“I would have gone if I’d known about it.”
If you work in live event marketing, you’ve probably heard this one before. Usually, you hear it after the show is already over.
The extra frustrating part? The experience was advertised. The emails were opened. The social posts got comments. The website got visitors. The campaign ran, dammit! So what happened?!
Not enough people knew the event existed. That’s the awareness gap, and it can quietly become the biggest problem for event producers.
A 2026 Meta benchmark report backs this up. Acquisition costs are climbing industry-wide, and campaigns that lean exclusively on targeting fans already in decision-mode (i.e., bottom of funnel) are showing diminishing returns. Spread that same budget across the full funnel—meaning fans in the awareness, consideration, and decision phases—and marketing effectiveness jumps by as much as 91%.
Retargeting bottom-of-funnel fans usually posts the strongest return on ad spend (ROAS) on paper, and that number is exactly what convinces many event marketers to mistakenly focus almost entirely on this audience. However, this choice can inadvertently starve the top of the funnel.
Common Mistake: Relying Too Much on Retargeting To Sell Out The Event
People who've engaged with your event before are more likely to buy than someone seeing it for the first time. Retargeting them works, so it's tempting to keep feeding money into what's already working.
Here's the problem. As campaigns optimize for performance, the platform keeps finding more people who resemble whoever just converted. Budget drifts toward your warmest segments almost automatically. Call it warm audience gravity: the algorithm's built-in pull toward immediate conversions over long-term demand generation.
Warm audiences are finite. Once you've reached everyone in that pool, spending more on it just shows the same people the same ad more often. A campaign that looked great in week one starts looking soft in week four, and the instinct is to blame the creative or add a discount. The actual problem sits upstream of both: the bottom-of-funnel audience has depleted.
Meanwhile, the people who would have bought a ticket if they'd ever seen the ad are still out there, untouched, because the algorithm was never asked to go find them.
How to Know When You’ve Saturated Warm Audiences
Frequency, the number of times a target audience is shown an advertisement during a period of time, is one of the easiest ways to spot this happening. Once frequency climbs to 4-5x and sales are flat, you're paying to say the same thing to the same audience without the payoff.
That's your cue to shift.
A rising frequency isn't automatically a bad thing. Some audiences need to see an event multiple times before they're ready to buy, especially with a higher-priced ticket. However, when frequency keeps climbing while reach, audience, and sales growth flatten out, it's time to take a closer look; this is also when a higher cost-per-click (CPC) can arise.
The question should not be:
“How do we get these fans to actually convert?”
It should be:
“Who else needs to hear about this event to increase the potential for more sales?”
What Your New-to-Returning Visitor Ratio Says About Your Event Marketing Funnel
You have to look at the entire fan journey:
Awareness → Consideration → Decision
If you don’t fuel awareness, you're just running the same shrinking list of already-aware fans through the wringer.
Awareness spend is the supply line for your retargeting pool, not a phase you turn off once the campaign gets going. Cut it, and that pool shrinks because nothing is refilling it. That's why the two need to run in tandem for the life of the campaign, not in sequence.
You can watch this happen before it shows up in sales. GA4 (Google Analytics 4) splits your traffic into new and returning visitors. Pull that split over the life of the campaign. The industry benchmark for event and entertainment sites is a 15-25% return visitor rate, meaning a healthy campaign is still mostly meeting new people well into the flight. Creeping past that is more than loyalty; it's the same list circling back because nothing new is arriving.
Don't Wait Until Ticket Sales Stall
Here's where event marketing gets especially tricky. Awareness takes time. Someone who sees an event for the first time today may not buy a ticket today. They might see the ad. Then see it again and talk about it with a friend. Visit the website. Check their schedule. Compare ticket prices. And… finally… buy.
That journey takes time.
If you cut prospecting whenever it seems less efficient than retargeting, you may save money in the short term but create a much bigger problem later. By the time ticket sales slow down, it's often too late to build enough awareness from scratch.
How to Allocate Budget to Attract New Fans and Win Back Old Ones
Most event producers don't budget enough to do both. They pick one or the other, awareness or conversion, like choosing sugar or eggs for a cake and wondering why it tastes off. You need both, and you need enough of both, or the funnel doesn't work.
The split shifts depending on where your event is in its lifecycle. A brand-new event needs to lean heavily into awareness, somewhere in the 60-70% range. Once you've got a season or two of ticket buyers under your belt, that flips closer to a 45% awareness / 55% conversion baseline, since you've got a warm audience worth working.
And here's the thing worth sitting with: it will never be more expensive to get people's attention than it is the first time you ask for it. No pixel data yet, no repeat buyers, no shortcuts. Whatever you don't spend on awareness now doesn't disappear; it just shows up later as a challenging, more expensive problem.
Long story short: event producers must have enough budget to sufficiently reach both top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel; it can’t be one or the other.
How much should you spend to advertise your event? Check out BEM’s event advertising calculator.
Top-of-Funnel Marketing Tips and Tools for Live Events
Now that you know how important it is to protect a portion of your budget for attracting net-new audiences, how should you actually spend it to achieve that goal? As a starting point, consider the following:
New geographic markets
Affinity-based audiences
Fans of similar events
Lookalike audiences: audiences who look like your ticket buyers
Programmatic ads served on popular websites and apps visited by your ideal fans
Connected TV ads that appear on shows your fans enjoy
Streaming audio ads geared towards artists related to your event
There are some tools we frequently use to help reach new fans:
Bandsintown: claim/verify the artist or venue page, then use it to push the event directly to fans already following that artist.
GovX and Vet Tix: set up a discount code for military/first responders through their network. It's an easy add.
Reddit: find the city subreddit (r/nashville, etc.) and any artist/genre subreddits, and post the event there like a human, not an ad.
The right balance of audience targeting and channels will vary by event, market, and timeline, but prospecting shouldn’t simply receive whatever budget is left over.
The goal is simple: Keep bringing new potential fans into the funnel.
The Question Worth Asking
The next time you look at an event campaign, don't just ask:
“Are our ads converting?”
Ask:
“Are we reaching enough potential ticket buyers to create a larger pool to retarget?”
The goal isn't just to find the people most likely to buy a ticket; it's to find the people who could become ticket buyers and make sure they know there's a show worth seeing.
Sometimes the biggest missed opportunity isn't the person who didn't buy. It's the person who never knew they had the opportunity to buy in the first place.
