How a Small Start-up Increased Event Attendance by 690% (And You Can Too)

This is a story all about how Ticketleap, an event marketing and online ticketing platform, stood out by empowering employees to share their expertise and lend some personality to the business.

Meet Ticketleap. This tech startup helps its customers sell more tickets to their events. But if you’ve ever created an event through Ticketleap, you know that the team leading the charge offers so much more than one-time products and services. They bring people together through events and experiences, empower and give the DIY event creators a voice, and encourage small teams, like themselves, to make a big impact.

Sarah Lang, Director of Marketing at Ticketleap, and the team use social media and their blog to showcase their fun, approachable personalities, while sharing their expertise on creating and promoting successful events. The team breathes life to the business. In doing so, they’ve kept the entrepreneurial startup-atmosphere alive that attract like-minded customers from afar.

Using Social Media to Add a Little Personality to the Business

Today, many businesses have strict social media guidelines and policies, so when one is more playful, people take note. Ticketleap’s social team shares fun and quirky marketing content to add a bit flavor to their online presence. This sets Ticketleap apart from their competition and makes customers want to follow and interact with them, which in turn promotes business growth. While they create tools to help customers build communities through events, they use their keen sense of culture and personality to build their own community.

For example, their highest engaging content on Instagram is a video series called #Justatip. Only seconds long, these videos feature a variety of Ticketleap employees sharing an event or community-boosting tip. The videos are just one example of how employees are encouraged to think creativity, and showcase the many different personalities that make up a business’ team.

How Education Can Improve an Event’s Success

But Ticketleap’s content marketing is not only fun and personable, it’s educational. As experts in the field of event, ticketing, and community management, the social media team shares their wealth of knowledge through content and in Ticketleap’s free Events University, or EU. Similar to an educational blog, EU is full of rich media content such as “what sold out events have in common,” “how to choose an event hashtag,” and “how to plan an event in one week.” Ticketleap uses EU content to arm customers with the skills and tools to create their own successful events.

“Business owners know their own product and service inside and out, so if we can educate and empower them to create their own branded events, their event will be represented correctly and that much more successful,” says Sarah Lang, who is the Written Content Lead at Ticketleap.

Instagram videos are an excellent way for the Ticketleap team to share some of the many tips and tricks from Events University. In the last quarter, since starting the campaign to promote EU on Twitter and Facebookusing Hootsuite, Ticketleap’s number of new subscribers has tripled each month.

How Hootsuite Helps Events Run that Much Smoother

With thousands of customers making event pages, promoting events on social feeds, and selling tickets through the Ticketleap platform, Lang and her team have a growing pool of content and conversations to listen to, engage with, and share.

“Some of the more popular events will tweet once and draw 10,000 associated social messages. That’s a huge volume of content to sift through, and because such a large part of our social strategy is consuming and sharing user-generated content, our strategy would not be effective without Hootsuite,” shares Lang.

Ticketleap’s social media team uses these Hootsuite features for success:

• Teams and Assignments: When it comes to social media listening and engagement at such a high volume, Lang and the team work together by assigning messages to one another—whether for customer service, customer event promotion, or day-to-day engagement—to ensure that conversations and opportunities are taken advantage of.
• Keyword and Hashtag Search Streams: Many of Ticketleap’s customers create hashtags for their events. Setting up both event-related keyword searches and hashtag search streams allow Ticketleap’s social media team to keep up with user-generated content and share their customers’ wins.
• Lists: The social media team creates and follows relevant lists of influential people or customers talking about events, inbound marketing, content marketing, and other marketing or industry related topics. This helps them easily find content that will resonate most with their audience.

“We have lists of influencers, journalists, and local people we think are cool or want work with,” shares Lang. “Hootsuite helps us sort through all of their updates to make sure we’re hitting the right people, at the right time with content about experiences over things, or anything else to do with events.”

• Scheduler: Lang and theteam have a wealth of user-generated content to share, but scheduling messages is essential for staggering content publishing times so that followers don’t become overwhelmed
• Mobile App Push Notifications: Although Ticketleap’s customer service help desk is open from 9am-9pm EST, the events take place at all hours. Because push notifications send mobile alerts on social messages that may require attention, the team can quickly respond after-hours or assign it to a customer service agent for the morning.

“Hootsuite Mobile Push Notifications let us follow up on customer service inquiries or put out fires right away—even after hours,” says Lang.

Getting People to Commit to an Event Is Easier Through Word of Mouth

“It’s easy enough to get someone to like or share, but it’s difficult to get them to see a post, take out their credit card, pay for a ticket, and attend the event,” says Lang. “Hootsuite is really important in helping us promote our own events, sell tickets, and track results.”

A recent Ticketleap community-building event was supposed to be an informal and intimate gathering of 50 people. After using Hootsuite to find and capitalize on a few existing hashtags and surface influential journalists who ended up being interested in attending, they ended up with 395 event attendees—almost seven times their original goal.

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