“Eventuality”: Promoting Your Event
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Promoting any event requires a lot of pre-planning. Whether it’s a live event, or a trade show, or you run a business organizing speed dating, the basics are the same, you need the marketing campaign to run along the right grooves, and you need to get enough people to fill the event so it becomes a profitable affair. But with the amount of modern tools to get people to events, do we even need to worry about attendance anymore? In short, yes.
The pre-production stage of any live event is all in the best few marketing methods available. Many companies would wage out an all-over attack on the senses by getting their promotional materials onto as many different platforms as they can. This can cause a sense of annoyance for the casual customer seeing the same ads pop up on their newsfeed, and can turn them off the event. By choosing just a few select channels to promote your event, and to the right target markets, it will prove to be a more effective approach in the localities of where the event is due to take place.
The supplementary materials for promotion can help to gather interest because of the personality it gives you. A video or vlog are a dime a dozen, but it’s an essential part of promoting a live event now. Even theatre productions have online trailers, which is mixing the message across different platforms. If you work with local sponsors, this can be a good way to get some funding to create a better quality of promotional material. But you can always take the rustic approach and work on a poster design or two. Using poster maker software now means that even the least artistically inclined among us can knock out a poster that carries some swag, and with the amount of online promotional materials, it is refreshing to see something in the flesh on occasion!
Marketing the event on the day itself is a totally different beast to the build-up prior. This is where your marketing campaign has to go into overdrive and the tweets need to be flying out thick and fast, and social media has become such a fantastic tool for real-time updates, making an event hashtag and adding photos and videos adds to the anticipation for an event. While you may be in overdrive getting your event ready at the last minute, there are programs like Hootsuite you can use to schedule your social media updates. As much as an event is about being there in person, there could be many that are unable to attend but are able to view it via their phones, which is why live streaming is such a popular method to take now, so if you are looking low in numbers on the day, you may make up for it by having people view it online. Although the feeling of a live event is totally dissimilar to viewing it on a computer screen, that obstacle can be overcome somewhat by having a team film the event to a high standard.
