Case study highlights:

It’s no secret: the best views in Sydney are from the harbour. With disco tunes pumping and cocktails in hand, Yeah Buoy’s party passengers are treated to spectacular Sydney sunsets that fade to starlight, all from the vantage point of a three-level, 39-metre cruiser. Yeah Buoy bills its events like a ‘floating nightclub’ and its cruises make for a truly unique party. 

“Imagine having three levels of sound with DJs and this ever-changing scenery around you,” says Calvin Engelen, director of Yeah Buoy.

“One minute you’re under Sydney Harbour Bridge, the next minute you’re looking at the Opera House, and the next minute you’re looking at some house in Vaucluse. “You’re outdoors, seeing the stars at some points…and then you’re back under the bridge.”

Engelen founded Yeah Buoy in 2018, alongside his current business partner Darrell Tester, while at university and working as a nightclub event promoter on the side. When they (along with a third, former business partner) decided to take the party onto the water, they found plenty of locals keen to take the plunge. 

“We sold that event out with two weeks to go,” Engelen says. “Then we just went from strength to strength. That first year we did about six events and the following year I think we did 20…last year we ran 120 events.”

Since launching in 2018, Yeah Buoy has used Eventbrite to help promote its unique brand of boat parties. As Yeah Buoy goes from strength to strength, Engelen reflects on the benefits he’s found from partnering with Eventbrite.

Using Collections to master a massive portfolio

Over the years, Yeah Buoy has grown big enough to warrant its own three-level, open-rooftop cruiser, Inception, which is equipped for events and promoters of all styles. Top of the list is the classic sunset cruise. “It’s very much about the music, the vibe, having a couple of drinks with your friends, and taking beautiful photos of the harbour,” Engelen says. 

Evening parties rage a little harder, shooting for more of a nightclub atmosphere with an unbeatable backdrop. “Sydney Harbour is beautiful at night,” Engelen says. “You find the Opera House lit up when you don’t expect it.”

Both event styles are endlessly tweaked to fit the season, with themed events like Halloween or Hawaiian dress-up, tie-ins with local festivals like lightshow VIVID, and public holiday specials for everything from New Year’s Day to mid-year long weekends.

To take this endless party program to Sydneysiders, Yeah Buoy uses Collections, sorting events into nearly a year’s worth of categories, making events accessible and easily plannable for partygoers.

“Driving to a collection page that has all the events allows people to plan birthdays, groups, getaways, or whatever,” Engelen says.

For Yeah Buoy, sifting events into appropriate categories across an extended time frame not only helps guests plan their parties but also means getting a leg up on sales before active marketing kicks in.

“I always say to people, if you’re getting at least 50-100 sales a week before releasing your event-specific marketing, you’re doing exceptionally well,” he says. “For example, we’ve got an event in mid-December that hasn’t started marketing but we’ve already sold 250 tickets. I don’t think we would have been able to do that if it wasn’t for putting the event out there on Collection pages and actually driving traffic. Otherwise people wouldn’t know about it.”

Using ‘easy, succinct’ Eventbrite promo codes

To keep sales and excitement ticking, Yeah Buoy incentivises potential attendees with Eventbrite promo codes. This might mean using the popularity of regular Yeah Buoy DJs and equipping them with discount codes for their fans, or tapping into some built-in sales events and pairing promo codes with an Eventbrite email campaign. 

“When we’re running big sales such as Black Friday we send out a blast through email and text,” Engelen says. “We might say, ‘Hey for the next 24 hours, grab 30% off your tickets’. So we’ll use a multitude of Eventbrite’s functionality – we might run one of the email campaigns or run it through our software and run a text with a multi-event promo code running to a collection page.”

As Engelen witnesses every day, attendees have their own motivations for climbing aboard. Part of Yeah Buoy’s promo code success story is its ability to tap into those specific occasions, whether it’s a birthday party, themed celebration or the chance to kick back with their preferred genre of music. Just like using Collections pages, this allows for some more targeted promotions.

“We can be quite specific. If we want to run a Halloween promo code only to the Halloween-themed events, we can,” Engelen says. “Because I’ve got multiple brands, they’re all Halloween-themed and people can choose. It’s just the ease of use so we’re not setting up all these individual promo codes with all these individual links, it’s just one promo code. It’s easy, succinct.”

Driving 23% of Yeah Buoy sales through Eventbrite

Engelen uses affiliate marketing and agencies to boost events alongside Eventbrite tools. Despite this, Engelen isn’t surprised to see that 23% of Yeah Buoy sales in 2023 came through Eventbrite. He chalks it up to Eventbrite’s consistently high Google rankings for event listings, even trumping Google Ad specialists.

“We’ve got an affiliate who runs Google ads for us and they complain to me everyday ‘we’re running ads but Eventbrite is always above us’ and we don’t even pay for that, it’s just something that goes with the software,” Engelen says. “That functionality where people are searching Yeah Buoy or ‘boat party’ or something and it might come up. People are searching and they’re finding what they want.”

For Engelen, Eventbrite’s in-built SEO mastery is just one element of the whole package that event creators can wield to build a strong online presence. “It’s these small little wins…2% here, 5% there and, before you know it, it’s 23%. And that’s significant.”