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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.

Advanced analytics

There are endless ways to cut and splice your data to find those little nuggets of insight that will help you grow your event. And now thanks to AI, you don’t need to be an Excel whizz to break it down and spot patterns.

What you do need is a platform – like CM – that gives you full control over your data. Because while almost all ticketing sites allow you to natively access analytics, and tout this as a selling point, a large proportion of them also make it difficult to export that data and use it elsewhere. In other words, they let you into the showroom but never actually hand over the keys.

And that’s a problem.

Because, the real value of attendee data comes when it is combined with insights from other channels (e.g. website analytics) and applied to find answers to deeper questions, such as: Which social media channel drove the most sales? What has been the highest-converting event description? What distinguishes repeat attendees from people that come once and never again? Attendee data that is easy to access is the first step towards that.

Powered-up promo

Promotion is tough. Long-term success hinges on growing your audience with each event and honing your targeting, messaging and personalisation to better engage attendees. Owning your data makes this much easier, reducing your reliance on algorithms and time-consuming marketing tasks.

At the very least, every event should be seen as an opportunity to expand your database and make the next promo cycle easier. Let’s say 25% of your sales come from your mailing list – grow your database by 15% each time you promote an event (using sign-up incentives during checkout or on-site tactics), and in theory your sales from that one channel will grow exponentially.

The problem is that unlike CM, which offers integrated marketing and ticketing, many platforms lack advanced email marketing features. And yet when promoters attempt to export data across to their platform of choice they are met with an overly restrictive and lengthy process.

This also limits how effectively you can target your audience. Clean, accessible data makes things simpler when it comes to building more sophisticated or personalised campaigns. You can easily segment attendees based on previous purchases, interests, or engagement levels, and create tailored welcome flows for different groups. This kind of targeted marketing generally leads to higher engagement, more ticket sales, and an overall better attendee experience.

More trust, less competition

The other element to consider in all of this is your attendees themselves. Data privacy is a growing concern and your attendees will likely want to know that their personal information is secure and not being passed along to shadowy third parties.

By maintaining control over your data, you can create a privacy policy and give them explicit assurance that their details won’t be sold off or shared with third parties. It’s a small thing, but one that could make you seem a more trustworthy and responsible event promoter as a result.

On the flipside of this, the recycling of attendee data can actually harm your event. As an example of how this might happen, let’s imagine you run a music event in a small town where competition is fierce. You've spent years building an audience, gathering email addresses, and pushing out content. Now, imagine the platform you're using promotes a rival event to your audience based on their demographic markers – which happens. That competitor now stands to benefit from all of your hard work.

With CM your attendee data stays with you. No competing events are marketed to your audience, and due to the integrated nature of the platform you are free to shape your attendee comms as you wish. Which, given the immense hard work and creativity that goes into promoting events, is the way it should be.