Event Promotion 101
You’ve got an awesome event coming up, so naturally you want to get the word out to as many people as possible. You know that event promotion is a key to making that happen.
There’s just one tiny problem…you don’t know where to start
Planning Your Event Promotion
The great thing about event promotion is that you can put in as little or as much effort as you want. Even if you’ve got limited time, you can still get your event in front of lots of attendees with minimal effort.
Before you can begin promoting your event, it’s important to spend some time thinking about key pieces that will guide you on the best way to proceed.
#1: Who are your attendees?
One of the first steps you’ll need to take is figuring out who you want at your event and why they’d want to come. This will give us a better picture of your target audience. Some examples are:
- People who attended your last event
- Fans of the event speaker/performer/teacher/etc…
- Supporters of a cause, initiative, or organization
#2: What do they have in common?
Event promotion is most effective when you promote your event to the right people (especially if you’re spending money on advertising).
Take a look at the people you said are most likely to attend, and look for commonalities. The commonalities you find will help you build your promotion plan.
Shared goals: Here’s your value proposition. In other words, why people will want to attend.
Shared characteristics: These define the specific segment of potential attendees you’ll focus on.
Shared sources of information: This tells you which channels you need to use to reach them.
#3: Where can you reach them?
This is really the meat and potatoes of your event promotion activities. There are loads of communication channels to get in front of potential attendees. The key is to find the ones that are going to be most effective for your specific audience.
Start by listing the ones you’ve already got in place and then continue to branch out from there until you’ve got a list of 5–10 really solid options. Don’t forget your own personal network!
Some popular channels are:
- Facebook (business page or personal timeline)
- Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social networks
- An existing email list you have
- Attendees from past events you’ve hosted
- Local meetup groups
- Word-of-mouth referrals
- Your website
Promoting Your Event
This is the fun part! Now that you’ve got your foundation, let’s get rolling with the actual event promotion.
Hopefully, the previous exercises helped you determine which channels are most likely to reach your target audience of potential attendees. The next step is to tackle the ones that will give you the biggest bang for your buck.
But how do you know which channel to start with?
It’s a bit of a science and a bit of an art to decide where to begin your event promotion activities. You can always start small and work your way up.
Small budget, lots of time: Get those social networks active to connect with your target audience for free and leverage your website to promote information about the event to everyone who lands on your site. If you’ve got a list of past event attendees, shoot them an email to let them know about your upcoming event.
Big budget, little time: Invest your time in setting up ads to promote your event. Or hire someone with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to handle your ad setup and management for you.
Middle of the road: Mix up free event promotion with paid event promotion. For example, take that Facebook post that got lots of comments and “boost” it to reach a broader audience. Or use some of your budget to sponsor a local meetup group that would be interested in your event. You can also offer a discount or coupon code to entice people to purchase tickets before they sell out.
Scale By Doing What Works
Once you’ve started promoting your event, keep the momentum going by periodically adjusting your game plan. If you find that one marketing channel is working better than another, keep doing what’s working and replace the under-performing one with something else you haven’t tried yet.
Don’t Neglect Your Own Site
Your website is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal because you have full control over it. Don’t stop at adding an event to your calendar! Leverage other pages on your site to maximize opportunities for potential attendees to see it.
If you’re using Loxi to power your calendar, you can simply copy your embed code and paste it where you want your events calendar to display on your site, like in a sidebar or as a featured event in a blog post. Other calendars can typically do this as well, but you might need to dig into the settings to figure out how to make it work.
Ready to Get More Attendees?
Put your event promotion plan in motion and see how it takes off.
And when you have time, come back and leave a comment to let us know how it went. Good luck!
Back to all posts