and what to do about it.

Focusing on social media engagement stats can be antithetical to actually helping people show up in real life.

Because “engagement-based” social strategies encourage more digital time, and less real-world activity, they need to be evaluated carefully before doubling down on “data-driven” drivel that often obscures facts. After all, engagement is what social media does: keeps people on digital platforms (IE in a digital realm).

Real life visitors come from sincere, ongoing and appealing Impressions, Information, and Invitations. [skip to it]

Providing digital marketing for large scale events for over 20 years, I also want to caution owners, producers, and digital marketing folks about something: please know what field you really want to grow, then work toward that greater purpose while crafting your overall marketing strategy with a holistic view.

Engagement is not everything, in fact, to do “data-based engagement” well, many folks figured out becoming more divisive, snarky, challenging, trendy, unhinged¹ and pushy would grow those numbers. Think political social media antics of late. Yucky, right?

From my perspective, the social media culture appears to have cultivated too much outrage, opinion brokering, and more than dash of trolling. So I’m calling BS on this approach, and am instead suggesting a simpler one, that is more sincere, dignified, and respectful of your audience– the public.

Because “getting more engagement,” or “conversions,” is not equivalent to getting simpatico people to your event, or respects the sovereignty of everyone’s purchasing decisions and their multi-faceted choices.

So below I’ll illuminate my personal I I I approach. Also, please know, I’m making a big naming-styled deal about this, so you’ll hire me for a consultation and help me fund my website writing, art and travel habit.

Real, harmonious folks showing up in person: volunteering, and creating a positive shared space IS the point of public events. Not social media numbers.

And that happens IRL and can only be measured by simpatico visitors– and anecdotally – by customer service feedback about how easy and enjoyable the purchase – and arrival – experience was for them.

Many who interact vigorously on social media, do not get out much. If they did, they may not have time to do what they do behind a screen. Looking at engagement numbers can be skewed by housebound folks (not a bad thing, but remember what you are trying to do here) and the naturally introverted, or maybe, easily overwhelmed.

Also, measuring your marketing success solely against engagement and conversion metrics supports the growing monetary and informational wealth you give the social media giants, not always your team or your people.

Stand-alone metric-hawking hog

And in the last 10 years, SM has also become its own digital marketing specialty, with complicated platforms, financial integrations, paid and tracked ads, cross-company conversions, pixels, G4 events, SEO and multi-platform interactive tracking with loads of excitable young companies ready to sell you the social and tracking “gold.”

And success for workers in this field has come to be defined as

producing compelling content
getting more clicks
encouraging comments and shares
pushing for endorsements.
report-able statistics

And who wins EVERY time you focus your energy on any of the above? Social media wins. Only sometimes your client or team does. Only sometimes you do if you are an event like above.

The more you use Social Media for improving commerce, the more it also gets to:

record and aggregate yours and your customer’s data
cross-share data patterns from platform to platform, enriching buying habit portraits of you, and deepening the industry’s overall informational power
enhance the algorithm to sell to EVERYONE more stuff, and
quite likely, train AI.

If you are trying to sell out an in person event, you don’t necessarily need more clicks & comments on social media. That equals more folks in your digital landscape which is made of zeros and ones, not grass and sky and music.

You really want more people buying in advance you need to keep the energy of ‘welcome’ up all the way to your gate. To do this well you need to journalistically² depict the experience you provide, create a digital inundation of beautiful Impressions, then consistently Inform & Invite.

And, even if you don’t sell tickets at the gate, you need to communicate that they can in fact buy last minute online passes even in the parking lot.

And if you don’t have enough raving fans to sell out completely every year, you need to perpetually increase Impressions to bring more into the fold. (I hate to say the obvious, but members of core audiences do sometimes die).

And yes, you need to keep the language of attracting and welcoming sales up until the very last minute, even if you don’t sell gate tickets, and especially if you don’t always sell out far in advance³.

Data-driven marketing is a fancy catch phrase that every tech bro loves to love. But, what data really does is empower a new FIELD that may or may not translate as the right people coming to your event, which in my work, was often on an actual field (music fests, farms, and fundraising outdoor events).

EXPERT LEVEL TIP: If you don’t have all your platforms analyzed holistically, your DATA view may be dumb. What’s your overview on how you set up and review your stats around ticketing, email clicks, G4 events, website links, Meta ads, organic stats, special offer urls, pixels, surveys and other click-based metrics? If these platforms aren’t cross-connected in purposeful way, you may be missing “optimizing” of an entire path of how folks actually get to you, and why.

If you aren’t looking at how your audience FIRST heard about you and how many times they’ve come back, you’ll have no idea, really what your various digital marketing products are truly doing. Even if you have granular data on each silo.

PRO TIP: if any given content post contains an important link (like a buy now url) within the caption, you may receive HUGE sales from the post, but have terrible engagement stats. Think about it, if a real person can’t wait to attend, and clicks “out” of social media to buy your ticket, how often do you go back to then click or share that post?

Right, never.

This is why ongoing, relationship building via I I I is important, a dignified process, not a used-car salesman pushy one down some darn fuzzy dice-smelling funky funnel⁴.

To build an in-person event that supports true community interest in advance, so you can more consistently sell more tickets, you need to consider the ramifications of this approach, and constantly check it against the purpose of why you do what you do:

The I I I – Style of Selling Out Events^TM

With purposeful Top Level Funnel Focus, because most folks don’t like to be manipulated down into a pointy and pushy funnel of engagement.

I for Impressions

Load up loads of stories, posts, reels and related pages with GORGEOUS Impressions. So that whether they follow you or not, your visuals will keep popping up all over their digital landscape. Beautiful and/or visually stunning content will get seen and eventually clicked. Impressions matter, they are the “awareness” aspect of event marketing. Without awareness, you can’t grow your audience.
And you ALWAYS need to grow your audience.

I for Information

Make your ongoing content informative and respectful. Don’t assume everyone who follows you knows what you are about or how to succeed in your landscape. Tell them how, share the inside stories and give them a chance to make their own decisions.

Also, you can produce endless content by represent the many facets of your event like;

your happy guests (show diversity),
your product (traditional images of what you pay for, and what you get),
the “vibes” (beautiful images of the little things like closeups, environment, atmosphere, and emotional sense of things), and movement-centric imagery like dancing, panning and vectors.
vignettes (little visual passages of beauty as if you were caught up in that food, or a flower, or band’s guitar strap.) You know, for the close-looker⁵.
news and timelines (announcements about ticket status, weather, price changes, countdowns, product specials and deadlines.)
features and focus on key people in your organization, because they are everything to your success. Show them if they want to be seen.

I for Invitation

Words like welcome, you are invited, join us as a consistent, classy call to action after you pleasantly bombard their “feeds” with beauty, useful information, and multi-faceted views of what they can expect when they do join you.

Some folks will say yes immediately, but some folks need a few invites with proper information to arrive. No matter what, you have entered their consideration, which is step one for a thoughtful person’s purchase or just confirmation and training for an impulsive persons reactive buy.

You win, “they” win, and the gate remains open up until the last minute to accommodate those late to the party. THIS is how you sell out tickets and build a community that stands by you.

FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT ;)

Caveat and Nod: so, although one can rock a great account with spicy, saucy, exciting and like-begetting content (hats off to Wendy’s social media for this and I hope they get paid a mint for their creativity and writing), this kind of engagement may or may not result in folks buying anything. While I love Wendy’s social media, but I don’t buy burgers there, preferring instead Five Guys or local restaurants (where I don’t follow social at all). ↩︎
More on Jour nalistic Marketing. ↩︎
The B-level events I’m talking about here are A+ in service and experience, but the headliners aren’t always A list, so the events don’t always sell out instantly. So I’m explicitly talking about taking B-level sales to consistently selling out like the big guys. It takes years to make this happen. Start now. ↩︎
Forgive me for again trash-talking the funnel. I think we’re kind of done with this pushy and annoying approach and someone has to call it. The funnel seems to have birthed some kinds of online dynamic pricing, and I am 100% against dynamic pricing, unless you are giving low income folks high quality goods for free. Talk to me if you disagree. ↩︎
Remember the Seinfeld Episode about close talkers? Yeah, well close-lookers are thing too, but you probably don’t notice them because they are quiet. ↩︎