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Social media shake-up

With backlash against X and Meta, not to mention uncertainty around TikTok’s long-term future in the US, now could be a good time to make moves on Reddit and BlueSky.

AI sounding boards

Focus groups are helpful but incredibly resource-heavy. Here’s an AI alternative: build attendee personas, feed them into your AI tool of choice, and ask it to impersonate your audience and critique new event ideas.

Live streaming 2.0

Live streaming can unlock new audiences and sponsorship opportunities. Festivals like Tomorrowland are redefining it as a premium, standalone experience – using cinematic production, multi-angle views, and interactive features.

Back to the future

Whether we like it or not, nostalgia acts are selling out venues up and down the country. Capitalise on the trend by celebrating retro themes likely to resonate with your audience.

Plain text, flashy results

If your email marketing is missing the mark, try adding plain text emails to your mix. What you lose in fancy design is often made up in engagement, with plain text emails more likely to avoid spam filters and stand out in busy inboxes.

WhatsApp Business

Don’t sleep on WhatsApp. It’s the most widely used messaging app in the world and generally outperforms other marketing channels. With CM, you can use it to broadcast new events, highlight offers and collect feedback..

Leaky checkouts

Make 2025 the year you fix that leaky checkout flow. Create a branded ticket shop, set up abandoned cart reminders through WhatsApp or email, and offer upsells in the form of merch and food & drink to make it count.

The unstoppable rise of vox pops

Vox pops are everywhere on social right now, proving there’s an endless appetite for hearing from everyday people. Try interviewing attendees as they leave your event, and use the footage for organic social and paid ads.

Unexpected collabs

Out-of-the-box brand collabs (think Snoop Dogg at the Paris Olympics) can be a great way to expand your reach and build affinity with your attendees. Seek out quirky brands and influencers that align with your vibe.

Experiential websites

Make your website an extension of your event. Follow the example of Amnesia, who relaunched their site last year with a design that complements the feeling of stepping into their Ibizan superclub with bold colours and shape shifting graphics.

Trend-tracking

The best promoters have an instinct for what is going to pop off and when. But keep an eye, too, on tools like Google Trends, Exploding Topics and SparkToro. Their suggestions won’t always be relevant, but they’re handy reference points.

Ticket ‘drops’

Drop culture, increasingly seen in fashion and food & drink circles, can work for events, too. Try releasing a limited batch of tickets, or offer time-limited discounts, to build buzz and jumpstart sales.

Post-event perks

Round your event off and surprise and delight attendees with a post-event perk. This could be something as simple as a wrap-up of the event or an exclusive playlist created by the headliner.

Wearable RFID

RFID wristbands and badges are a game-changer, helping to streamline entry, enable cashless payments, and provide insights into how attendees move around your event. Expect the technology to become more prevalent this year.

Ownable data

As we’ve seen, algorithms can change on a whim and make it harder to reach your hard-earned audience. Guard against this by using platforms like CM that allow you to manage and export your data as you please.

Voice search

Optimising for Siri and Alexa is no longer just a nice to have – it’s essential. You can optimise for it by ensuring your event basics are formatted clearly and packaged as ‘structured data’ on your website.

In-event engagement

Don’t limit your comms journey to pre and post-event – keep in touch with your attendees during your event, too, with targeted push notifications and alerts. Event apps are great for this and straightforward to create.

Process post-event feedback with AI

Save yourself the job of manually sifting through post-event feedback and survey data. AI can process it at scale and be tasked to identify trends, audience sentiment and future curation opportunities.

The power of superfans

An event brand’s growth is often driven by a smaller, core group of repeat attendees. Identify who they are and make them feel valued by bringing them into curation and showering them with perks.

No more stranger danger

A surprising new trend is gaining momentum: events made for solo attendees. Jump on this by offering discounted solo passes, designated spaces to connect with strangers, and AI-powered matchmaking.

Niche fusion

Targeting niches has always been a smart way to build an audience. Now we are seeing the next wave of that – niche fusion, with promoters blending subcultures to create fresh, unexpected events. K-pop cooking class, anyone?

Pricing flexes

The rise of alternative pricing models such as pay-what-you-can, referral incentives, and subscription-based access offers a good lesson: a more flexible approach to ticketing can benefit both organisers and attendees.

Year-round engagement

In 2025, algorithms tend to reward brands that publish content all year-round. Even if you host one event a year, continuously repurpose content to stay visible and drive momentum for your next onsale.

Predictive analytics

A new breed of AI-assisted predictive analytics tools such as IBM Watson can help event organisers forecast demand, optimise pricing, and fine-tune messaging and marketing.

Standout content

In 2025, every business is a content business. To cut through, approach your content creation with a spirit of experimentation and creativity. It doesn’t need to be slick, but it does need to stand out.

Start with research

To build your personas, you need to source as many insights on your audience as possible. (If your event is completely new and you don’t have an audience, then your job is to validate your event concept with surveys and conversations with those likely to attend. Use those to build provisional personas that you can adapt over time.)

Start by inspecting your data (staying within GDPR regulations). With CM, you have complete ownership of your attendee data and – unlike other platforms – are free to access and export it at any time. This allows you to uncover the insights you need.

Start with these:

• Look for any demographic markers, such as age, location, and interests, to get a basic sense of who and where your audience are

• Analyse ticket purchasing patterns to understand when they are most likely to buy

• Identify repeat attendees and analyse what they have in common. Look for behavioural patterns to understand what drives their loyalty

• To get a sense of what messaging and content resonates, go through email marketing metrics and social media engagement rates

• If you have a website, drill down into your analytics. Pay particular attention to conversion paths – to see which content drives the most ticket sales – and where your traffic is coming from.

Complement your data findings with attendee feedback. Use post-event surveys to ask them how they heard about your event, and what they would like to see in the future. Hold 1:1 conversations with your most loyal attendees to understand more about their lifestyle and where your event fits in.

Finally, assess the landscape. Look at what competitors are doing, incorporate wider trends and developments, and match these against what your audience is looking for to identify opportunities.

Piece your personas together

Once the research phase is done, move on to building your personas. There are endless ways to do this but don’t get bogged down – ultimately, they just need to be digestible and actionable.

A well-presented Buyer Persona is one that is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and structured in a way that highlights key insights at a glance. People are more memorable than bullet points, so often you’ll see personas presented as fictional characters with some sort of cringey moniker – e.g. Fun-Seeking Fred.

You don’t need to do that, but you do need to present a clear picture of your typical attendees and give a sense of their deeper motivations. Tell a story: reveal their characters and traits, introduce a problem and demonstrate how your event solves that problem. They will be more memorable (and used) as a result.

Buyer personas fall down when they are too woolly. Guard against this by including insights that are precise and actionable.

Don’t say: “they are active on social media” – say: “they primarily engage with reels on TikTok and Instagram, and are particularly active on weekdays between 5.30 and 7.30pm.”

Don’t say: “they are passionate about live music” – say: “they value our event because they want to support the grassroots of live music and enjoy discovering new acts within their preferred genre of Amapiano.”

Don’t say: “they buy tickets through our website” – say: “they generally buy tickets through our website using a mobile device, with most transactions occurring 48-72 hours after receiving a promotional email. They are 75% more likely to convert when they have a discount code.”

Make your personas count

Buyer personas can help you land sponsors, fine-tune your marketing, and increase ticket sales – but only if they’re acted upon.

It is the curse of strategy documents to be presented and discussed once before being consigned to a shared drive never to be opened again. Avoid that fate by integrating your personas into your day-to-day.

Here are some ideas:

• Make it a team effort: If you have a team, involve them from the outset. They will bring observations to the table and feel more invested in the process as a result
  

• Bring them into your onboarding: When permanent or freelance team members join, familiarise them with your personas straightaway
  

• Regular recaps: Start every ideation or strategy meeting with a recap of your buyer personas to bring focus to the discussion. Pin them into Slack or Teams channels
  

• Adapt them over time: Set quarterly calendar reminders to review your personas, bringing in new attendee feedback and learnings.
  

Providing you have the right insights, it should be pretty clear as to how you act upon them. But, to wrap up, here are some common use cases:

• Demographics: use these to guide the location, timings, pricing and content of your event. For example, if you find that a lot of your most loyal attendees come from East London and your events are Central, you might want to consider introducing a more local event

• Promo: use your personas to craft a more targeted promo strategy. If you use TikTok to promote your event but your audience prefers IG, there’s your pivot. If they generally attend in large groups, create group discounts. If they tend to buy tickets on Sunday morning, send out your promo emails then

Partnerships: get a sense of what other content and brands your audience consume and then approach them for a collab. This will open up sponsorship and promo opportunities while building affinity with your attendees.

Leave attendees wanting more

What happens at the end of a meal at a high-end restaurant? Usually they give you some kind of parting gift – a sweet treat to send you away with positive feelings about the experience. It’s a simple psychological trick and one you can apply to your own event.

Platforms such as CM.com make it easy to send opted-in attendees a post-event perk. If you run a music event or festival, consider sending an exclusive playlist curated by the headliner, an NFT of the setlist, or special edition merch (which you can sell through your CM.com ticket shop) themed around the gig. If you’ve hosted a workshop, send attendees away with audio from the event or a breakdown of the key takeaways.
On social media, publish wrap-up reels or image galleries that will be engaged with and shared. You want to induce positive memories in the people that did attend – and a feeling of FOMO among those that didn’t.

Find other ways to engage

As an event organiser, it pays to build a year-round relationship with your fans – so that when you do have something to promote you’re not starting from scratch.

As boring as it might sound, this starts with having a good handle on data. With CM.com, you take complete ownership of your data and are free to segment it as you wish. This makes it easy to build automated welcome flows, birthday emails and regular newsletters – which can help you keep up momentum in fallow periods. And unlike many other ticketing platforms, you can import opted-in email addresses from elsewhere – your website, for example.

Content remains king but make sure to tailor it to your audience. Using analytics from the platform and survey data, get a feel for their preferences. What topics most interest them? Where do they hang out online? How often do they want to hear from you?

Then, look to build an always-on, cross-channel content plan with a few repeatable formats (monthly playlists, behind-the-scenes reels, artist Q&As) that takes all that into account. This could be as light-touch as sharing the odd meme related to specific topics on Instagram, or as involved as curating a weekly email newsletter series that features original interviews with artists your fans are likely to be interested in.

If you’re struggling to find or create compelling content from elsewhere, don’t be afraid to take them behind the curtain into your experiences as an event creator. In 2024, event brands or venues that are able to connect with their fans on a deeper level tend to win out. You don’t need slick, stylised content to compete.

Get ahead of the onsale

In the lifecycle of an event, there are two crucial stages – the moment tickets go on-sale and the week leading up to the event. Most promoters make the latter count, it’s those that are able to master the on-sale that really get ahead.

What makes a good on-sale? Clearly, you need to create as big a splash as possible and generate an initial surge of ticket sales and interest. The more people that know about your event early on, the more exponential growth you will see as they tell their friends and so on. This doesn’t happen by accident – so use any downtime you have to build momentum.

Create presale content that evokes feelings of scarcity, intrigue or a combination of the two. Scarcity marketing works because it creates a sense of urgency in the mind of the consumer. You might achieve this by communicating well before the launch that there will be a limited set of early-bird tickets available, or by including merch with each of the first x number of tickets sold.

Intrigue your audience with cryptic Tik-Toks or emails that tease the event’s content or line-up. Embed countdowns into your posts and stories. If it feels right for your event, use guerrilla marketing tactics to get people talking.

And be creative. Because while you don’t have the instant gratification of ticket sales in the off-season, what you do have is the space to figure out how you’re going to do things bigger and better next time.