Have you ever wondered why the Eventbrite app is so popular, yet so many people complain about it? And if the web page gives so many people difficulties, why are people still using it? That was our question, and we decided to investigate. If you’ve been thinking about using the Eventbrite app to buy tickets, read ahead to get the lowdown on how it works- and what better alternatives are on the horizon.
What Is Eventbrite, and How Does It Work?
Eventbrite is essentially a ticketing platform used to sell tickets. It can be accessed on the web or by downloading the app, and its system helps event planners manage events. It provides them with platforms for standard registration. If you’re an attendee, Eventbrite has a dashboard that gives you limited information about other attendees in the months before the event takes place. The web page also gives you the ability to share the event you’re attending on multiple social media platforms. For event managers, there’s a “reporter” feature that generates suggestions on which social media pages would be the best fit to advertise your event. While this kind of personalization can be helpful for event managers, the personalization ends there. If you’re an attendee and want to interact with other attendees and share information before the event, you have to do it on social media pages where the event is also posted. The Eventbrite app doesn’t give event managers any information on how to leverage the social media pages they recommend; it simply makes the suggestion.
What Eventbrite Isn’t (and What It Doesn’t Do)
So if you didn’t before, now you have an idea of what Eventbrite does do. What doesn’t it do? Well, first of all, its system doesn’t support much interaction between event planners and attendees (or attendees with one another, for that matter). That’s a really big deal, as interaction is probably the biggest trend in event planning right now. Consider the amount of tech personalization that exists in most people’s everyday life. Voice assistants not only answer questions but make suggestions; virtual events not only give people a window into an experience from the comfort of home but allow them to interactively participate in them. If that’s what people can expect in their daily lives, imagine what they expect from events, which are seen as special experiences. Eventbrite is one of the most sophisticated ticketing platforms. But that’s just what it is- a ticket selling platform. It doesn’t curate the type of customized, interactive experience people ideally want before attending the event. Nothing about Eventbrite’s system helps create a personal connection with attendees before, during, or after the event. And if there’s anything attendees and consumers of all kinds want right now, it’s to attend events that create a unique, personal connection with them.
The Eventbrite App Doesn’t Personalize the Attendee’s Experience
Eventbrite events often get lost in the crowd of thousands of other events. So, when people do a non-specific search for a certain kind of event, such as “music festivals near me”, they are flooded with options. It’s not only overwhelming, but so many events elude searches that yours is likely to fade into the background. On top of that, Eventbrite brands itself through every event created by a user. Not only is each event posted in the signature orange color of the brand, but their logo is advertised on all event pages. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can really dilute your events. Event planners put so much hard work into designing unique promotions that give their brand character and make them stand out from everyone else. Graphics and visuals are an important part of every well-executed event promotion. If all event pages look virtually the same, they’re likely to get lost in the crowd of countless other events of its kind- or of any kind, for that matter. So even if your event sells out and rakes in great revenue, using Eventbrite still means you’ll lose out on so many opportunities to brand yourself and promote your business. And that’s a loss that many brands just can’t afford.
If your event features a VIP experience, which many of them do, you stand to potentially lose hundreds of attendees. Because searches yield such broad results and event pages all look essentially the same, so many people never come across your event. Those who do come across it might click away from it at first sight- not because it’s not interesting or unique, but because it doesn’t look very different from other, similar events. Generally speaking, people don’t have a lot of time on their hands and comparing hundreds of events that look the same just isn’t doable.
The Eventbrite App Doesn’t Reach Niche Audiences
When promoting an event, especially a B2B event, you want to reach niche audiences. Your sales team needs to know which target audiences it needs to be engaging. The Eventbrite app, which limits your ability to personalize events, doesn’t help you achieve that goal. In fact, it seriously limits your audience by making everyone who registers for an event sign up to become an Eventbrite user. Not everyone wants to do that, so using Eventbrite means you’re actually filtering out audiences rather than targeting specific ones! Also, those who do join up have a much greater chance of using the Eventbrite as their event platform in the future. People figure it saves time and effort to rely on the same system for the duration, never realizing that there are better options. And Eventbrite promotes their brand through your event, mixing it in with countless others. This means more than meets the eye. You can essentially lose your customer base, along with who-knows-how-many potential new ones.
The Eventbrite App Doesn’t Help You Track Your Brand’s Success
The promotional plan for your event should begin weeks before the invite and extend through to post-event follow-up. As you probably already know, following up after your event happens is one of the most important parts of event promotion. You should follow up by setting up surveys with open-ended questions, sending personalized emails about future events, and advertising discounts for early bird or VIP registrars, you’re maintaining a relationship with your attendees. The data from follow-up surveys is invaluable. It tells you what your attendees liked and disliked about your event and gives them some control over the agenda of your future events. It opens a conversation in which your attendees can share ideas about the future of your brand and feel heard by you. Follow-up also gives you the demographic information you need to attract niche audiences, and effectively build brand loyalty.
If your event is an individual one and you’re not looking to promote your brand through it, Eventbrite could work for you. But for everyone else, it doesn’t give you the ability to track your audience and continually adapt based on attendee feedback. The Eventbrite app doesn’t provide event managers with a comprehensive system that measures the success of multiple events over time. It misses the nuances of information that can be gleaned from tracking your audience before, during, and after your event takes place. Its system simply doesn’t support the marketing strategies you rely on to build your brand. Measuring ROI becomes a virtual nightmare. You need detailed information about how your marketing strategies are helping your brand achieve its unique goals for your event. While some of these goals become standard over time, others will change to adapt to an evolving audience. No customer base stays the same all the time, and event planners need a system that helps them glean both straightforward and nuanced information.
Technical Difficulties
Let’s get technical for a minute. Eventbrite makes it difficult, if not impossible, to connect your event data to your CRM or marketing automation platform. You’re often required to use Eventbrite plug-ins, which are known to frustrate marketing teams, who are challenged to fit detailed strategies into the app. Again, a disadvantage when it comes to cultivating niche audiences. Seeing a pattern here?
Another important part of event strategizing is the ability to incentivize your sales team and other staff. The Eventbrite app has no tools that allow you to leverage giveaways, discounts, or other benefits that motivate your sales team to perform at its best. As you know, your sales team essentially operates your promotional plan. You rely on your sales team to facilitate thorough follow-ups in a personalized manner, and you want them to do this on time. If their motivation is low, they might do a poorer job than they’re capable of without even realizing it. You need to be able to track sales to know who did what, and who needs improvement. It’s part of developing your team and tracking your success as a brand.
Get People Making Plans- and Talking About Them
The good news is that a solution is in the making. Our upcoming social media app, Plans, seamlessly combines social media with event planning at its best. Designed to cultivate quality experiences rather than images, Plans gives both event managers and attendees the highly personalized experience they won’t get with Eventbrite. With our app, events populate your newsfeed based on the shared interests of you and the friends you add. Our platform gives users the option to add friends, creating individual connections rather than just joining groups (like with Meetup). When you select individual friends with whom you share much in common, you’re personalizing your newsfeed at a new, unprecedented level. With most other social media tools or event platforms, events are suggested to you based on much broader, less specific personalized information. Think of it this way: Are you more likely to be interested in the events your friends are into, or events that virtual strangers like? We thought so!
This is good news for event managers as well as attendees. B2B events, which are meant to build and expand upon customer reach, will benefit immensely (and measurably) from the Plans app. And because Plans builds personal connections between attendees, if people loved your event, they’ll be talking about it. Even in the presence of so many new technologies that seem to evolve by the day, word of mouth is still one of the most important marketing tools. Whether you’re looking to optimally promote your event or find events you love, you’ll want to stay tuned for our launch date. We can’t wait to share our Plans with you!