You need to promote your conference, music festival, or another type of event. If you don’t, you’ll never have enough attendees to meet your goals. Because every organization and event has a different target audience, a one-size-fits-all approach to event promotion rarely yields desired results.
Let’s take a look at effective offline and online event promotion tactics for different organizations and goals.
Event Promotion Ideas That Yield Results
Do you have an upcoming event but don’t want to break the bank promoting it? Check out these tested and proven event promotion tactics.
Open an Event Registration Website
An event website serves as a low-cost digital advertising platform for your upcoming event. It is usually the landing point of prospective attendees who click on online promotions for your event. To make the page as effective as possible, it must be compelling and optimized to convert visitors. Accomplish this by:
- Adding engaging content and persuasive calls to action that convert visitors
- Using a web analytics tool to monitor the site’s performance
- Performing A/B testing to identify underperforming website elements
- Making the site mobile-friendly and improve its user experience
Lastly, don’t forget to optimize the site for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that the site appears in relevant search results on Google and attracts organic traffic. One of the most effective ways to do SEO is keyword research, which identifies the search queries people use to find information related to your event.
Insert the most relevant keywords into your site content, title tags, image alt texts, and meta descriptions. After optimizing your site, you can also run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to generate traffic quickly.
Leverage Email Signatures
Your email signature appears at the bottom of your sent emails. Instead of carrying just your signature, you can tailor the feature to promote your next event. This cost-effective tactic is ideal for advertising to people and institutions that receive emails from your company.
You can set up email signature advertisements for all your employees. That way, every company correspondence becomes a potential event promotion. Don’t forget to deliver a clear message in your advertisement and add a link to the event registration page.
Send Out Newsletters
Do you send out newsletters and have hundreds of subscribers or more? That’s a free event promotion channel just waiting to be leveraged to generate awareness of your event. Add your event promotion to each newsletter you send out or create a separate newsletter campaign for the event.
Turn Registered Attendees into Ambassadors
A ticket boost campaign works by providing links that ticket buyers can share via email or social media. Potential attendees can then register for your event via such links.
Incentivize ticket buyers to share these links and promote your event by offering a partial refund to the link sharer. You can also incentivize prospects by offering discounts to those who use the link.
Build an Event Community
People want to be a part of something that looks fun and beneficial. Use this human instinct for your benefit by creating an event community your target audience will want to join. As the community grows, it will generate social proof, which will make more potential attendees curious and eager to join.
Your event community may be online or offline, and you can make it more attractive with exclusive offers for members. For example, backstage passes to your event for members. Besides the incentives, many will join the community simply for the opportunity to mingle with like-minded people.
Partner with Another Event
Partnering with another event can help reduce the cost of hiring and setting up a venue. More importantly, your partnership will give you access to your collaborator’s attendees. The tactic works best if you partner with an event that has a similar target audience. You also get a bigger return on investment if your event partner is larger than you.
However, other events may have little interest in collaborating if you are yet to build a strong event brand that can benefit them in return.
Promote the Event with Limited-Time Offers
Everyone loves a sweet deal, which is something else you can leverage to promote your event. Accomplish this by intermittently launching time-limited discounts and other promo events. It could be 20% off for the first 50 registrants or merchandise for those who shop on a specific date.
Making the offer time-limited creates scarcity and a sense of urgency. People rushing to take advantage of a perceived small window of opportunity can help you reach your event registration targets much faster. To intensify the sense of urgency, have a timer counting backward on your event site or social media channels.
Offer Different Ticket Types
People like to have options. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic means not everyone will be enthusiastic about physically gathering in large numbers. Work around this by offering an offline and webinar event. Those who want to attend in person can get regular tickets, and you can target those who prefer the online experience with a webinar promotion.
Offering various pricing options also lets prospective attendees choose their preferred experience. For instance, a VIP ticket may offer the best seats and unrestricted access. For a webinar event, you can offer streaming-only tickets or streaming plus that comes with event merchandise and more.
Showcase Your Speakers and Partners
Provide exclusive videos and other content from key speakers and sponsors on your event website and social media pages. You can do this before or after ticket sales open to generate awareness about your event. Don’t forget to add a call to action to the content. People interested in hearing more from your speakers can immediately use the CTA to register for your event.
Offer a Complimentary Skill Certification Course
Everyone’s looking for a way to add value to their CV. If attending your offline or webinar event comes with a free skill certification, that’s more reason for your target audience to register and attend. It helps if the certification is for an in-demand skill that increases the employability of your attendees.
Start a Podcast
Over 144 million Americans listen to podcasts. That makes the medium a huge platform for reaching several potential attendees. Your podcast must cover topics related to the event, and you can invite your speakers and sponsors to participate. Enlighten listeners on how to register for the event and offer special or free tickets during your show to generate publicity.
Use Social Media
Social media is huge. Facebook alone has over a billion daily users. Promote your event on every possible channel with content customized to resonate with the users of each platform.
For instance, make entertaining and enlightening TikTok videos that trigger curiosity about your event. You can use reels and images from past events to promote the upcoming one on social media.
Engage with viewers to generate traffic and comments so more people share your posts. You must also use consistent hashtags or handles in your posts to avoid confusing your target audience.
Boost your social media promotion by tapping into influencer marketing. Alternatively, have your sponsors and speakers promote the event on their pages.
Launch a Wi-Fi Hotspot
Set up a Wi-Fi hotspot around the location of your upcoming event. Free Wi-Fi will lure people in droves and give you a chance to promote your event to an available audience. You can also use the Wi-Fi connection to capture useful data for tailoring marketing strategies that resonate with your target audience.
Tips to Successfully Promote an Event
Event promotion involves using marketing channels and strategies to generate publicity about your upcoming event. If the promotion is a success, a large number of your target audience will register to attend.
The most successful event promotion campaigns utilize more than one marketing strategy to advertise their event. You can leverage digital or virtual event promotion tactics, such as social media and emails, or print mediums, like posters and flyers. The right tactics to use depend on your budget, goals, and target audience.
While using multiple marketing channels is beneficial, you don’t have to use all of them. As with everything else, quality trumps quantity. To find the best promotion options for your event, follow these tips:
Identify Your Event Promotion Goals
Launching a music or conference promotion without clear goals makes measuring the success of your campaign difficult. Your goal is what you hope to achieve by promoting your event.
For example, the 1985 Live Aid concert was itself an event, but it wasn’t the goal. The actual goal was raising awareness and funds for charity, and it was a huge success. Had the organizers not set clear objectives, the concert’s pomp and pageantry might have overshadowed the fundraiser.
Identifying your goals also helps set KPIs (key performance indicators) for optimizing the attendee registration journey. Examples of KPIs you may want to track are:
- Number of registrants from sales
- Total number of registrations
- Number of registrants before the deadline
- Number of paid and free registrations
- Number of discounted registrations
Involve Your Entire Organization
It takes more than just your marketing and sales team to promote an event successfully. Getting everyone in your organization involved increases your chances of reaching more people. You’ll have more people spreading the word via flyers in their neighborhoods or personal social media networks. Even your executives can get involved through financial support and investment.
Have a Clear Message
Having a horde of people promoting your event means nothing if they share different messages about the event. Inconsistent messaging will confuse potential attendees and lead to mixed results. Avoid this by providing all the promotional materials your marketing people will need.
Besides being consistent, the promotional message must resonate with your target audience. Make sure to tailor the message for optimal impact on each marketing channel. For instance, what works on a flyer and Instagram won’t work on Twitter or YouTube.
Simplify the Ticket Purchasing Process
Congratulations, you’ve convinced people to attend your event, but how will they get tickets? The process of getting tickets must be as uncomplicated and hassle-free as possible, or potential attendees might lose interest. Fortunately, with Eventbrite and similar platforms, you can now sell and deliver tickets online.
Reuse Promotional Content
Music promotion and other types of event advertising are typically expensive. Save money and time by promoting your next event with content from your last event. You can reuse old images, video footage, attendee reviews, and more for your new marketing materials.
Generate interest by using images and videos of past events to show potential attendees the thrill and excitement they can expect from your next event. Positive reviews from past attendees will also show newcomers that your events are worth attending.
Make Sure the Right People Know About Your Upcoming Event
Event promotion is hard work, and you need the right tools and expertise to ensure you get a return on your investment. At Gold Promotion, we help brands identify their target audience and reach them through the most effective digital marketing strategies.
For all your event promotion needs, get in touch with us for performance-focused solutions that help you reach your goals.
We built a performance marketing system for small business owners. Cutting-edge technology and tactics power revenue-focused digital marketing
programs for local, b2b, and e-commerce.
- How to Select a Promotion Agency - July 25, 2021
- Top Promotion Tools for Sales & Marketing Success - July 25, 2021
- Event Promotion – Strategy & Tactics - July 25, 2021
Leave a Reply