In a world that is becoming more digital every day, face to face, human interaction is incredibly important. Events are an amazing way to promote your brand, connect with your fans or audience and to have a lot of fun in the process! But how do you promote your event? A lot more goes into making your event a success than putting up a few flyers and waiting for the people to roll in. There are some proven steps you can take before, during and after your event to ensure maximum exposure, make people want to come and to ensure you capitalize on this momentum. Event promotion and tracking software like Eventuosity can be a great tool when it comes to tracking your attendees and being 100% prepared. Meetup.com is another platform that makes sign up easy as can be.
What to do beforehand?
First of all, you have to define what success means for your event. If the purpose of this event is simply to make money then success means a high number of paying attendees and sponsors, while keeping costs low. If the purpose is to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry or to create brand awareness then you want to maximize your audience and invest in having great quality at your event: Compelling presentations, helpful advice and training, or a great takeaway for your audience. For the latter it may be beneficial to make the event free and offset costs with a relevant sponsor, but only if that sponsorship will enhance the experience for your attendees.
Once you’ve defined what success means to your audience, you can then develop a list of key performance indicators that will allow you to break them down into actionable goals.
Make sign up as easy as possible. You want to eliminate any friction in this process so that your target audience doesn’t give up. This can be the difference between reaching your goals or not!
In all of your marketing materials for this event you must include the details and features of the event: What bands are playing and when? What great restaurant is catering the event? Etc. But you can’t stop there, you must communicate the benefit of attending this event. Will your attendees learn something great that will help them in their careers or life? Is it a great networking opportunity? Does their attendance support a great cause like education or medical research? Or, will they simply have a great time?
Event promotion while it is happening
Assuming you’ve go a great content marketing strategy already, photos, stories, videos and quotes from your event can be great sources of content.
Make sure a member of your team is in charge of taking pictures, getting quotes from attendees, recording exciting moments and documenting stories that can be used for your blog, newsletter and website! To ensure quality and maximum value, you should consider hiring a photographer or videographer to capture this stuff for you.
Another great tactic for promoting your event while its occurring is to live Tweet, live posts to Instagram or use Periscope to stream live video coverage. This is the first step in convincing those that couldn’t make it this year to come next year, or to your next event.
What to do after its over
This might seem counterintuitive. Why would you need to promote an event after its over? The answer to that question is that the promotion of your next event starts the minute this event ends. You want to capitalize on the momentum from the fun your attendees had and get them thinking about the next event already. This will give them time to mark it on their calendars, to become an evangelist or advocate for your event by recruiting their friends and to get the most out of your events.
Remember all that great content that your team compiled during the event?
This will also show those who didn’t attend everything they missed and will help drive attendance at the next one!
What event promotions have you tried? What worked, what didn’t?
