Getting the Word Out About Your Awesome Event
Effective event promotion is the foundation of what makes an event successful. How much time, effort and budget you put into your promotion – and whether you’ve targeted it at the right people will directly impact how successful you are.
“You always need to do more promotion than you think. It’s worth spending money on getting posters up in highly-visible places around the city centre and look into paid social media promotion – it’s not as expensive as you might think.” – Jamie Groovement (Groovement.co.uk)
How to market an event will largely depend on who your audience are and what sort of event you’re holding. But there are a few things that remain the same no matter what sort of party you’re putting on.
You might be asking yourself, why is it important to market an event – and do I really need to do it? The answer is yes – you do! But you don’t have to do it alone.
Is Your Chosen Venue Absolutely Promoting Your Event?
The venue you’ve chosen for your event should be helping you advertise – not directly with things such as costs, but they should be including your event in their ‘What’s On’ calendar, promoting you across their social media pages, and adding your party to any newsletters they send out.
You should also be asking them if you can put posters up in the lobby and have fliers to give out.
The Venue has a vested interest in seeing you succeed – after all, the better your event does, the more people attend, the more they’ll get involved and possibly come back another time. So, don’t be afraid to ask the people at your venue to get in on promoting your party.
You should make this as easy as possible for them – by providing clear and dynamic images, a list of the Artists or Special Guests attending, the start time (and finish is applicable), dress code, accessibility – and anything else you think a potential ticket buyer needs to know.
Are You Making the Most of Word-of-Mouth and Your Staff?
Get your friends and family involved, get your team involved – the more people talk about the event, the more other people will see it.
It’s especially important if you’re a new event – you need to know how to market an event online to catch the attention of your audience, and the best start to this is to build locally.
People are going to be more likely to trust you when they can see excitement and enthusiasm coming from the people working on the event.
Hype needs to build from home.
What Can You Do to Really Spread the Word About Your Event?
After you’ve spoken to your venue and your team, and you’re promoting with them – you need to make sure your social media channels are functioning at their best, that your website gives people information they need – and a good reason to get excited.
You also need to make sure that you’ve covered the basics – “There are always things that pop up when you least expect them to. Our advice would be to double and triple check everything – if at any point it involves paper work or obtaining a license for a venue, then make sure you have copies of absolutely everything.” – Benji B, Deviation
Keeping organised and knowing who is doing what will help you with your promotion as well – you can reach out to websites, media channels and Influencers – but if you’ve not kept track of who you’re speaking to, and what you’re asking – you run the risk of annoying people with repeated requests, or missing out on a connection because you think it’s already been done.
At the end of the day, organisation, dedication and motivation are what you need to market an event and make it a success.
