There have been a lot of conversations happening about what to do in terms of digital marketing if an event has to cancel or postpone. Additionally, there has been concern for those events that are still on the calendar. They are worried about building consumer confidence so that they continue to purchase tickets for an event in the third or fourth quarter.  To address this, our CEO Michael Bleau spoke with Josh Sturgeon, the Co-founder of digital marketing agency EmberTribe. You can listen to the full podcast below or read on for a preview.

Help From a Digital Marketing Agency

EmberTribe is a digital marketing agency focused on paid traffic channels. They have spent about $80 million to date on Facebook, Google, native advertising platforms, and pretty much anywhere paid ads exist. Their primary focus is turning those ads into sales leads for their clients. Some of their major clients include festivals and national event companies that put on bar crawl series.

The Good News

According to Josh, we are living in a time of unprecedented opportunity. Even if your event is postponed, has gone partially or fully virtual, there are a lot of opportunities. Cancelled events still need to be advertising to retain mind share for next year. EmberTribe is very in-tune with the state of paid advertising.  Fortunately, they have seen a 30% drop in the cost to reach people right now. That means that spending the same amount of money will reach 30% more people. For events, that means that their budget is going to stretch further than in a normal season. This is because most of these advertising platforms are auction environments. Imagine a massive auction where advertisers are bidding in real-time to reach their target audience.

Why It’s Happening

In recent times, the number of advertisers bidding has decreased. Many of the major players who spent a lot of money have dropped out. Advertisers were once spending hundreds of millions of dollars that previously raised the cost of ads on these platforms. Now they are not spending like they used to. That means the online paid advertising environment feels like it did back in 2014 when there was less competition. The efficiency in cost is the best it’s been in a while.

Google also just announced that they are rolling out an ad credit program to help customers during these hard times. Per their website the credit program will be available to: “Small and medium-sized businesses globally, who have spent with a Google Ads account in ten out of twelve months of 2019, and in January and/or February of this year. Eligible customers are those who advertised directly with us or through a partner, and adhere to our advertising policies.” Depending on your previous spend through Adwords, you may be able to do much of the advertising Josh recommends for free.

If you can believe it, this was all discussed in just the first five minutes of the podcast! Listen via the link above to gain even more insights. Josh and Michael discuss how events can take advantage of this good news. They also talk about how to increase lead generation for events whether their event has been canceled, postponed, or is taking place later this year. Grab your notebook, put your phone on do not disturb, and listen to it now. For more resources on how to market your event during the pandemic, be sure to check out our Spring Back Series: Handling Press and Marketing for Postponed Event.