Event Promotion Tactics

You’ve picked a date, place, and time for an event to promote your business or organization, but how will you get your customers to attend? Here are some important tactics to consider when promoting your next special event to ensure a successful experience for both your business or organization and your target audience.

Know your audience

A key element of making an event a success is knowing and reaching out to your target audience. To know who your target audience is, you first need to know the goal of your event and then find the people who fit in with that goal. For example, if you’re participating in a local festival you might want to talk to last year’s vendors to find out the dynamics of the people attending in the past, where they traveled from, and what goods and services they were most interested in. Getting a good understanding of this information can predict if you should begin participating in the festival or if you need to increase your presence at the event.

Get social

Using social media to attract event interest is a lucrative way to get the word out to a very large audience. Here are some quick tips for social media promotion:

  • One month in advance, create an event graphic on your social media platforms
  • Three weeks before the event, post a save the date graphic on your social platforms
  • One week before the event, post photos of some items that will be for sale to garner interest
  • Consider creating a Facebook event to increase interest
  • A few days prior to the event, post more photos or a graphic on social media
  • If your business is participating in a multi-day event, post on social media again during the event
  • Encourage community partners and influencers to share your event on their social media accounts
  • Use Facebook Live, Instagram Reels or Stories, Twitter, and Tik Tok videos
  • Consider geo location and/or boosted paid social media advertisements to reach a wider audience

Electronic communications

Email marketing continues to be an effective means to reach out to your consumers and invite them to an event. A good rule is to email your customers one week prior to an event to encourage attendance. Ask them to forward the email to their friends and family. Additionally, you can send another reminder email one day prior to the event in case your audience has forgotten about the opportunity and still has room in their schedules to attend. If your business or organization uses SMS text messages, in addition to emails, it’s recommended to push a notification one hour prior to the start of an event to drive more traffic. 

Web traffic

You’ll always have customers who prefer to seek out information rather than having you push it to them through social media and email, that’s why putting event information on your website is critically important. One important note to make is to remove the event after it has occurred as to not confuse your audience.

In conclusion, communication is key for your next event. You can never over communicate but under communicating will result in poor attendance and lack of community interest. Many community members are interested in participating in in-person events in a post-COVID world, so make sure your business is prepared to greet them with them a smile!

Written by Blog Contributor: Holly Lynn Gibbons