot of different types of events, especially with live stream events, you're they're seeing the majority of your sales either occur in the last 48 hours leading up to your event, or in some cases, the last 48 minutes leading up to the event. So people tend to make a lot of last minute buying decisions on that end. So for the sake of this example, let's pretend that this event is on Saturday the 7th. So we're just gonna run a two-day ad campaign on this end, and in terms of what our overall budget's gonna be, it's gonna be 100 bucks. So we'll say, hey, look, we've got this live stream effectively occurring on Saturday. And then from here, guys, this is where we are going to go ahead and basically build out our ad. So when I go ahead and press that Ad Image button,

Speaker 3: let me refresh my ad account real quick, guys. One moment. And then from there, let's go to the Modify Target Audiences section.

Speaker 2: So from here, we're gonna go ahead Basically build out our ad campaign on that end, one second. Hmm, well, you know what guys I'm gonna cut off this stream briefly just because I'm running into a few technical difficulties on that end. But in this design ad step, this is where you go ahead and basically put things in and then in this set a goal section you'll go ahead and choose the purchase conversion event. So I'll be going live again next Thursday. I'm gonna be making a lot of changes to the stream. I put a lot of effort into our social marketing stream and our basically like Spotify and music marketing stream and I'm gonna change that up for events soon too. One thing that I do want to point out to you guys though is that we have extensive event marketing docs docs that I think everyone here would really, really, really benefit from. It's pretty much everything that we've learned about the event marketing space in the past like I want to say two to three years on that end. So literally everything you need to know about conversion tracking, A-B testing, budget optimization and all that good stuff. So sorry for some of the difficulties today, guys. I promise to be live again on Thursday.