If you are new to events marketing, you may struggle to time your marketing communications for optimum impact. If we ignore the ”gurus” for a moment – who claim to be able to predict when a tweet or email reminder will reach the greatest number of eyeballs. We can see that there seems to be a timeline that can help you with promoting your event.
Let’s look at a rough timescale for promoting your event effectively online.
6 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 optimised for search engines so 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 no more than 3 months in advance. Since different websites have different editorial and content approval calendars your event information may not receive enough attention if promoted more than 3 months 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. You can find some tips on how to combine your email marketing with your social media, in this post.
1 week before your event
Start promoting the event on Twitter with relevant hashtags (e.g. #comedy, #free #camden).
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 message 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.
For More Marketing Advice – https://evvnt.com/blog/category/event-marketing/
