Making your New Year’s Eve event stand out from the crowd on one of the busiest nights of the year presents unique challenges. You’ll need strong marketing efforts to grab attention and entice attendees.

Planning ahead gives you an immediate advantage. Read on to discover how to get your New Year’s Eve promotions off to a rocking start.

1. Start planning now

The most successful New Year’s parties start by promoting months in advance with a website, social media presence, and online ticketing options. Planning ahead allows time for an organic buzz to spread and gives you ample time to track your data on ticket sales.

Using Eventbrite’s marketing tools puts an array of solutions at your fingertips to help you spread the word across social media channels and through direct email. Send customisable emails across your contact list, create branded event pages, and get personalised marketing plans — all aimed toward facilitating your NYE party marketing and promotion efforts. Music promoter Freq Group used our paid social ads to advertise their pre-NYE event and drive 24.1x return on ad spend. It’s a smart choice to put these tools to work for you!

2. Set your theme

Theming your New Year’s Eve event helps you stand out. Once you’ve selected a theme, make sure it’s incorporated into all aspects of your event. This includes decorations, marketing collateral, promotions, entertainment, and anywhere else you want to make an impression.

You want your theme to feel organic to the New Year’s Eve holiday — horror themes, for example, would feel out of place and make people think of a Halloween party. Instead, consider themes such as:

  • Disco
  • Masquerade
  • Pyjamas
  • Black and White Ball
  • Winter Wonderland
  • Roaring 20s (or 50s, 60s, 70s)
  • Glitter Party

3. Promote your party as a splurge

New Year’s Eve only happens once a year, and people love to dress up and make some memories. That means that the cost to attend your event is less important to guests, who tend to be interested more in one-of-a-kind experiences, pampering themselves, and the chance to see and be seen. Your marketing strategy should reflect this.

Put your event’s features and VIP experiences front and centre. If you have the resources to provide a premium experience, an upgraded ticket is the second most important ticket type after GA (general admission) for driving revenue. Not sure what to promote? Revellers are happy to pay more for things like:

  • Open bars
  • Free champagne
  • Artist lounge access
  • Premium restrooms
  • Fast, private entry (a huge perk in chilly December)
  • The option to reserve front-row seats

4. Make your party the convenient option

Who doesn’t love being able to quickly get to a location that doesn’t require expensive parking or multiple train changes? The fact is, people are more likely to attend your event if it’s easy for them to do so. Market your event in a way that highlights easy transportation options. You can also offer incentives for designated drivers, such as providing free non-alcoholic drinks or VIP access.

You might even consider renting your own bus and providing shuttles from a central, easy-to-find location. Decorate the bus and use it to reinforce your theme — for example, if disco is your theme, make sure the bus is blaring the Bee Gees. Serve sparkling cider in plastic flutes or coupes to get everyone in a celebratory mood.

5. Support your attendees’ New Year’s resolutions

Another way to make your event stand out is to bring attention to how your event supports attendees’ set goals. For many people, the new year is about new beginnings, with many committing to a new health regimen or other self-improvement programs.

Include fitness dancing, non-alcoholic cocktails, vegan and vegetarian cooking, or a room focused solely on mindfulness, whether it’s yoga lessons or a midnight meditation session. Even if your event is not focused entirely on health and wellbeing, simply offering alternatives lets you highlight one more feature in your marketing.

6. Write your best event description

Your event description will often be the deciding factor for many people; while imagery or a headline might initially grab attention, it’s the details that often prevail. You’ll want your event description to be accurate, exciting, and engaging so that people will want to come.

Also, try to incorporate search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices to get your event to rank higher on a search results page. If someone googles “New Year’s Eve party in Melbourne,” your nearby event should pop right up. If you ignore these techniques, your event might end up lost on page seven in the Google search results, cutting awareness of your event significantly. Use keywords you know people will search for and use a ticketing platform (hello, Eventbrite!) that Google trusts to help your chances. Repeating keywords in online descriptions and headings can improve search response as well, so make sure you understand how search engines work — and put them to work for you.

7. Motivate the early birds

Did you know that you can set up multiple ticket types within your ticketing platform? There are two general strategies with respect to ticketing, both of which bring distinct benefits to your event.

Offering an elevated tier of tickets, such as higher-priced VIP tickets that provide increased access or special deals and treats, can help create the impression that your event offers more than a competing New Year’s Eve event. It’s all about creating FOMO around the most exclusive New Year’s Eve parties.

Alternatively, discounts can motivate those who are interested but uncommitted to actually make the ticket purchase. For example, an early bird discount can woo back past attendees and put pressure on recipients to act by a certain date. You get to decide how long the early bird promotional price lasts and how much of a discount you want to offer attendees; then, advertise this ticket type to loyal fans or “on-the-fence” wafflers.

Another discount option is the coded discount. Targeted discounts give specific groups of attendees the option to purchase reduced-price tickets with a special promotional code. Use it to kick off a pre-sale for return event-goers, offer last-minute discounts, or extend your marketing efforts via exclusive partner discounts.

8. Advertise

There’s no getting around it: paid advertising can be effective, whether through traditional media or on social media. Not only does paid advertising increase your New Year’s Eve event’s visibility, but it also subtly conveys a certain legitimacy to your event.

Printed collateral, such as brochures, one-pagers, and flyers are ideal for dropping off on store counters and hanging up on community bulletin boards. Don’t forget, not all advertising requires a large budget — free event listings like you’ll find on Eventbrite are effective at spreading the word, too. You can even use our marketing tools to get the word out about your event on social media using targeted advertising.

Music event creator the Freq Group used Eventbrite to target Spotify listeners according to the genre of music they listen to. That meant that a five-day ad campaign was able to reach music fans with similar interests, resulting in ticket sales that amounted to a 24.1x return on their marketing spend. Not only that, but our algorithm automatically optimises your budget by adjusting your spend to the best-performing audience. Freq’s director of music Dan Hesson was even able to use Eventbrite to target people who had previously bought tickets from them, increasing the likelihood of sales conversions.

You might also consider engaging a social media influencer to promote your event. Give them custom discount codes they can distribute or let them offer special access to VIP ticket holders. This lets you track which promoters drive the most ticket sales and reward them in kind.

9. Work with sponsors and other vendors

Partnering with a sponsor can quickly double your marketing reach by engaging with your new partner’s customer base in addition to your own. When negotiating your sponsorship agreement, you might propose cross-promoting through social media channels to gain access to an expanded online community. For major brands with large social media followings, this can increase your event’s reach significantly.

Vendors can offer marketing opportunities, too. Some vendors may see value in promoting themselves as exclusive suppliers to a New Year’s Eve event, further spreading the word about your event to yet another customer base. Your event will seem more appealing when your advertising includes vendor brands that your attendees already know and appreciate. If you’ve hired musicians or a DJ, make sure they’re promoting the event on their socials — many artists can have loyal followings, so don’t be shy about taking advantage!

10. Use “buy now” buttons in your marketing

With the right marketing strategy, you can make it easy for people to buy tickets to your NYE event as soon as they see your promotion. Even if your promotions cross multiple platforms, it’s possible to simplify the purchasing process. When you use Eventbrite, you can place “buy now” buttons directly on Facebook as well as on other apps and websites where potential attendees search for cool events. This means ticket buyers aren’t redirected to as many slow-loading supporting websites, resulting in a cleaner, faster transaction for the customer. Leverage the “buy now” button the right way and watch your ticket sales soar.

11. Drive organic online search

When people want to find an event to attend, they’ll often open up a search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo to find what’s out there. Making sure these search engines can find your event is essential for your New Year’s marketing efforts to succeed.

Along with a careful event description to help your listing turn up in online searches, there are other SEO tips and tricks to help people discover your event. For example, Google trusts websites with a strong reputation such as Eventbrite, so it tends to put them higher up in the search results. You can also use links to other websites to make your listing more noticeable.

12. Wait for that sweet spot

It’s important to promote your event early to get it on the radar of search engines and real people — but you also have to be realistic about last-minute buyers. With Christmas and Hanukkah coming immediately before NYE, people often don’t get around to making their plans until just a few days before the big night. You want to be sure to still push your event in that week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Here are some expert ideas from our NYE party planning checklist to win over last-minute buyers:

  • Make sure your event is listed on social discovery sites like Eventbrite to get in front of local people looking for something to do.
  • Post FOMO-inducing photos on all your own social media platforms that show happy people having a blast.
  • Retarget! Eventbrite lets you use your email list to remind busy folks that your event is still an option for their NYE celebration.
  • Let them know tickets are more expensive at the door — but they still have time to buy online at a cheaper price!

13. Create clear marketing around cancellations

Avoid last-minute cancellations by making your return policy clear in your marketing materials. The policy should be easy to find on your website, event listings, and email marketing. It should also state whether ticket buyers can transfer their purchase to someone else. You can define which tickets are transferable — for instance, making VIP tickets transferable might make people less hesitant to buy them in the first place.

Whatever choices you make, be sure your policies are straightforward; that way, your customers will be fully aware of what restrictions are included in the ticket price when they make their purchases.

14. Use online ticketing tools

Gone are the days of tearing off a paper ticket from a thick roll at a ticket booth. These days, online tickets eliminate the need for paper. Instead, simply use electronic ticketing for quick and easy entry that doesn’t leave a mess of paper tickets strewn across the floor.

There’s also no need to remember to bring tickets — instead, guests simply hold up a QR code on their smartphone.

15. Use your data for a Happy New Year

Once your NYE event is a smash, the guests have gone, and the clean-up is complete, it’s time to analyse. What went right? What went wrong? What did people respond to most and least? A careful analysis can help you improve your events and grow your audience, so you want to get it right.

Fortunately, Eventbrite makes it easy to collect a wide range of data that answers many of your questions with the click of a mouse. Click-through rates, social impressions, and similar data can all be at your fingertips when you list your event on Eventbrite.

What are you waiting for? Get your NYE event listed and start getting the word out.