Promotion makes or breaks your entire event.
Whether you like it or not, your event’s success is almost entirely anchored on your promotion. The way you target your audience, build an attendees list, and invite prospective customers to your event greatly contributes to the overall success of your event.
With that said, we have created this guide to help you create an effective and foolproof promotional campaign.
Table of Contents
Figure Out Your Timeline
A successful event usually takes weeks or months of planning and development. It does not happen overnight! Crafting the perfect event takes tons of meetings, hours of venue hunting, costly supplies acquiring, famous guests booking, and many more.
Therefore, it is crucial to set your objectives first and then carefully plot everything in a timeline.
Here are some of the most crucial points we often include and take into account whenever we create a timeline for our promotions event:
Budget
Your budget should be the whole basis of the timeline you would create. Longer timelines mean you can stretch out and even save some of your funds while shorter timelines can be costly because you have to rush everything (or vice versa).
Regardless of which option would best suit your promotional and marketing campaign, the ultimate deciding factor and the one that would guide your entire promotions event is your budget. So we highly suggest you create a timeline with a budget in mind. This way, you can pace your progress and track your expenses in real-time.
Outreach (Supplies)
It does not matter whether you are planning to promote your event online or offline, you still have to reach out and deal with a supplier at some point. These suppliers can be your point of contact for the printing of your collaterals, media buys for native adverts, targeted advertising online, and many more.
In this case, we like to give our suppliers a lot of headroom. This buys us a lot of time to spot or fix any mistakes before the actual launch of our promotional campaign.
Outreach (Leads)
This part is especially helpful if you are planning to promote events and gatherings like in-store demos, assemblies, trade shows, and others. Since events like these heavily rely on big attendance, we give time allowances for our marketing, business development, and other outreach teams to gather and confirm the list of our attendees. This way, we are sure that there would be people attending our event.
These are just some of the factors that we take into account whenever we are creating a timeline for our promotions event. Since promotion varies for every event, we usually add a few things to this list like design timelines, local event outreach, networking, and many more.
So we highly suggest you customize and tailor your timeline based on the event you are promoting.
Level up Your Data and Research
Every successful event promotion strategy that we know of is always based on data and research. Therefore, apart from the usual market research, we often branch out and explore other areas of research as well.
One of the most effective, efficient, and useful areas of research that we have been lately fascinated about is audience research.
Primary Target Audience
Figuring your potential attendees or audience is expected as with any event promotion. But in this case, what we like to do differently is use our primary audience as an extension or a way to generate more leads. We try to figure out if there are any other common denominators that unite them (aside from their potential interest in our brand or products) so that we can target other groups of audiences as well.
Secondary Audience
These days, secondary audiences often come from online event promotion. So what we try to do is study our secondary audience as well as try to curate promotional content that would resonate or make an impact on them.
Find the Perfect Medium
As renowned theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.” Veering away from journalism and doubling down on event marketing, you need to find the best medium that would fit and make a significant impact on the message or event you are campaigning for.
With that in mind, we try our best to narrow down and pick only the best medium that would fit our event promotional campaign.
Here is the list that we often choose from:
Social Media
Nowadays, social media has become every event marketer’s best friend. It’s a convenient and easy-to-use medium to get the word out about your event.
Most of the time, we use our social media channel for our event promotion. But in order to save time and resources, we cherry-pick platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and only focus on one or two.
For instance, corporate event promotion works well on LinkedIn as compared to Twitter, product launch promotion works better on Twitter than on LinkedIn, and trade show booths promotion works best on Facebook groups as compared to Twitter.
Promotions on print ads are perfect for local event. It’s much easier, cheaper, and effective than digital ads.
Magazine
These days, magazines now come in print and digital versions. If you are looking to promote your event to a niche or specific group, then we highly suggest you do some research on this and choose which magazine is best suited for your event or party themes.
Digital Ads
Obviously, digital ad is an umbrella term. As marketers, we all know that digital ads encompass a lot of things like banner ads, pop-ups, directory listing, in-stream ads, skippable ads, geotagging, trends, and many other online brand awareness strategy.
In our case, we often refer to our market research and see whether it is worth investing in these or not. Because sometimes, targeted marketing on social media often does the trick and we no longer see the need to spend on other digital ads (since it can be costly sometimes).
Regardless, digital ads might just do wonders for your upcoming promotions event. So we highly suggest you still put this on the table for discussion with your marketing and planning team.
Strategize and Brainstorm with Your Team
We have created a special section for this in order to remind you that you do not have to decide and do everything by yourself. You can brainstorm and craft the perfect promotional event ideas with your team.
With that ,we have listed some of the things we often talk about and consult with our team:
Ad Targeting
As we have mentioned before, ad targeting on social media often does the trick. But in order for this to be successful, we often work with a bunch of researchers, analysts, and creatives from our team. This is to ensure that every targeting option we purchase is correct and every content we publish is clickable, interesting, and eye-catching enough for our target audience.
Hire Brand Ambassadors
One of the things marketers often debate about is hiring a brand ambassador or influencer. Some deem them necessary while others do not.
We get the apprehension of hiring one because they can be costly and unnecessary sometimes. For us, even though we are a brand ambassador agency, we do not always recommend hiring one especially if your promotions event does not really need one.
But, it is worth noting that we have seen several promotional campaigns that managed to garner large event attendees because of their brand ambassador. The ambassador or promotional model they hired for their event campaign helped gain them a lot of buzz on social media as well as fuel excitement around their event.
So we usually get the opinion of our team and weigh in the pros and cons first before hiring one.
Email Marketing
Promoting your event through email usually works well with internal campaigns and/or if you have a list of all your loyal customers.
It is best to discuss this with your team, especially if you are doing an internal campaign, because you can mention other things in the email or even change the tone of your content so that everyone from your organization would be more inclined to attend your event.
Social Media Campaign
Lastly, your promotions event on social media would be much more effective if you discuss it with your team. You can get their opinions, be updated on the latest fad, and know what’s trending if you sit down and talk with them. This way, you can think of better and more creative ways to create content for your social media pages.
Delegate Tasks Properly
To foolproof your entire promotions event, you and your team need to be on the same page. Without team harmony, any of your promotional strategies and ideas would not even take off. How do you expect to land a successful event with this?
Keeping that in mind, here are some of the focal points that we often check and polish with our team as we go along the whole planning process.
Content Creation
The team of creatives behind every content should be well-timed and be tasked to work with the other teams like the research, marketing, or business development team. Doing this would not only keep you on track of your schedule, but it would also make the job a lot less difficult for the creatives team. Once they learned how to get along with the other teams, it would be much easier to portray or think of other creative ways to better connect their design with your target audience.
Lead Outreach
Given that the whole point of event promotion is to reach out and invite attendees, you should brief your outreach team well and make sure that they know how to engage or connect with the potential registrants of your events.
Marketing Collaterals
Since creating marketing collaterals is not a one-man’s job, you have to make sure that you are not overworking your event staff and giving them too many things to handle. For example, you can divvy up the task of creating the design, writing the content, and communicating with the suppliers. This way, not all responsibilities fall into one person and it would be much easier to fix the problem along the way.
Prepare a Backup plan
The icing on top that would complete and ultimately make your event promotion successful is the backup plan.
Even though you can confidently say that your initial plan is effective and foolproof, some problems are just inevitable and are hard to fix. So in order to counter this, you should prepare a backup plan in case your initial plans go south.
Document Everything
As cliché as it is, you should document everything so that you can improve and learn from your mistakes. This way, even if previous events already happened a long time ago, you can still look back on it, learn from it, and maybe even get inspiration for your future events.
Apart from that, doing this is also a great PR stunt for your business. You can include previous successful events in your company portfolio and attract highly skilled workers.
Never Lose Sight of Your Goal!
With all things considered, the most important reminder that we can ever give you is to never lose sight of your goal.
Why are you promoting the event in the first place?
Sometimes, with all the planning and promoting, we often forget what our true goal is.
For every event promotion idea, the main goal is to always host a successful event.
A successful event does not always mean having a large crowd or many attendees. For many businesses, a successful event means turning attendees into buying customers and making a profit out of the event.
So in light of all this, you should track every progress you made towards your goal. Focus on the ends, not the means, so that you would never lose sight of your goal.
