If you are trying to build awareness and registrations for your event, promotion needs to be a key part of your strategy. Between social media, websites, emails, Google ads, Facebook ads, billboards, and paper advertisements, knowing where to begin can seem like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Don’t worry, with this quick guide you’ll soon know where to start, and which event promotion tactics fit best with your campaign.
Effective Event Promotion
Without a doubt, the cornerstone of effective event promotion is a coordinated campaign across different marketing channels. For example, if you need a handyman in your area, which one would you call, the one you saw on a craigslist ad once, or the one you saw on park benches, in Facebook ads, and at the top listing of Google?
First you need to identify your target audience and find out where to reach them. If it’s a local event, try putting up local ads, locally-targeted Facebook ads, or conduct a door-to-door campaign. For events focused around a specific interest, try doing interest-targeted Facebook ads, sponsored posts on relevant blogs, and engaging influencers in your niche.
Get Your Team Aligned
The next important step is to get your team aligned behind your event promotion strategy. One way to do that is through promotion codes: unique codes that are given to each employee for them to distribute. Each of these codes will track how many sales each person gets, allowing you to create a leaderboard or competition within your organization. Then, give the winners a prize to incentivize them to promote the event. Pro Tip: you can even provide promo codes to your attendees to have them promote the event as well.
It’s also a good idea to have your creative team make social banners, images, and videos that your employees can share on their social accounts. Your employees are often your biggest fans, use them to leverage their social networks and get tons of publicity for free!
Promotional Content
There are tons of great content ideas that you can implement for your next event. For example, you can write a monthly newsletter, start a video content series, and make blog posts about your event. Having ongoing content updates gives your fans and employees something to look forward to and share with their friends. Remember to also email your list consistently (a few times a week, at least) and to reuse content from previous years. Videos, images, and quotes are all great things to reuse and get people excited about your event, so use them!
Follow just a few of these tips and your event attendance is going to skyrocket.
