Creative Event Promotion Ideas – Out of the Box Ideas
Due to the sheer number of events out there, your event will need creative event promotion ideas to make it stand out from the crowd.
Successful events use a combination of traditional marketing methods (that most events will be using) but also throw in some strategies that are outside of the box.
Outside of the box or guerrilla marketing is becoming more popular to simply stand out.
Below are some creative event promotion ideas you can try for your next event.
Good luck!
1. Use influencers with PPC
2. Get sponsors
3. Leverage your attendees
4. Use event discovery sites
5. Make sure you’re using ad re-targeting
6. Boost posts that do well
7. Do a purple cow PR stunt
8. Create a community long before the event
9. Run irresistible social media contents
10. Make sure there’s a big draw to promote
1. Use influencers with PPC
Influencer marketing, although sometimes successful, is becoming increasingly frustrating.
Due to constant algorithm changes and a lot of variables (e.g., post times) asking influencers to post doesn’t always work.
Our favourite strategy for using influencers for events comes down to putting paid advertising on influencer created videos.
For your next event you can try inviting various influencers to the event and asking them to create videos for TikTok and Reels announcing or talking about the occasion pre-event.
Influencers love events, so unless they’re a big celebrity usually offering them free entry/freebies at the event will be enough to get them there.
Next, TikTok and Instagram (Facebook ads) allow you to pay for ads on other peoples content.
This is called Spark ads on TikTok and brand partnerships on Instagram.
This is powerful because not only will that video go to that influencers organic reach (to their followers and to those the algorithm choose), but also to the audience that you select.
Say for example you want 18 – 21 year olds to come to your event who are into sustainability and have a lot of disposable income.
Usually the influencer you have chosen won’t have too many of these exact people following them (which has always been the limitations of using influencers for events).
But now you can pay to target say 100k of these people in your area, and they will see an engaging video from an influencer promoting you (which is far more powerful than if you created the video, which would automatically be more like an ad).
The other huge advantage of this is that you don’t need to use celebrities or influencers who charge a lot. It’s better to use your cash on the ads knowing it will go to your perfect audience.
So for your next event, use influencers, but know your perfect audience and pay to target more of them.
2. Get sponsors
Sponsors for events have been around for a long time, but they’ve become even more useful for events in the recent social media revolution.
Sponsors can not only supply much needed cash for an event, but they can help a lot with the marketing efforts as well.
Sponsors first of all should have their own loyal following that you can tap into.
Always make sure your sponsors are happy to promote the event before, during and after the event so you can reach their followers.
The other strategy we like to do as well is to team up with sponsors when creating PPC and video ads on social media.
You can take advantage of your sponsors perspective, team members and influence.
3. Leverage your attendees
For every event you create you need to turn your attendees into ambassadors and marketing machines.
The first step for example is pre-event at checkout.
If someone buys a ticket for your event, incentivise them to announce this to their friends.
This could be with their own affiliate link or a % off your next event in the future.
When this is done at checkout it means code is involved, which means you can track every share and sale to see if it’s working or not.
If your attendees aren’t sharing links or telling their friends then your offer isn’t good enough.
Another way to leverage your attendees is during the event with plenty of photo ops.
Photo ops create social proofing (making an event cool to be seen at is half the battle) and this will help a lot with your future events.
Events should never be seen as standalone events, but part of a bigger picture and move on a chess board that will benefit you in the future.
4. Use event discovery sites
It’s actually frustrating to see so many events have hundreds of man hours and spend poured into them but event organisers don’t even list their event on the major event platforms out there.
And there are many, think Eventbrite and Bloc Nearby.
But our advice is to ‘be everywhere’.
There are so many sites and apps out there where you can list your event for free and each one will have their own loyal fan base.
You never know what networks you might tap into, so it’s worth just being everywhere.
Listing your event could also lead to a backlink that will help with your SEO for future events as well.
5. Make sure you’re using ad re-targeting
When marketing, you always have to think about the behaviour of people.
It’s very rare that someone will see an event email or ad on Facebook and just go for it in terms of buying tickets.
Most humans will need to think on it, ask their friends who’s available and so on.
This is why re-targeting ads are so important as part of your creative event promotion ideas strategy. .
It means you can re-target them with an ad later down the line to remind them that your event is still on and tickets are available.
Re-target comes in different formats as well.
You can re-target people by email (if you’ve been smart enough with a lead magnet) and also pay for re-targeting ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on.
6. Boost posts that do well
Another one of our favourite strategies.
The idea is to post on social media your organic content to try and get engagement from your following and fanbase.
Don’t waste marketing spend on boosting every post.
Only boost posts where the engagement has done well after the first 24 hours.
This way you know the post is good and people are engaging with it, so if you pay to push it to more people, then it should go even further with even more organic reach.
And the best part is this content will then go to the exact target audience you’re trying to reach for your event.
7. Do a purple cow PR stunt
The world is a noisy place and brands that manage to stand out and get talked about usually succeed.
The purple cow method in marketing refers to the question ‘if there are 1000 normal cows in a field and 1 purple cow, which one would you look at/talk about the most?’
Aka the method advises brands to be so different that people will have no choice but to talk about them.
Once you get this right it comes with a host of benefits as well.
For example, press might pick up on it which will drive traffic and could result in decent backlinks for SEO purposes.
An example of this is a new event company announcing their next event by windsailing through London. With the event name on the sail.
The stunt got a lot of social media coverage and press even mentioned it a few times.
8. Create a community long before the event
Communities are so powerful in marketing now.
If you can manage to get a bunch of people in one place who like your brand, events and values, then you can market/sell to them time and time again.
Communities can be built on social media, tribe like platforms and via email lists.
For example, for our own events wing at Bloc we have created a ‘Bloc Events Membership Program’.
This invites people who are interested in our events to join our community.
We ask them certain questions like what kind of events they’re interested in and curate events purposefully for them.
Say for example, 10000 members are students and have told us they love raves, then we will create a rave knowing we have a database of members who have told us they will be interested in that from the sign-up process.
9. Run irresistible social media contents
Social media contests have been done to death in our opinion and people are pretty bored of them.
However, they still do have their place, especially if you can come up with an irresistible contest that people won’t be able to help but to enter.
And of course a successful contest is all about the reach that contest gives you.
Make sure the ask e.g. ‘tag two friends’ etc benefits you but doesn’t ask the person too much.
You can think outside of the box with the prize as well, the better the prize the more likely people will want to do it.
We like to offer free prizes that are specific for that event, it’s way more relevant that way and means the people entering are 100% interested in the event.
10. Make sure there’s a big draw to promote
At the end of the day your event will only be successful if the event itself and the plan of the event has a good draw.
You could implement all of your marketing strategies perfectly but if the event is in a muddy field in England in January with no music, then it’s obviously never going to do well.
The better the draw of the event, the easier it will be to get people there.
So before thinking of outside of the box marketing strategies think more and longer on the event itself.
What makes the event different? Does the event stand out from others? Why would people want to be seen at this event? Is this event going to be talked about? Would the press care about this?
Go back to the purple cow method and make it stand out so much that people just won’t be able to resist booking a ticket.
Summing up
Throwing a successful event can be easy if you have got the event itself right in the first place.
Once you have something great to announce all the marketing becomes a lot easier.
There are plenty of creative event promotion ideas above that will give it a boost if needs be.
Good luck with your next event and let us know if you have any questions.
