How to Sell More Tickets
A Guide for Marketing, Sales and Communication Teams in Live Ents, Events, Experiences, Arts and Culture
INTRODUCTION
If you work in marketing, sales, or communications for a ticketed live experience, you're measured on one thing: ticket sales. Not brand awareness for its own sake. Not engagement metrics. Not reach. Revenue. Tickets sold.
Yet there are several common mistakes that are easy to make when we're under pressure or lacking time; investing in conversion campaigns without first building awareness. Talking about themselves instead of why someone should attend. Treating marketing and ticketing as separate functions instead of aligned teams.
The result: lower-than-possible ticket sales, wasted marketing spend, poor brand awareness and frustrated bosses and clients.
Here's what's really happening. In the last 15 years, the breadth of experiences a customer can buy a ticket for has exploded exponentially. The leisure pound has never had to stretch further. And marketing, sales, comms, ticketing, and leadership teams working across West End theatres, regional theatres, heritage venues, attractions, concerts, comedy tours, immersive experiences, pop-up dining, family attractions, festivals, exhibitions, seasonal experiences, visitor attractions, and dozens of other sectors are all solving identical problems. Yet these teams rarely learn from each other. Knowledge stays siloed. Best practice doesn't travel between sectors. Teams feel under-valued and under-resourced. The pressure to sell tickets is higher than ever. The support to do it is fragmented.
This guide outlines a framework for positioning and selling tickets across all types of ticketed live experiences: theatre, attractions, museums, festivals, immersive experiences, and cultural venues. It's built on principles tested across multiple sectors, scaled to any budget, and focused on what actually moves the needle: ticket revenue. But more importantly, it's written for everyone who works in marketing, sales, box office, ticketing, copywriting, brand strategy, communications, partnerships, or leadership roles in experience businesses. Because the way to sell more tickets isn't isolation. It's understanding how successful marketers across the entire experience economy think and work.
Whether you're looking to increase ticket sales, understand experience marketing strategy, or build a ticket conversion funnel, this guide covers the frameworks that work.
IMPORTANT: This guide reflects proven approaches, but there are no guarantees in marketing. Results depend on your audience, offer, execution, and market conditions. Use these principles as a starting point, test, learn from the results, and adapt to your specific situation.
The Framework: Paid, Owned, Earned
To build revenue strategy for live experiences, you need to think about audience growth in three ways: Paid media, Owned channels, and Earned media. This isn't new marketing theory. It's how successful campaigns have worked for decades. But in experience marketing, we often skip the awareness phase and jump straight to conversion.
A solely conversion-focused campaign does the opposite of what you want. It limits reach, reduces eyeballs on your offer, and leaves revenue on the table. You need to build awareness first, then drive conversion. This requires all three channels working together.
Paid Media: Building Eyeballs
Paid media is where you buy attention. This includes paid social, display ads, search ads, OOH, broadcast media, influencer partnerships, and sponsorships. The goal here isn't immediate ticket sales (no matter how under pressure you may feel). It's reach. More specifically, it's moving people through a funnel.
Think of your audience in stages: Awareness (they don't know you exist), Interest (they've seen you and are curious), Desire (they want to attend), and Action (they buy the ticket). Most marketers get pushed into thinking paid media should jump straight to Action: 'Click here to buy tickets.' But if no one knows who you are, Action ads underperform dramatically. Instead, invest in building Awareness and Interest first.
Your paid media strategy should move people through this funnel:
AWARENESS + INTEREST (60-70% of paid budget)
Show your experience to people who haven't seen it yet. Use language that entertains, excites, and explains what they'll experience, not just telling them to buy. Focus on benefits and emotions: What will they feel? Who will they go with? What's unique about this experience? Why should they care? How can you help them imagine being there? Your creative assets should support this stage: cinematic footage, storytelling, atmosphere, lifestyle imagery. Copy should inspire, not sell. Consider how your assets and copy will differ from the next stage of the campaign.
DESIRE + ACTION (30-40% of paid budget)
Once you've built Awareness and Interest, retarget those people with Desire and Action messaging. Show them CTAs, pricing, availability, and urgency tactics. By this point, they probably know what you are. Now you're giving them the reasons to book. This is where FOMO (fear of missing out) and scarcity tactics become powerful: limited availability, countdown timers, 'only 10 tickets left,' early-bird pricing ending. Your creative assets should shift: product-focused, clear pricing, strong CTAs. Copy should be direct and action-oriented.
The exact budget split depends on your situation. But the principle is consistent: move people through the funnel. Build awareness first, desire second, action last. If your budget is small, this teaches you more about how to sell experiences than a large budget ever will. You learn to be disciplined with spend, to test what messaging and creative resonate at each stage, and to understand what actually moves tickets.
Owned Media: Extending the Conversation
Owned media is anything you control: your website, email list, social media following, and blog. This is where you own the relationship with your audience.
Many marketers treat owned media as a promotional channel. But its real value is different. Owned media is where you build customer lifetime value.
Don't ask for a customer’s data immediately as part of the purchase. That comes later, post conversion.
Use owned channels to keep engaging new and existing customers. Send content related to their experience. Share behind-the-scenes stories. Build anticipation. Then, after the event, ask for feedback and data. From there, fire campaigns at them for upcoming events and experiences. One ticket buyer today is repeat revenue tomorrow.
This is where email lists matter. Your email list is one of your most valuable assets. It's people who have already shown interest. Use it strategically: awareness content, event updates, exclusive offers, post-event engagement.
Earned Media: Credibility Through Others
Earned media is coverage and mentions you don't pay for directly: press coverage, word-of-mouth, social shares, and influencer mentions. You can't control it, but you can influence it.
Don't discount traditional earned media tactics. A review in a major publication, a feature in relevant media, or a mention from a trusted voice in your space carries weight that paid ads don't. It's credibility you didn't buy. That is crucial.
Build relationships with journalists, bloggers, and influencers in your space. Give them stories worth telling. Make your experience interesting to their audience, not just to people who already love your venue type.
Cross-Channel Principles for Selling More Tickets
1. LANGUAGE IS ENTERTAINMENT
Don't just describe your experience. Entertain people through your marketing. Make them feel what they'll feel. Use words that excite, that create anticipation, that help them imagine themselves there. Your marketing language is part of the brand promise.
2. TEST, LEARN, AND ADAPT
You don't need a massive budget or perfect strategy to start. Small budgets teach you more about what works than big ones. Test different messages, audiences, and offers. Track what moves tickets. Use your experience to inform the next campaign. This is how you build real, sustainable revenue growth.
3. RETARGETING IS YOUR ADVANTAGE
People rarely buy on the first touch. They need to see your experience multiple times, from different angles, before they buy. Use retargeting to show the same people different messages. Someone who saw your awareness ad should see conversion messaging next. Someone who visited your website but didn't buy should see a different version of why they should.
4. ALIGN YOUT TEAMS
Marketing and ticketing teams often work independently. Marketing builds awareness. Ticketing drives conversion. But ticket sales depend on both working together. Marketing needs to understand what ticketing can deliver. Ticketing needs to understand audience segmentation. Sales needs to know what messaging drives different audience types. Alignment across teams compounds results.
5. THINK BEYOND THE FIRST TICKET
Your first-time ticket buyer is the most valuable customer you'll ever acquire. Not because of that one ticket sale. Because of what they might buy next. Build systems to track and re-engage previous buyers. Calculate lifetime value. Plan campaigns for the season, not just the next show. Someone who came to your spring event might attend three more times this year. If you only focus on converting them once, you're leaving revenue on the table.
Ticketing Technology: Your Revenue Infrastructure
How you sell tickets matters as much as how you market them. Your ticketing system should support your revenue strategy. Choose a platform or partner that lets you:
Segment audiences and apply dynamic pricing based on demand
Retarget past buyers and email subscribers with personalized offers
Track data on what messaging, channels, and offers convert
Integrate with your marketing channels (email, ads, social)
Support flexible pricing strategies (early bird discounts, group rates, last-minute deals)
Build integrations with your owned channels (website, email, CRM)
Don't choose a ticketing system based on features you won't use. Choose based on your revenue strategy. If you need flexible pricing and audience segmentation, that's different from a platform designed purely for transactions. The right system becomes your competitive advantage.
Audience Segmentation and Positioning
Different people buy tickets for different reasons. A family buying for children's theatre has different motivations than a couple buying for an immersive experience. A tourist visiting a museum for the first time has different needs than a repeat visitor. Understanding these segments matters because it changes how you market and price.
Segment your audience. Give different messages to different groups. A family segment might respond to 'Make memories together.' A couples segment might respond to 'Something unique you can't find elsewhere.' A tourists segment might respond to 'A must-see experience.' Same experience, different language for different audiences.
This is where data becomes important. Track what works with which segments. Over time, you'll learn that certain messaging drives conversion in one group but not another. That certain channels reach specific demographics. That price sensitivity varies by segment. Let that data inform your strategy.
Converting Browsers to Ticket Buyers
Most people who visit your website or see your ads don't buy immediately. They browse. They consider. They wait. Conversion psychology is about removing barriers and creating urgency at each stage.
REMOVE FRICTION
Make buying tickets easy. Too many form fields, unclear pricing, or confusing navigation loses browsers. Every step toward the buy button should be obvious and straightforward.
CREATE URGENCY
People procrastinate. Limited-time pricing, countdown timers, and 'only 10 tickets left' messaging work because they create motivation to act now instead of later. But use this honestly. False urgency damages trust.
LEVERAGE SOCIAL PROOF
Show that others have bought and enjoyed. Reviews, testimonials, and photos from real attendees are powerful. They reduce the risk someone feels before buying.
Why Cross-Sector Knowledge Matters
If you're working on ticket sales for West End productions, regional theatre, immersive experiences, family attractions, museum exhibitions, concert tours, or any other type of live experience, you're solving problems that marketers in every other sector are solving too. Yet most teams work in isolation.
A Head of Marketing in theatre doesn't know what pricing strategies work in attractions. A ticketing specialist in festivals doesn't see what email sequences convert best in immersive experiences. A copywriter working on heritage venues never learns from the language that resonates in social gaming. The best practices that exist across the entire experience economy stay locked within single organizations.
This is the core problem On Sale Group was built to solve. Not through content, but through community. Through bringing together the people responsible for selling tickets across all these sectors, creating a space where they can learn from each other, test ideas together, and build confidence that they're not alone in the challenges they face.
Get Started: Your Revenue Strategy Starts Now
Selling more tickets doesn't require a perfect strategy or massive budget. It requires thinking through how awareness, conversion, and retention work together. It requires your teams aligned on one goal: ticket revenue. And it requires testing, learning, and adapting.
Start with one thing. If you don't have a clear awareness phase in your marketing, build one. If marketing and ticketing aren't aligned, set up a meeting. If you don't know your audience segments, spend a week analysing your ticket data. One change compounds.
Join the community. Attend On Sale Live in May, an annual gathering for the marketing, sales, ticketing, and comms professionals working across the experience economy. Meet peers solving identical challenges. Learn frameworks that travel across sectors. Share what works in your market and discover what works in theirs.
Between events, deepen your craft. The GIEM Experience Marketing Masterclasses deliver specialist, hands-on training in the frameworks, tactics, and commercial strategies that move ticket sales. Built for the people responsible for revenue. Delivered by practitioners who have done the work.
Written and published by Dawn Farrow’
ON SALE LIVE | onsale.live
The experience economy rewards those who share knowledge, not hoard it. The professionals selling out shows, growing audiences, and building sustainable revenue aren't working in isolation — they're learning from each other.
If you're ready to take the next step, join your peers at On Sale Live to learn this live. Still weighing up your options? Not sure which conference is right for you? And if one day a year isn't enough, build these skills year-round with The GIEM.
ABOUT ON SALE GROUP:
We built a commercial ecosystem for the experience economy marketing workforce. We work with professionals responsible for revenue across theatre, attractions, immersive experiences, festivals, exhibitions, and every other type of live experience. We believe ticket sales are measurable. Strategy is improvable. And your peers know things you need to know. We created three connected pillars: On Sale Live (annual conference), GIEM Experience Marketing Masterclasses (specialist training), and a growing community of senior marketing and sales leaders in the space. The flywheel works because we bring the knowledge out of silos and into a space where it can be shared, tested, and learned from.
ON SALE LIVE’26 | onsale.live