Top 5 Social Tactics for Marketing Your Event Online

 

Events offer a unique opportunity to raise awareness of your brand, build solid relationships with your customers as well as putting your company’s personality out there.  In order to make your event as memorable as possible it’s critical to apply serious effort to marketing your event.  This begins with setting specific goals detailing how you wish the event to impact your business.  When promoted and executed well events have the power to create a positive and lasting impression of all that your company embodies and all that it can deliver, so it’s important to think carefully and strategically about how to maximise results.

We’re all aware of the importance of social media and online networking for businesses.  The main purpose of doing so is to connect with your prospects and share valuable information about your products and services.  The objective for any small business is to spend less and gain more from their marketing and there are several ways to achieve this when promoting an event online.  Firstly, prior to launching any online campaign ensure you have the fundamental details established, including the event name, event date and time, the event venue and the event hashtag.

Before you begin promoting your event it’s important to create a fan base for your business.  Without a fan base, promoting the event successfully will be more challenging. The job you are doing becomes more difficult since you have to promote your business, products or services, raise awareness and market the event you’re planning to host all at the same time.

One secret of events marketing is to ensure the campaign focuses on the event in particular rather than other information about your company. Therefore, have your accounts ready and active long before the event campaign, have a well-developed and attractive website with detailed content and an email list. Ensure any online campaigns you run commence in plenty of time as this will give you time to promote it widely as well as giving your attendees enough time to prepare for it.

Top tip: Just prior to starting a campaign, ensure all preparations are complete and confirmed. Making alterations after the campaign has begun may result in potential attendees changing their minds.

Here are 5 ways to successfully promote or market your event online:

1. Facebook

If you do not already have one create a Facebook page for your company.  On the page, create an event.  An event is more or less like a page but specifically for event promotion.  On this page, you can describe the event, give details of the date, time and venue, invite people and view the number of people who accept your invitation. If you don’t mind spending a coin or two, you can advertise with Facebook for around $5 and reach over 1,000 people a day. The good thing about Facebook adverts is that you can select the amount that favours your budget.  Ensure you have some quality images for the event and post them alongside your content which should be succinct.

Ensure that you also have a professionally designed cover photo for your business and event page and a professionally designed flyer or banner for either the advert or for a normal Facebook post.

Top tip: Post at least twice each day on the events page. Stay online throughout the day to respond to questions from followers and attendees. Post the link to the page that holds all event information -preferably the landing page.

2. Twitter

Follow big event companies and event planners in your area.  Post the flyer and content you designed for Facebook on Twitter and don’t forget to include the event hashtag and a link to the location (online) where those interested can access further information on the event. Use Bitly to shorten your link.

Top tip: Within the maximum 280 character limit, make sure you capture the most exciting aspects of the event and its purpose, make it punchy and easily viral.

Your tweet may look like this for example:

(After flyer attachment) #CouplesRally at #London this October 15th. #CouplesEvents @AmyWoods Thank you for the amazing tips @FionaPlanner bitly.com/rally.

#CouplesRally is your event hashtag, #CouplesEvents is a famous hashtag related to your event, @AmyWoods is your event planner, @FionaPlanner is a famous planner with a massive following and bitly.com/rally is a shortened link to the location where readers can find more information about the event. This tactic will reach more people on twitter. It will ensure you reach all those who have used the hashtags and their followers, you will reach your planner and his/her followers, the famous planner and his/her followers as well as give them a link that re-directs them to your event info. You can pin the post on your Twitter wall and continue posting using this tactic right up until the event date.

3. Landing page

This is an attractively designed web page that acts as an advertisement for your event.  Ensure that the focus of the page is the needs of your event’s attendees and not you and your business, why they should care and how the event will impact them.  A landing page is best since it focuses solely on the event itself.   You do not wish for potential sign ups to get distracted by other features of your website and forget why they arrived there in the first place.  The page absolutely must have a call to action, whether it’s online registration, buying tickets or reserving tables.

4. The business website

The best way of using your business website to help promote your event is by blogging about it.  You can then post excerpts from the blog post across your social media platforms.  It’s also worth creating a website banner and displaying it in the sidebar of each page on your site, so as to increase visibility of the event.

5. Email Marketing

An email list is a list of people who have submitted their email addresses to your website for daily, weekly or monthly newsletters. These newsletters provide you with a way of communicating with your readers regularly to ensure they are kept well informed of any news or developments.  These will of course be extremely useful for spreading the word about your event and generating discussions around it.  Ensure you add a sign up form to your landing page.   You can use this method to send regular reminders and updates about the event.

It’s certainly worth using other social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Pinterest to promote your event in addition to WhatsApp if you have a business group to share with.  You can create an event promotions video and post it on YouTube or even a slideshow on Slideshare.

On the day/night

Gain as much feedback as possible from your attendees and take plenty of photos of the attendees, the planning team and random photos as the event proceeds. Post these across your social media platforms during the event so it resembles a live stream.  Ensure that one of your representatives remains online for the duration to respond to comments and queries. This tactic will lead to a higher level of momentum and following for your business.

Post event

Have some of the best photos edited and collect testimonials from attendees.  You could send out a feedback survey using Survey Monkey for example.  Make an effort to collect your attendees email addresses or provide guidance on joining your business email list. Post the photos and testimonials on social media and on your business website.

Bonus Tip Remember that how efficient you are in applying these strategies will affect how successful you are in promoting future events.   Make good use of the online following you accumulated during your event promotion process to boost how well you promote other products and services for your business and continue to maintain consistent communication with your followers and readers.

If you’re interested in outsourcing some of your event management and event marketing activity please contact me here.