Do you remember what it felt like to have a birthday party as a kid and be terrified that no one would show up? Hosting an event or being the guest of honor at one, is a vulnerable situation. Can you imagine spending time and money on what you think is a great event and having only a handful of people show up? The horror! That’s why it’s important to properly promote your events.
Events are one of the most effective way to promote your company, services and or products and perhaps, more importantly, to meet your target customers face to face. It’s just as important for your customers to know you as it is for you to know them and events are ideal promotional tools to accomplish that. In order to safeguard yourself from a potential event disaster, here are 5 ways for you to promote an event for your business.
Email Newsletter Marketing
If you’re already utilizing email newsletter marketing in your marketing mix, this is the first place you should go to publicize an event. You’ve got a ready-made audience of interested customers because they purposely gave you their contact information. This is the perfect audience to start to promote your event to.
Since your email list is used to receiving your email blasts, you’ll want to make the subject line of this particular email stand out as an obvious invitation. For inspiration, check out this blog post for ideas for event and invitation email subject lines. Your subject line should accomplish a number of things, including being obvious, creating a sense of urgency, getting the reader interested, and encouraging them to sign up for the event. You’ll also want to follow these general rules for email blasts to ensure your event email is as effective as it can be.
Create a Facebook Event
Another way to promote your event is to open it up to the public through a Facebook Event. When considering how to promote an event, look to resources you have at your fingertips. Chances are you have a company Facebook page so promote your event using Facebook’s event feature.
Not only is it FREE, but it’s incredibly wide reaching. Facebook events will also enable you to keep track of registrations, post event details, and announce any last minute changes.
Social Media Giveaways
Social media giveaways are an area in which you can get creative with event promotion. For example, run a repost and hashtag Instagram giveaway contest tied to your event. The participant would need to repost your event invitation, include the event hashtag, and tag a friend. In order to claim their prize they’d need to show up to the event. You could even throw in a grand prize to the person who shows up with the friend they tagged. Not only will you be increasing awareness around the event but those who participate in the giveaway contest are more likely to show up for their chance to win.
Eventbrite
Event planning tools like Eventbrite can be a lifesaver for small business owners. There can be a lot of balls in the air at any given time when putting events together and having a platform like Eventbrite to consolidate them is helpful. You can pull useful analytics from it and keep track of your budget, just to name a few key features. Another plus, they’ll promote your event on their local events page if you make it public which gives you extra promotion!
Hashtag Marketing
Hashtags are used to search and group specific topics. Coupling an event hashtag with other marketing strategies will help pull the conversation about your event together. For this to work it needs to be threaded throughout the campaign from beginning to end. This will make searching for information regarding the event that much easier for your followers. Be sure to include it in follow up correspondence, too. People will want to see if they were caught in any candid photos from the day or if you’re promoting valuable offers to attendees.
All of the suggestions we’ve laid out here are totally FREE and you’re not restricted to using just one at a time! What are you waiting for? Get started promoting your event now!
1 Comment
VERY GOOD ARTICLE. THANK YOU.