How to Promote St Patrick’s Day Events

St Patrick may be a saint because he drove the snakes out of Ireland and helped convert the pagans to Christianity, but these days he’s mainly known for driving rowdy Irish revellers and people looking for an excuse to party to their local pubs and bars. But how do you get those people interested in attending your St Patrick’s Day Events?
You don’t have to run an Irish pub to throw a St Patrick’s Day event, so dust off the Guinness pumps, retune your fiddles and join in the craic. This blog post will give you some top tips to make sure your venue benefits from one of the busiest and most profitable days of the year for bars and pubs. Following last week’s embarrassing result in the cricket, expect the Gaelic contingent to be in even better voice than usual this year.
Use Social Media to Spread the Word
St Patrick’s Day is such a big event that it is always a popular topic on social media websites. The best way to take advantage of this is by tagging your tweets about St Patrick’s Day events with an appropriate #hashtag. This will ensure that anyone searching Twitter for St Paddy’s day events will find your content and hopefully be persuaded to come to your venue.
St Patrick’s Day Festival Week
St Paddy’s Day is an especially long affair if you happen to be in London. The St Patrick’s Day festival week means you can have themed nights throughout the whole week, not only on the day itself. However it will be best to keep things low key until the main event, perhaps you can attract the rugby crowd with offers relating to the two Irish 6 nations fixtures on the 12th and 19th of March, or maybe offer an Irish culture event such as a poetry reading.
Stand out From the Crowd
Most venues will have some sort of event for St Patrick’s day, try to make your venue stand out from the crowd and at least do more than a special offer on Guinness. A popular option is for venues to create their own themed cocktails – Guinness or whiskey based are the most common. There are plenty of great Irish bands out there who can help liven up your event, or perhaps you can have prizes for the best Irish themed fancy dress. A combination of these suggestions should ensure that your venue has a lively atmosphere and people stick around instead of moving on to another venue.
Use Event Listing Websites
Even if you are unfamiliar with this type of site it is imperative that you promote your St Patrick’s Day events on these channels. Event listing sites are perfect tools to increase the attendance at your events as users will search them with the express intention of finding St Patrick’s Day parties. Try using a multitude of different sites such as Yelp to increase your potential audience and bring in the punters.
Image Credit – Florian Knorn