How to use Eventbrite as a Small Business

by Hassan del Campo, Social Mediums

Eventbrite is a mainstay in our arsenal of marketing and branding tools. For the new entrepreneur or seasoned business owner, the platform can be highly effective beyond its intended purpose. Aside from being a popular site for promoting events, Eventbrite is good for SEM and reaching audiences organically (hi, Facebook).

Below we unlock some insights we’ve discovered along the way; highlighting those which have proven most effective. Yes, this is our Do’s and Don’ts of Eventbrite.

Things you should already be doing.

1. Choose or create a good event image. First impressions matter.
2. From what we can tell there’s no implied character limit for the event description, so use it! Just enough information to help your audience understand exactly what they should expect from attending your event will suffice. Be descriptive. This especially applies if you’re hosting a paid event. If you want people to shell out money you must be transparent about what they will receive in return. If you really want to go the extra mile, you can include an FAQ section.
3. Check “Link to Facebook and Twitter”, because you should probably have at least one of those. You can even schedule tweets about your event through Hootsuite, directly from Eventbrite.
4. Complete your Organizer Profile and create others if/when appropriate.

Some of our best practices when using Eventbrite.

• “Emails to Attendees” is a powerful, underutilized feature to engage with your participants before and after the event. Use call-to-actions, personalized messages, follow up messages, surveys, etc. to keep your audience in your funnel.
• Publish your event under different event types and topics to target your audience more strategically. But, don’t abuse the feature. Stay within relevant topics and subcategories. We recommend limiting duplicate events to three, to avoid coming across spammy.
• A/B Test your event names. Remember our post about email subject lines? The same concept applies here. Choose relevant (consider your keywords) titles that grab attention and encourage clicks. While much of the optimization takes place within the body of the event page, all your work will be for naught if no one is encouraged to see more of your event.
• Overbook. Yes, we mean if you’re looking to host a first-time homebuyer workshop and you can only accommodate fifteen people, set your available ticket quantity to 25 or more. Unless you’re really, really confident that everyone that RSVPs will show up, it’s not a bad idea to overcompensate for no-shows by adding an additional 10–15 tickets on top. Another way to look at this is as an indirect way to capture emails. You may anticipate only 10 attendees, but you can collect 100 emails, of which 90% won’t even attend. Which is OK, because you can still retarget and engage your no-shows through a follow-up message (see “Emails to Attendees”).

You can host digital events too.

If you’re holding back using Eventbrite because you simply don’t have a physical location (or your event doesn’t necessitate one) don’t fret, Eventbrite supports online events as well (note that Facebook can only connect to your event page if it has a physical address).

Use your real estate.

There’s a lot of areas beyond the “event description” body that you can use to fill with text, and thus, more opportunities to connect with your audience, calls-to-action, and use descriptive keywords.

• While not required, the ticket description is a great place to offer additional details and even plug in a promotion. For instance, we used our ticket description to include a special coupon for attendees.
• The Order Confirmation and Waitlist Settings pages are other areas to optimize. Find them at Manage > Order Options > Order Confirmation and Manage > Waitlist Settings respectively.

Use Extensions.

What separates Eventbrite from your city’s community calendar online are the features and it’s ease of integration with other applications. The MailChimp and Speaker List are among our favorites and most used. Extensions do the job of putting a particular function of your event on autopilot, enhancing the attendee experience, or both.

Conclusion.

There’s way more features that we didn’t even cover. While you’ve been spared of the details we highly encourage you to explore more of Eventbrite on your own. We can only scratch so much surface on the first round, but you’ll find that Eventbrite has some great integrations for monitoring the performance of your marketing efforts with tracking pixels from Facebook, Google, and Twitter as well as reports and other analytics.

With that said you may still not be convinced that Eventbrite is the right promotional tool for your small business. Enter Airbnb Experiences. Read why we can barely contain our excitement about how Airbnb Experiences is one of the best things to happen for small businesses and brands, here.