Event Advertising Ideas – How to Market an Event
Coming up with effective event advertising ideas is no easy task.
As an event planner, your job begins way before the day of the event.
Right from planning, organizing, and arranging – you have to do it all to make sure the event goes smoothly.
Event advertising is another aspect you need to look at, and it is just as important a task as anything else.
Marketing will help ensure your event gets the exposure and turnout it deserves.
And if you’re looking for out-of-box event advertising ideas, we’re here to help.
These tips are creative, unique and will definitely help make the event a great success.
Let’s have a look at some of these easily implementable event advertising ideas:
1. Pick the best team
2. Create a detailed marketing strategy
3. Create a buzz around the event
4. Stay active on social media
5. Simplify the registration process
6. Email promotion
7. Introduce your team to the world
8. Offer personalised experiences to some people
9. Get as creative as you can
10. Use Bloc
11. Collaborate with popular faces
1. Pick the best team
Irrespective of the scale of the event, you need to ensure you have a great team to work with.
A great team is easy to manage, as everyone knows their role and steps up when required – and this is very important in a field as dynamic as event management.
Once you know who is part of your team, you can begin delegating tasks according to the strengths and specializations of each team member.
If you don’t segregate duties, it will all be a chaotic mess on the day of the event.
Assigning roles and corresponding duties will help monitor the event and ensure everything is going well.
Plus, every person will know exactly what their job is – the marketing team will focus on anything, and everything related to marketing, the design team will handle the backdrop, and so on.
2. Create a detailed marketing strategy
Now that the team is all ready, it’s time to chart out a systematic, detailed marketing strategy.
Every little thing that is essential to the marketing of the event should go into this plan.
You can then brainstorm with the marketing team and come up with even better, relevant event advertising ideas.
When all the details are listed out in the plan, it’s time to get going with the promotion of the event. The earlier you begin, the better the response to your event will be.
3. Create a buzz around the event
Social media is a great place to start from.
Almost everyone uses different social media platforms these days, making it easy for you to catch their attention for all upcoming events.
Social media marketing gives you an edge over all other marketing ideas, as there are no limitations on its reach.
It gives you geographical advantages, too, which means your event will reach international customers as well (if that’s what you are targeting).
The four main social media platforms you need to master are – Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Each of these platforms thrives on different types of content formats, so make sure you nail each of them well.
For example, Instagram is all about eye-catchy photos and on-point hashtags – if you get this right, you’re sure to get a great reach on the platform.
Likewise, Twitter is all about how you can get across your content in a short, crisp manner.
Note the requirements of each social media platform and get the team to work accordingly.
Target-based efforts are always better so that the team knows the level of efforts they need to pitch in to get the desired results.
4. Stay active on social media
Every social media platform follows an algorithm – the frequency of posts, their quality, how active you are on these platforms – everything counts when it comes to social media.
Beating the algorithm may seem like a task, but if you come up with a tactful strategy, you’ll be able to conquer it in no time.
One of the foremost things you need to keep in mind is your active online presence – even months before the actual date of the event.
Beginning the conversation and hype about the event a year before its date would be perfect.
You would get ample time to generate buzz around the event, while gaining enough popularity among the target crowd, slowly and steadily.
Now, this totally depends on the scale of the event, too – for a small-scale event, you can begin six months prior – that should be enough to garner a relatively huge response.
Responding immediately to queries, replying to comments, encouraging people to share your posts, engaging with the followers through innovative ways (quizzes, polls, or anything else that you can think of), announcing giveaways – these are all ways to increase your following as well as reach on social media.
Your followers on social media are nothing but your potential sales leads for the event – so make use of these amazing platforms well!
5. Simplify the registration process
No one is interested in filling out lengthy forms filled with innumerable questions.
People want everything at one click and that’s what you have to offer them.
Remember, a tedious registration process can actually lead you to lose out on customers – and that’s something you don’t want.
The whole objective of marketing the event well is to ensure you can turn as many leads into sales as possible.
For this, you can choose any of the multiple options available online that help to simplify the process of registration.
You can verify these platforms through time-testing and ensure they are quick, effortless, and swift.
You also need to have a proper trial run before you actually roll out the registration process to the public.
And yes, don’t leave any scope for technical glitches – ensure that the platform is super seamless.
People won’t really bother about the technical issues you face, they’ll just leave the page – which is totally the opposite of what you want!
Taking all possible extreme situations (such as a sudden surge of traffic to the website) into account is critical, too.
One simple error or technical glitch and all your marketing ideas go down the drain! So, it’s best you avoid them as much as you can.
6. Email promotion
Now, this is a marketing trick that never goes out of fashion – it always works!
While you are generating buzz on social media to attract people’s attention, also reach their inboxes!
Email marketing is one of the most feasible and cost-effective ways of marketing and can actually fetch you a lot of sales.
The trick with email marketing is this – get as quirky as you can to make sure people are intrigued with your mail.
Long, boring paragraphs are not something people like to read, so chuck them out.
Come up with something vibrant and to-the-point and attach it with a catchy email subject.
Once you’ve got people to open your email and skim through it, give them a reason to stay, read it completely and act on it.
Getting the customers to the third step is important, and you have to get creative for this.
You can offer some discounts, group or couple passes and highlight the offer so that it strikes the reader the minute they open the email.
Simply fetch the list of email addresses of the category of people you want to reach out to and shoot them your quirky emails!
Don’t overthink email marketing too much – give it a go, and you’re bound to find potential customers right away.
7. Introduce your team to the world
Get up-close and personal with your audience and show them snippets of the behind-the-scenes action.
The fun and chaos that the team experiences while organizing the events is interesting content and people love to watch that kind of stuff.
You can also come up with a series of posts where you introduce the team to the world, with crisp and quirky introductions of each member.
People relate to such content easily, developing a closer bond with the faces behind the events – even if they are on the other side of their gadgets.
Such content keeps people hooked and helps improve the quality of engagement and the number of followers, too.
8. Offer personalised experiences to some people
It’s a general preference of people to have a personalized experience at any event.
You can go a step ahead and offer this special experience to a select number of people.
How?
Well, simply announce a lucky draw – the passes for the event that get selected in the lucky draw could be eligible for special perks from you.
This would not only encourage people to buy more passes but also to participate in the lucky draw, as their chances of winning would increase.
On the other hand, you can also bring the personal touch right into the event.
Invite local artists, regional food shop owners, the popular music band, the superhit brewery to the event and watch guests have the time of their lives!
With local people, the event has an easy-going, casual tone to it, which makes your audience feel at home.
9. Get as creative as you can
Visual aids are an effective form of marketing, too – only if you think out of the box!
Ditch the typical poster formats, color schemes, and go bold and vibrant.
The latter is more eye-catching and would instantly vibe with people. Remember, good quality pictures and visual aids will fetch you a lot more sales, as compared to the typical, regular form.
The best part about visual aids is that you can convey the whole idea of your event in a series of pictures.
This way, you let the target audience what they can expect from the event while keeping the buzz alive.
Pictures are a lot more effective as compared to long-form content, so make the most of this type of marketing!
10. Use Bloc
Bloc is our social app, which lets people know of the events happening around them.
As an event planner, it’s your job encourage check-ins on Bloc to the venue the event is being held, so that your event is out there for the world to see.
Bloc also offers paid advertising packages, which you can make use of.
For starters, you can try out the free plan. This allows you to get 75 free customers to your event with £150 ad credit.
If you go over 75 people then it’s just £2 per check-in.
Bloc has a range of amazing features, which encourages people to head to events, check-in, and actually get paid for visiting these events.
Bloc also allows people visiting the same event to interact with each other.
After hitting a certain number of check-ins, the app actually gives customers real cash in return for points earned.
Now this works as a great incentive for people to visit even more events.
As an event planner, you can make the most of this amazing platform and increase the visibility and popularity of your event amongst the masses.
11. Collaborate with popular faces
There’s a reason why celebrities are associated with events!
People love seeing their favorite stars as the face of an event, which is why you need to get one or two celebrities or popular faces associated with your event.
It’s one of the most effective event advertising ideas for boosting attendees and increasing your brand awareness.
It could be any famous singer, artist, musician, or actor – getting them on board would help your audience connect even more with your event.
If you aren’t able to get a celebrity to collaborate with you, you can always tap social media influencers.
As these influencers have a large fan following on social media, roping them in for marketing, too, is a great alternative.
The probability of people trusting your event and everything you promise to offer shoots up when other people (such as celebrities and influencers) vouch for you.
You can also call these popular faces as special attendees or guests of honor for your event. This, too, would work as a great crowd-puller.
Summing up
We hope we’ve given you enough inspiration to get started with the marketing of your event.
Remember, the scale and type of the event are important aspects to consider.
Depending on these factors as well as the budget of your event, you, too, can think of some fun event advertising ideas for your event.
Good luck and we hope your event goes really well!
