If you’ve never promoted one of your events before, you may be missing a golden opportunity to raise awareness about your organization. By including tactics like social media check-ins or email marketing, it’s possible to make your next event bigger and better than before. These tips for how to promote an event will guide you through what to do before, during and after a special occasion.
Pre-planning an Event
Your website can be used as a central location for all your event promotion. If you create a separate event page, potential attendees will have a spot to refer to for information. You can optimize your website by creating a compelling description, logo and call-to-action.
Since millennials and other age groups often use mobile phones for searching the web, event promoters are increasingly optimizing their web pages for mobile use.
Always remember to include social sharing links on your event web pages to allow your message to be amplified to larger audiences. Another recommended campaign enhancement is including QR codes on printed materials. They are used to direct potential attendees to a specific event web page.
Email Marketing
Event email marketing’s average open and click through rate of 25 to 40 percent is a golden opportunity for promoters.
But, just like websites, the success of event email marketing is dependent upon catering to the growing mobile audience. Emails with visual elements, lots of links and less jargon have a greater impact.
Another thing to remember for how to promote an event is that in email marketing timing is everything. Emailing in the morning can increase the click through rate by up to five percent, according to HubSpot.
Social Media
Social media marketing is perfect for promoting an event. This low-cost strategy can increase awareness with your target audience.
Your organization can capitalize on social networks like Facebook that allow users to share an update about an event they plan to attend. On Twitter, you can create a unique hashtag, which may be used to attract attention before, during and after the event occurs.
With options like Instagram, Periscope and more, social media is also a terrific medium for video promotion. By creating a pre-event video, your can gain even greater exposure on social media.
If you choose to use promotional discount codes, they will increase attendance while giving you the ability to track the web traffic.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO, which is an effective way to reach a larger audience online, can be harnessed to raise the awareness of your event.
Optimization is also essential to driving organic website traffic, because the first page of Google results receives 94 percent of clicks. A keyword strategy, a proven method for quickly improving your position on search engine results pages, works well with event marketing.
How to Promote an Event While it’s Going On
Now that you have a captive audience, it’s a perfect time to generate new leads for your business.
You can try marketing strategies, such as asking participants to fill in their contact information when they sign in.
Or better yet, you can capture more leads if you hold a simple contest. For example, you could make the price of entry a business card. With each entrant, your organization gains a new lead.
If you are still wondering how to promote an event best, understand that promotion doesn’t end when the event starts.
Since 65 percent of your attendees will post to social media during an event, you can enhance your event by making the most of this extra exposure.
One way to gain attention is to encourage participants to check-in on social media networks. Other possible promotional avenues include live tweeting from the event, posting photos in real time or uploading short videos.
The Post-Event Follow Up
Just because your event is over doesn’t mean your promotional work is done. It’s important to leverage the momentum from one gathering to the next.
Update your website and social accounts with pictures and descriptions after the event. Or, you could include a post-event survey, which would help inform future planning and capture new leads.
Finally, don’t forget to thank all of your attendees for their help making a great event even better. This presents yet another opportunity to continue what should be an ongoing conversation with new leads.
