Marketing Your Event (The Low Cost Version)

 A guest post from Aidan Henry of Brink Events (website).  Thank you Aidan.

Cost-Effective Ways to Market Your Event

Event planning and management are very important aspects of the event industry. These organizational functions are essential for any event to run smoothly and without problems. But what’s a smooth event if the venue is only half full? Event marketing is often a task placed upon the event manager/planner in addition to the original duties. Filling the venue with the right crowd is important for aesthetics, profitability, and loyalty. The following are tried and tested marketing tactics that are both straightforward and cost-effective:

Facebook

• Create Facebook event and send invites to select contacts.
• Create an event poster and make it your profile picture. Next, tag event helpers and workers in the picture, creating added visibility among their friend lists.
• Get close friends and contacts to send out event invites or post the event link.

Twitter

• Announce your event launch and encourage re-tweeting.
• Run a contest offering free tickets/incentives for followers who market your event.
• Provide one-day discounts or last minute deals according to predicted attendance levels.
• Tweet event and ticket sale updates throughout the marketing campaign.

Mass Messaging

• Send out e-mail message to your list (if you haven’t started one yet, you definitely need to).
• Send out a text message blast (text message/SMS marketing is essential in this day and age).
• Post event to Craigslist, Kijiji.
• Message a smaller number of influential and connected contacts personally.

Video

• Create 1-minute promo for the event and post on your website and Facebook. NOTE: There are many freelance videographers who can produce a high-quality video at a low cost.
• Post video to video sharing sites, including YouTube and Vimeo. Be sure to include your SEO-targeted keywords and phrases in the titles and descriptions.

Offline Marketing

• Provide tickets to trusted sellers and participating businesses; incentivize based on sales (ex. $5 per ticket sold).
• Distribute posters to specific business and select locations. 

This guest article was written by Aidan Henry at Brink Events, an event planning company in Victoria, BC, Canada.  Visit: www.brinkevents.ca 

Social Media to boost Event Attendance

Using social media to enhance event attendance is considered essential, but HOW to utilize the many options is a question we all face.  CVent has just released a free e-book with practical tips on integrating social media into your next event.  You can download the book of tips here:  Event e-BOOK

See you on facebook, or digg, or twitter, or stumbleupon....  

Successfully Promoting your Event Online

We all know event promotion strategies have been radically changed with the social media phenomenon. Below is an insightful guest post by Robert Grossman of Focus Creative distilling the most effective ways to utilize social media to promote your next event.  Hope you find this article as helpful as I did.

Social media strategy ideas before an event:

• Create a Facebook Event, pulling in all your event details. This creates a central location for attendees to begin to connect and share their excitement for the event.
• Create a Facebook Page. For larger events a dedicated page may be appropriate as a central location to engage with attendees and people interested in learning more about your event.
• On Twitter, create an event hashtag and promote it. Encouraging dialog with Twitter hashtags is an excellent way to build buzz around an event.  Then publicize the hashtag in advance across all channels—put it on your registration page, website, and use it in every single one of your Twitter posts.
• To encourage people to tweet - give out your hashtag and spread the word, sweeten the deal with a free pass, door prize or other giveaway for one lucky hashtag-er.
• Post the event to LinkedIn. At a bare minimum, you can create an update that includes a few words on why you are excited for the event and a link to your registration page. Send the invite out to all your LinkedIn connections.
• Seek out LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your event and let them know about it as well as sharing the event with specific contacts which LinkedIn easily lets you do.
• Build your own community. For the biggest and most complex events (typically conferences), building your own community may make sense.
• Learn where communities already are. Before the event, it’s critical to identify existing communities like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other forums and find out what they’re interested in. You can also use real-time search on Twitter to find out what your future attendees are talking about and hoping to gain from an event. Then use this knowledge to fine-tune the event content and make sure that it’s relevant for your audience.

Focus Creative helps fortune 500 companies and non-profits create engaging productions and presentations for sales meetings, share holder events, conferences, award shows, sales and marketing videos, training videos, post event videos and presentations.