Promotional Event Ideas – Ideas to Sell Out Your Event
This article looks at different promotional event ideas to help you sell out your next event.
Marketing your events is the best way to get people to attend them, obviously. Despite being so obvious, so many event planners fail to market efficiently and effectively.
The trickiest part about marketing an event is knowing whether you’ve overcooked it and eaten into the profits or under done it and having a pretty disappointing turn out.
This is why you need to come up with an excellent marketing strategy to help you get the visibility and sales you deserve.
To help you get started, we have listed out promotional event ideas – we’re sure these ideas will help you give the much-needed boost to your event planning business too.
You can jump to the promotional event ideas you want to read about:
1. Have an impactful social media presence
2. Get creative on social media
3. Make good use of event discovery sites
4. Implement an SEO Strategy
5. Create a YouTube channel
6. Email marketing
7. Rope in a brand ambassador
8. Professional photography
9. Tell your tale
10. Create an event community
11. Partner with a sponsor
12. Get fans involved
13. List out limited offers and deals
1. Have an impactful social media presence
Whether it’s Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you need to have a strong online presence on each of these platforms.
Most of your audience is concentrated on these platforms, which is why you need to be super active on all of them.
The best part about these social media platforms is that they offer special marketing tools for businesses, which you can capitalize on to boost your visibility.
Merely posting about your event won’t be enough – you have to generate hype around it way before the actual date of the event.
This buzz around the event will help you gain local as well as international visibility.
The whole idea of generating this hype way before the event is to inform people that something exciting is coming up, and they shouldn’t miss out on it.
2. Get creative on social media
If you need to attract the attention of your target audience, you need to make sure your social media presence isn’t bland.
So, spice it up with creativity, come up with funky posters and captions, use bold colors, think out of the box – only then will you be noticed.
If you opt for the same old boring templates, standard captions, and color schemes, chances of your post being scrolled by are high.
If you want people to stop scrolling and take note of what you want to communicate to them, you need to have a unique way of expressing yourself.
3. Make good use of event discovery sites
The first thing you need to do is research these sites that list events happening in and around your town or city.
This is because most eventgoers investigate these event discovery sites to find out about events happening near them.
But hold on – you would have to do your research too before you zero into the top event discovery sites.
Make sure you pick sites that have good visibility.
Once you have listed out the best event discovery sites, get them to feature your events as and when you organize them.
This will help make your event more discoverable.
The probability of this visibility getting converted to sales, too, will shoot up.
4. Implement an SEO Strategy
Without Search Engine Optimisation, none of your blog posts, social media posts, or website content will get the attention it deserves.
Therefore, it is advisable to research the keywords revolving around your events and use them effectively in all your posts.
By effective usage, we do not mean you stuff the keywords in every sentence you write.
Only strategic, clever usage of keywords will help optimize your online presence.
Create content that is relatable, and that people would love to follow.
In a world full of mindless scrolling, capturing people’s attention may not seem an easy task – but it’s not impossible either.
If your content is valuable and informative, people will automatically get drawn to it.
Once you have a base of followers who love your content, in no time, you’ll find themes sharing your content and posts too.
This will further help enhance the visibility of the event you are organizing.
Organic growth is the best when it comes to social media and websites – so do all you can to get there.
5. Create a YouTube channel
YouTube videos are a fantastic marketing tool – only if you know how to use them well.
Videos are a perfect platform to capture information that you wouldn’t be able to post otherwise on other media.
You can give your target audience a sneak peek into the upcoming events to pique their interest.
You could do short but effective videos introducing speakers and sponsors. Also, you can let the audience or participants know what they can expect from a particular event.
Live streaming, too, is another excellent option you can try out.
Broadcasting is top-rated these days, and it will help you fetch wider exposure.
6. Email marketing
“Who even reads those emails?” – must be the first thought that crosses your mind.
But here’s the deal – email marketing is still quite an effective tool for converting prospective leads into sales.
Getting email marketing right is essential – you just cannot shoot out one single long email to everyone in your content directory.
Instead, categorize your contacts into different demographics, people who have positively responded to your emails and acted on them and those who haven’t.
Of course, these are just examples – you can create multiple categories too.
Each type must be approached differently – to come up with different, catchy emails for each of them.
The more specific your email marketing will be, the better results it will yield for you.
Put out offers, discounts, group discount deals, early-bird discounts for those who purchase tickets in advance, or bulk numbers.
People are not bothered about the paragraphs you write in the email – they simply look for what’s in there for them. And that is what must be highlighted in your emails.
Ensure you have a good outbox manager; your mails could end up in spam boxes more than inboxes!
This is not something you want, so do ensure the emails reach the intended audience.
7. Rope in a brand ambassador
Popular bloggers, influencers, celebrities, YouTubers, or other famous persons with a vast fan following can be roped in as brand ambassadors.
You will have to compensate them financially to put out timely posts on their social media handles about your events.
As these people already have a huge fan following and base, it is easier to get broader visibility through them.
8. Professional photography
Even if you have to set aside a considerable budget for the services of a professional photographer, we assure you it is totally worth it.
The reason is simple – after people come across an event on Google, they first head to Google Images and then YouTube to check on the images and videos available.
So, if you can perfectly capture the vibe of your event in photos and videos, there’s nothing like it.
Well-lit, picture-perfect photos can be used two ways – first, to improve your Google Images presence and second, as posts on your social media handles and emails.
Visual appeal is of utmost importance these days – if people do not like the photos you’ve posted, they’re likely to cancel out on your event.
So, make sure the best parts of your event – the ones that make it exciting and worth visiting are out there – in the form of photos and videos.
9. Tell your tale
Organizing and managing an event is no easy task. Much effort goes behind any successful event – so make sure your audience is aware of what’s happening behind the scenes.
You can introduce the event managers, other team members, post fun moments on your social media pages to create a rapport with the audience.
People relate to stories and love personalized content – so do share insider stories with them as well.
Formal marketing is effective, but you end up building a bond with your audience when you tell stories.
10. Create an event community
This platform will be where you promote your own, as well as other events.
An event community would be a one-stop for people to find all events happening around them on a single platform.
Considering that other events will be featured out there too, you will be assured of improved visibility.
You can also consider joining an existing event community.
If there isn’t any such platform you know of, simply go ahead and create one!
It would be a perfect place to market yours as well as other events in the vicinity.
11. Partner with a sponsor
Cross-promotional activities are great to improve exposure to your events.
So, if you managed to secure a sponsor for your event, pitch forth the cross-promotions concept to them.
As it would be a win-win situation for both of you, the sponsors, too, would agree to promote your event.
Strike the perfect deal so that both parties benefit from the arrangement.
12. Get fans involved
Who else can give out better word-of-mouth publicity than the people who attend your events regularly?
You can offer them free passes or tickets to the event and ask them to promote your events on their social media handles.
If they can get creative with the promotions, there’d be nothing like it!
Creative Tik-Tok videos, Instagram reels, and goofy memes are in vogue currently.
This strategy would help you gain a lot of visibility. And considering that it would be from the persons who know the kind of events you host – the publicity will be even more reliable.
While this promotion would happen before the event, you can also encourage attendees to share as many photos and videos on social media as they can.
You can have these creative photo booths or funky props at the event venue so that people can have their own little corner to click Instagram-worthy shots.
13. List out limited offers and deals
The sense of urgency these offer, and deals bring in is unmatchable – people instantly wish to purchase tickets to the events if you offer them appealing deals.
You can give out a couple of passes, group passes, a couple of free passes for a group of 10 (you can choose the number here), or so on.
This would encourage people to hurry up and grab tickets or passes to the events right away.
Simply put out a super appealing offer for a limited period and watch how the sales shoot up.
Summing up
Marketing is a fantastic tool to get visibility for your business or events.
If used well, you can actually secure a high percentage of sales only via this channel.
While these promotional event ideas are sure to get you started, do make sure you think of out-of-the-box creative ideas.
Also, these are basic promotional event ideas, and you can modify them to suit the requirements of your venue.
A good marketing strategy is all you need to get your event sold out, so good luck creating one for yourself!
