The efforts and money you put into building any event go in vain if it does not reach the desired audience.
The success of any event would depend on its audience, and the engagement of your audience would depend on the success of your marketing campaign.
Make your marketing activities engaging to grab the attention of your target audience. This will make your event promotion ideas shine.
Creative event promotion ideas can help you stand out from the competition and boost your ticket sales growth.
We have curated creative event promotion ideas that can help you promote your event successfully.
But, planning an event without a vision is like driving a car into a wall! So, before event promotion comes “setting your goals for your event and giving your event an identity”.
So, let’s start with the basics i.e. setting your goals and objectives and event branding.
Setting goals and objectives for your event
Before planning for promotions of any event, you need to be very clear about the goals and objectives of your event.
“The more clear the event organizer is with their objectives, the better it would plan its event promotions.”
To get a clear vision you need to brainstorm on the following questions:
- What is your idea behind organizing this event?
- Who is your target audience?
- Why will your audience attend your event?
- Where can you find your audience?
- What incentive are you providing to your audience?
- How your event will be different from others?
Many event organizers don’t realize the importance of being clear about the event’s objective and enter into the trap of Marketing Myopia. So, promote what your audience is looking for.
Every event organizer should develop their promotional strategy in such a way as to reach a large audience, stimulate interest in them, remind them from time to time, and reinforce them to register for your event.
Enter into the shoes of the attendee when planning your event promotion strategy.
After getting clear on your goals, let’s give your event an identity.
Next comes Giving an identity to your event.
Once you are clear with your objectives and know your target audience, it is time to dive into event branding. It takes a lot of effort to design and implement your event promotion idea. But if carefully planned and executed, it can do wonders for you.
Event Branding
Color theme – The color theme of the event promotions must be consistent throughout the campaign.
Logo – The logo of the event should be such that the audience can associate the brand, as well as the event with it.
Title – The title of the event must always be in alignment with the theme of the event.
Tagline – Make sure to add a tagline to your event to convey what you are delivering.
Message – Convey a consistent message through all the promotion channels of the campaign.
Event Promotion Ideas During Different Phases of event
Your event promotions strategy would be divided into three stages – Pre-event promotions, promotions during the event, and post-event promotions.
Pre-Event – Event Promotion Ideas
Your event’s visibility and ticket sales depend on this stage. Any event’s success would depend on how well you engage with your audience before the event, giving them a reason to join. Following are some of the creative event promotion ideas –
1. Pre Event before the actual Event
One of the most creative ways to promote your event is to plan to organize different events before the actual event.
The events before the actual event are not just limited to contests but can be in the forms of –
- Short Instagram Live sessions by the guests or performers or virtual events
- Some social or fundraising events before the actual event
- A free educational course (depending on the type of event)
- Event promo in the form of a virtual tour
2. List your event on Event Discovery Platforms
Event Discovery platforms are a great way for every event organizer to start promoting their event. With features and promotional tools of event discovery platforms, your event has a high chance of getting maximum visibility.
To get your event discovered by millions and market them professionally, create your event on → Allevents.in
3. Strategizing ticket pricing
Strategizing your ticket pricing would definitely have an impact on your ticket sales and boost your income. Single-price ticketing might not be very effective for your event.
Every event organizer should try out different ticket pricing strategies such as –
- Early Bird Pricing
- Group Pricing
- Bundle Pricing
- VIP
- Ambassadors
You can try different ticket types with the help of event listing websites. Some of the event listing websites allow you to create multiple ticket types also in numerous currencies. Try to set your ticket price in a way that triggers a sense of urgency in the audience’s minds.
Here is the collection of event listing websites you can explore.
4. Advertising
You can use various mediums to advertise your upcoming event such as:
- Social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and many more
- Email marketing
- Event listing platforms
- Traditional advertising
Need help promoting your event? connect with our marketing experts.
5. Retargeting interested audiences
Have you experienced ads related to your search history? That’s what ad Retargeting is!
Retargeted ads average a CTR 10x higher than that of Display ads. – skai
Retargeting can be done in many ways. Be it google ad retargeting, social media ads, event listing platforms, email marketing, or push notifications.
Most of the methods to retarget your audience falls into the category of the paid form of marketing.
But with AllEvents you just need to List your event. We will help you retarget the audience interested in your event with the help of reminder emails and push notifications.
6. Leveraging social media platforms for pre-event promotion
Using various social media platforms for your event promotion has become vital in today’s world.
Social media is the best platform to promote your event. AllEvents users get most of their tickets sold through social media.
But it is imperative to change with changing social media trends. Creating reels on Instagram is the new trend. And for event promoters, reels can be a very effective way to promote your event.
Here are some most effective ways to use social media for event promotion.
- Posting visually appealing, and engaging content regularly.
- Creating authentic content such as behind-the-scenes and setting up event location. People like this type of content.
- Influencer marketing – Find an influencer who is suitable for promoting your event.
- Storytelling – The best way to interact with your audience is to tell them a story instead of marketing your event. Good stories would build great events.
In fact, the audience recalls stories 22 times more than just simple facts.
Event marketing is not about the tickets you sell but the story you tell.
Social media event promotion is a vast area, here is a complete guide you can follow to promote events on social media platforms.
7. Let your Mascot represent your Event
Mascots never go out of trend. A character representing your brand throughout the campaign is a very creative method to promote the event. For years, many brands have been successfully using mascots that represent their brand.
There are many benefits of using mascots to represent your event. The most important of all is the recall rate of the event. Constantly showcasing the mascots in all your posts would create a brand association.
The same mascots can be used for on-site marketing during the event.
8. Multiply reach by making your audience your event ambassadors
The best way of gaining trust along with promoting your event is to let your audience speak about your event. The best part about this promotional technique is that the attendee is motivated to attend your event and promote your event to his social circle. This is one of the low-cost yet effective techniques.
Engaging your audience by making them ambassadors could benefit you in the long run. Over time, you’ll be able to develop your community.
You can make your audience your ambassador in the following ways –
- Referral marketing – Event Ambassadors
- Featuring feedback and reviews of the past events
- Live Tweeting
- Geotagging filters on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat
With the above techniques, you can make your attendees post about your event, and in this way, you will e able to reach their contacts.
9. Keep curiosity as an element in your marketing campaign
Curiosity might kill the cat but will capture your potential attendees!
Humans have a tendency to find the answer to questions which is deliberately left unanswered for them. And this is an excellent way of marketing the event as well.
Marketing your event mysteriously can prove to be one of the most influential ways to promote an event. It can generate interest like no other form of marketing.
Event marketers can leverage mystery marketing in the following ways –
- Complete mystery event
- Secret events with the main event
- Create a mystery contest
- Secret gifts for the audience
- Unexpected guest appearance
Make your audience follow you on social media to resolve the mystery.
Mystery marketing can sometimes prove to have negative results when it is too mysterious. the audience for the event would like to have a complete idea about the event for which they are paying. But successful planning and execution of mystery marketing can do wonders for your event.
10. Innovative Invites
Invitations (via emails or through other channels) can be the first point of contact for your target audience. It is essential to engage your audience at the first point of contact.
Every event organizer must ensure that the impact of their invitation is impressive enough to generate a positive response. And in order to generate a long-lasting impression event organizers must create their invitations as innovative as possible.
With changing trends, email invitations have also evolved. HTML email templates have become very popular recently. You can design them according to the theme of your event and run your email marketing campaign with the same.
What if you can send email invitations to your attendees after setting up an event? Yes, that’s possible by setting up your event on AllEvents.
11. Gamify the process
Gamification of the process serves many purposes. It makes the audience more engaged with your content.
Some methods that you can apply to gamify the process is –
- Making the registration process in the form of a game
- Providing virtual badges and goodies to the attendees at the time of registration
- Allowing attendees to create their own dashboard and arranging some virtual games around the theme of the event and allotting scores to the participants
- Making a leader board in case you are using affiliate marketing
- Allowing your attendees to create their own avatars and share them on their social media handles
- Using testimonials in the form of Avatars which can be shown on your event website and other social media handles.
12. Promoting your event in other events
The primary purpose of any event marketing campaign is to find the right audience and target them to attend your event. And what better way to find them than by collaborating with similar events?
Spending your marketing budget to promote your upcoming event in similar events would yield you a very concentrated and high-quality niche community that is genuinely interested in attending such events.
By collaborating with other events for cross-promotions, you can get an audience for your event. In this way, you also leverage their efforts to attract the audience for their event.
For online promotions, you can set up ad popups on their websites to target their community.
During Event – Event Promotion Ideas
Most event organizers miss conducting promotional activities during the events. The promotional activities undertaken during the event helps you build a long-lasting image of your event and your brand in the audience’s mind.
It creates an impact that enables you to retarget them for your next event. It also provides an incentive for the audience to participate in post-event promotions (Reviews) as well.
Following are some event promotion ideas that you could implement during your event. –
1. Let your guest talk about your event
You can count on various people to talk about your brand and events as their stakes and benefits are also attached to your event.
These stakeholders include chief guests, performers, sponsors, Judges, and partners of your event. Never miss making them post about your event.
Think about an influencer doing Instagram live from your event. This will increase your reach and create fear of missing out on audiences who are not attending your event.
2. Collect maximum pictures and videos
During the event, You should try collecting a maximum number of pictures and videos that will help you in the next event promotion. Posting exciting videos and pictures can also create fear of missing out on the audience who haven’t attended your event.
Past event pictures will ensure a good experience for people and encourage them to purchase tickets for your next event without fail.
Post Event -Event Promotion Ideas
The main idea behind post-event promotions is to reinforce our brand even after the event. Organizers often work hard to build the event and promote it to the audience but forget to pay equal attention to post-event feedback. Feedback can also act as a promotional mechanism by targeting the audience who attended our event and giving them the incentive to attend our upcoming events. Post-event promotions can help you make your next event better than the previous one. It helps you improve the user experience. Following are some of the post-event promotion activities that you can try for your event –
1. Leveraging event feedback as a testimonial for the next event
Any event is not successful before you get feedback from the attendees about the event. You not only get a chance to interact with your attendees but also chance to develop long-lasting relationships with them.
To take the feedback you may sun a post-event survey and interview attendees. By running a post-event survey you can get valuable information from your event attendees. You can post social media posts or create an online survey yourself to collect this information.
Interviewing attendees is the best chance to take feedback for your event personally.
Feedback received from your event attendees helps you judge how well the event is being perceived by the audience and what changes can be made to make it even better. You can also create a Facebook group to get feedback from your community and promote future events.
Feedback received post your event can also be used as a promotional technique by the event organizer to show your event’s success. This feedback can act as testimonials on your website.
2. Use FOMO for your next event
After completion of the event, the photos and videos of an event will help you create fear of missing out among the audience who haven’t attended the event.
Try reposting every story or post where your audience has tagged you, that will encourage more people to post about your event.
You should post audience reviews and stories about how successful the event was. This will act as pre-marketing for the next event. You can create a short movie and distribute it on all of your handles.
3. Leverage your event as a lifetime money-making opportunity
If you are hosting an event where people can get value out of it by just seeing the video For example A webinar, podcast, seminar, workshop, or Ted talk; you can make money even after your event is over.
You can record your live event and sell it as an on-demand video event after your event. People who have missed out due to any reason will love to get your video.
AllEvents.in has one such option where you can monetize your videos without paying any hosting monthly charges.
All three phases of event promotions must always be in alignment with each other. Pre-event promotions would help you increase the attendance of your attendees, while promotions during and after the event would help you improve user experience and brand awareness. Post-event promotions often work as pre-event promotions for your upcoming events as well.
Distribution of your event
Some event organizers put in a lot of marketing efforts and create valuable content for the audience but fail to get the desired results. The very reason for the same is the lack of distribution planning.
In marketing, it is often said that distributing the content is more important than the content creation itself. All your marketing efforts go to vain if you can’t deliver the content you created to the right audience.
While deciding how to promote your event, event organizers must also plan how to distribute the campaign in order to reach the targeted audience.
Wrap up
Marketing your event is mission-critical for the success of your event. Here are the key points from the article
Be clear with the objective of your event and create your marketing ideas around the same.
Segregate your Promotion strategies into – Pre-event, during the event, and post-event promotions.
Get listed on Event discovery platforms like AllEvents.in
Be as creative as you can with marketing your event.
Maintain consistency throughout your campaign.
Play with ticket pricing – Free tickets, Early bird tickets, group, and VIP.
Create your community for long-term benefits.
Retarget your interested audience and induce them to attend your event.
The distribution of your campaign is as important as the content itself.
Event Promotion FAQs:
Why is event promotion important for the success of an event?
Event promotion helps to increase awareness about your event and encourages people to attend. Successful event promotion can also help to generate buzz, create a sense of excitement, and increase engagement with your audience.
What are some effective event promotion strategies?
Some effective event promotion strategies include leveraging social media, using paid ads, partnering with influencers or other businesses, and creating engaging content.
When should you start promoting an event?
It’s a good idea to start promoting your event at least 6-8 weeks in advance, especially if it’s a larger event. This gives you a lot of time to build buzz and generate interest among your target audience.
How can you measure the success of your event promotion efforts?
You can measure the success of your event promotion efforts by monitoring metrics like ticket sales, and social media engagement. It’s also important to collect feedback from attendees to gauge their overall satisfaction with the event.
What are some common mistakes to avoid when promoting an event?
Common mistakes to avoid when promoting an event include not targeting the right audience, relying too heavily on one promotion strategy, not providing enough information about the event, and not leveraging the power of social proof (such as testimonials or social media shares).
How can you make your event promotion stand out from the crowd?
To make your event promotion stand out from the crowd, focus on creating unique and engaging content, leveraging the power of visuals, partnering with other businesses or influencers, offering exclusive deals or incentives, and using social proof to your advantage.
