Marketing for Events

Marketing for events in Perth, where the deadline is the whole strategy

Q: How much should I spend advertising my show?

Start from the ceiling rather than a guess. Take your remaining capacity, multiply by your average ticket price, and that is the most revenue the campaign can possibly produce. Decide what return on ad spend makes the event worthwhile and you have a maximum budget. We would rather work backwards from that number with you than quote a figure before we know your venue size and pricing.

You are selling seats that expire. On the day after your event, every unsold ticket is worth exactly nothing, which is why we plan spend, creative and reporting against your on-sale date, your run dates and your remaining capacity.

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See the theatre results

5.0

our own Google rating, across 23 reviews

5.74x

return on ad spend selling theatre tickets for Zealous Productions

10 weeks

to launch Auzpod across Google Ads and Meta with no prior search history

$1,000

where our SEO starts, including GST, per 4 week cycle

An event does not
get a second chance
at the sale.

You have a fixed number of seats and a fixed date.
Once the house lights go down, unsold inventory is worthless.

That one fact changes the mechanics. Budget cannot be spread evenly across a month, because demand is not spread evenly. Attribution windows need to fit inside a sales window that actually closes. And knowing when to stop spending matters as much as knowing when to start.

CLIENT RESULTS

Proof this works

Zealous Productions

A Perth theatre company selling seats across nine performances at the Regal. 5.74x return on ad spend.

Read the case study

Auzpod

A ten week paid launch from a standing start, in a category with almost no existing search demand.

Read the case study

What actually moves ticket sales

An event campaign is not one budget running for a month. It is a sequence of phases arriving in order, and each one wants different money and a different message.

The phases we plan against, in the order they arrive:

announcement, warming your own past buyers before a cent goes to media

on-sale, a short hard push while intent is concentrated

the mid-run trough, throttled back and used for testing rather than volume

final call, honest scarcity on the sessions that are genuinely filling

sold out, switched off the same day rather than the same month

Flatten those five into one monthly budget and you get an average, and the average sells fewer seats.

Poster artwork for a Zealous Productions theatre season in Perth

Urgency you do not have to invent

Signal

What we run

What we will not run

The deadline

Closing weekend. Final three performances.

A fake countdown

Remaining seats

Limited seats remaining for the Saturday matinee

A claim that a session is nearly sold out when it is not

How it is checked

The audience can verify it on the seating map

It does not survive contact with a ticketing page showing plenty of availability

What it does to your audience

Builds an audience that comes back for your next season

Loses the trust of exactly the audience you want to bring back

A lot of industries have to manufacture urgency. Events do not, because your deadline and your capacity are both genuine.

What we actually do on an event campaign

Three workstreams, run to your event dates. Most event budgets only ever cover the first.

The spend plan

Budget mapped to your announcement, on-sale, mid-run and final call dates, with a ceiling agreed from capacity and ticket price before anything goes live.

HOW WE RUN GOOGLE ADS

The demand

Paid social that creates the want in the first place, then retargeting built around how far someone actually got.

HOW WE RUN META ADS

The ticket page

Tested end to end, because a checkout problem shows up in the reporting as an ads problem.

HOW WE BUILD SITES

Why the undecided
matter commercially

Plenty of the people who will eventually buy have already visited your ticket page at least once. They are not lost, they are undecided.

So we separate them, and set the campaign to match:

People who viewed the show page and still need to understand what the show actually is

People who reached seat selection or checkout and stopped

Buyers stuck on price, date or logistics, who need the remaining sessions

Buyers who need parking, running time or a group option answered

Audiences capped by time windows set against your run dates, not a default

This is where event campaigns quietly make or lose their return.
Retargeting someone for six weeks after a one night show is wasted spend.

Not sure whether it is the ads or the ticket page costing you seats?

See the theatre case study Call 0455 089 036

What we check on your ticket page and checkout

A lot of this traffic arrives on a mobile, so we look at the whole path from the ad to the confirmed seat:

Whether the landing page loads quickly on a real phone on a real connection

A hero video that stalls before anyone gets near a ticket

Dates and prices visible without a pinch and zoom

A seating map that works with a thumb

How many taps it takes to get from arriving to paying

A forced account creation step that could be a guest checkout

A ticketing provider that opens in a new window looking nothing like your brand

Which parts are fixable in your ticketing platform and which parts are not

We would rather spend a week fixing a checkout before the on-sale than spend the whole season paying more per ticket than we need to. If your site is the bottleneck, our web design and development work covers it.

What this looked like for Zealous Productions

Zealous Productions came to us to sell theatre tickets. What we delivered was the campaign and the website rebuild behind it.

Why the ads needed the site

The second half of that sentence matters as much as the first. The ads and the site were done together, because sending paid traffic to a page that was not built to sell tickets would have capped the return no matter how well the campaigns were structured.

That is the model we bring to every event client, and you can read the full detail in the Zealous Productions case study.

How we work with Perth event promoters

We are founder-led, based in Perth, and you deal directly with the founders doing the work. For an event campaign that matters more than usual, because decisions have to be made quickly. A session sells out on a Thursday night and the budget needs to move on Friday morning, not at the next monthly meeting.

Who this is for

Event marketing with us tends to suit:

Perth promoters working to a fixed on-sale date

Theatre companies selling a season of performances

Festivals working out which part of the line-up carries demand

Multi-date seasons where the audience data compounds

Single night shows on a compressed lead-in

Organisers who want reporting on tickets, not impressions

Questions

Event marketing questions Perth organisers ask.

When should I start marketing my event?+

Earlier than you might think, but not by spending earlier. We would want a few weeks before tickets go on sale to warm your audience through email and social, so the on-sale spike is as big as possible. The heavy paid spend then starts at on-sale.

What if I only have three weeks until opening night?+

If you come to us with three weeks until opening night we can still run a compressed campaign, you will just pay more per ticket than you would have with a proper lead-in.

How much should I spend advertising my show?+

Start from the ceiling rather than a guess:

take your remaining capacity

multiply by your average ticket price

that is the most revenue the campaign can possibly produce

decide what return on ad spend makes the event worthwhile and you have a maximum budget

We would rather work backwards from that number with you than quote a figure before we know your venue size and pricing.

Is this ongoing work, or a one-off campaign?+

If your events run in seasons, ongoing work makes more sense than a one-off burst, since each season builds the audience data and past-buyer list that should make the next one cheaper to reach.

Does media budget sit inside the retainer?+

Media budget sits on top of any retainer and depends entirely on your capacity and ticket price, and we will tell you plainly if the numbers do not support a paid campaign at all.

What happens to my budget if a session sells out?+

We stop spending on it the same day. Sold out sessions get excluded or paused, and the remaining budget shifts to the sessions that still have seats. This is an easy part of event marketing to miss, and it is one of the first things we set up so it does not depend on someone remembering.

Can I just send ads straight to my ticketing provider?+

You can, and sometimes it is the right call for a single night show. Often it costs you money, because you lose control of the page, the tracking and the mobile experience at the exact point people decide. We will look at your ticketing platform and tell you honestly whether a dedicated landing page in front of it is worth building for your event.

Do you work with festivals and multi-date seasons, or only single shows?+

Both. Multi-date seasons are actually easier to run well, because each date gives us a separate inventory position to manage and the audience data compounds across the season.

Is a festival run differently to a multi-date season?+

Festivals need more care around which acts or days do the selling, so we start by working out which part of the line-up is carrying demand.

How will I know the advertising is actually selling tickets?+

We report on tickets and revenue, not impressions. That means conversion tracking has to be right before the campaign starts, including the handover to your ticketing platform, which is a common place for event tracking to break.

What happens if my setup cannot measure ticket sales?+

If we cannot measure sales properly on your setup, we will tell you that first and fix it rather than report on numbers neither of us can trust.

Tell us about the event

Send us the event, the dates and the ticket target. We will come back with what we would run and when it needs to start. If you would rather talk it through, call us.

Call 0455 089 036

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Have a season to sell and a date that is not moving?

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