If you are new to events marketing, you may struggle to time your marketing communications for optimum impact.
Ignoring for a moment the ‘gurus’ who claim to be able to predict when a tweet or email reminder will reach the greatest number of eyeballs, let’s look at a rough timescale for promoting your event effectively online.
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If you are new to events marketing, you may struggle to time your marketing communications for optimum impact.
Ignoring for a moment the ‘gurus’ who claim to be able to predict when a tweet or email reminder will reach the greatest number of eyeballs, let’s look at a rough timescale for promoting your event effectively online.
Weeks before your event
Book your venue, acts and make arrangements for security.
If you have video footage of past events featuring the same artist(s), upload it to YouTube to catch people curious about the featured artists. As a bonus, video content is extremely well optimized for search engines so it will boost the chance of your content getting exposure online.
3 weeks before your event
Submit your event to as many listings sites as possible.
Tip: If you’re using evvnt to promote your event on multiple listings sites, we recommend scheduling it to go out at least 2 months in advance. Since different websites have different editorial and content approval calendars, your event information may not receive enough attention if promoted less than 1 month ahead of time. However, social media, email and mobile marketing campaigns can be scheduled as far in advance as you like.
2 weeks before your event
Send out an email informing your subscribers of the event. Email marketing for events will not only drive registrations but will help build relationships, cross promoting content, promoting apps and get feedbacks. Remember to have a share button on the email in order to encourage sharing as well as an unsubscribe one.
1 week before your event
Start promoting the event on Twitter with relevant hashtags (e.g. #evvnt2014, #weAREevvnt).
Publish the event to your Facebook page. You can set this up in advance as a draft and just tweak as necessary later to save time in the run-up to your event. You can do this either directly on Facebook or using one of the external tools available. You can reach additional users by employing the tagging feature (simply tag your artists/partners pages using @[page name] feature).
If you are promoting your event with an SMS campaign or mobile flyer, this is the time to send a mobile message with brief event details and a website link to notify your potential attendees. A mobile campaign can be one of the most effective ways to promote events with regard to response numbers – there are many low-cost SMS marketing providers out there that can help you.
4 days before your event
Consider sending a reminder email to your subscriber list to remind people who may wish to attend your event but have forgotten the date. Do be careful not to send too many emails, however, as you may soon find people are sending your emails straight to spam.
There are different views on the maximum number you should send, but we recommend no more than 2 a week, as the main reason people give for unsubscribing from mailing lists is because they are receiving emails too frequently.
Likewise, you should consider sending a reminder SMS now.
3 – 2 – 1
In the final few days before your event takes place, keep promoting your event on Twitter and on updates to Facebook. As a close to real-time platform, users who are inundated by hundreds of tweets are more likely to take notice of your post if the event is taking place in the next day or two. Your tweets should be useful and informative, not dressed-up ads. So whether you are providing a piece of interesting news, a guestlist invite or special offer – don’t throw away your followers’ goodwill on endless tweets that provide little value.
In the short term, Twitter is useful for filling your venue – but it can also be a valuable long-term platform, depending on your goals. If your goal is simply to build awareness of your brand, you will gain influence and visibility as you gradually accrue followers.
The day of your event
If you have plans to repeat the event, consider posting tweets in real-time during the event to drum up awareness for the next occasion. One of the best ways to gain followers is by using @ mentions and retweeting other people who tweet about subjects of interest to your own followers – sooner or later people will reciprocate.
Remember, no marketing strategy should exist in a vacuum and cross-referencing all of your content should produce a multiplier effect, hopefully resulting on more bums on seats.
This is a guest post by evvnt. evvnt enables people all over the world to fill their events utilizing the most effective event listing sites on the web. Every minute, with little more than a click, more events and conferences appear in listings, in search engines and on mobile – discoverable by both category and location. With next to no effort customers of evvnt get better attendance, while consumers find events they previously had no idea existed. To date customers in 70 countries worldwide have submitted over 500,000 thousand event listings, created over 300,000 live links, and generated 1 million clicks to ticketing and registration pages. Learn more at www.evvnt.com