The advent and progress of social media platforms have made it much easier to communicate with your prospective customers. Whether you are planning an event or offering festival discounts, social media networks offer the right space to reach out to potential customers and share the message.
Event promotion is about letting your followers know that you are hosting an event and convincing them to attend. And the best part is event promotion on social media will not break the bank. It allows you to promote the event at a lower budget and achieve the best outcomes. There is so much to do when you want to promote an event on social media. The right approach is to work on a proper event marketing strategy and execute it. In this blog, we talk about a few easy and effective tips to promote an event on social media.
Define Your Objective
It may look like a no-brainer initially because the goal of any event promotion strategy would be to get more attendees. You can specify the goals so that it makes it much easier to track the progress and tweak your campaigns accordingly. For example, you can keep track of the total number of registrations, number of paid attendees, number of free registrants, etc. Make sure you come up with specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals to make the whole process easier.
Create Your Buyer Persona
When you know your target attendees, you can create event promotion campaigns that delight them. Like any other marketing campaign, you should create the buyer persona before you create the campaigns. Figure out who are your target attendees and gather various data about them so that you can decide on the right social media platforms to run your campaigns. Moreover, you can come up with the right marketing tactics and curate messages to attract and convert them to event attendees.
Plan An Event Hashtag
Hashtags are a social media tool to group conversations together. Adding hashtags to your posts will significantly increase the reach of the posts and improve user engagement. When you want to promote an event, you can decide on a relevant hashtag. Also, make it short and crisp so that it is easy to pronounce and remember for your target group. Once you have finalized the hashtags, make sure you use them on every post related to the event across social media networks. You can ask the attendees, sponsors, event speakers, employees, and other stakeholders to use the same hashtag on their posts related to the event.
Choose Social Media Platforms Appropriately
All major social media platforms are different from one another. You need not have to focus on all of it while you promote your event. Once you pinpoint your target audience, you can figure out which platform gives you the best results. Each platform needs a unique approach for event promotion. While you can use LinkedIn for event announcements and posting press releases, you can focus on creating attractive posts with event hashtags for Twitter. Instagram would be beneficial for advertising short videos or images about the event; TikTok gives the best results if your targets are a young audience.
Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
Before you start promoting the event, make sure your profiles are updated. Keep your professional bio, company description, images, etc. optimized and professional. If you have an event section on your website, make sure it is updated. Also, update your ‘About us’ section with an engaging company description and mention the details of the event. The username, hashtags, headers, and descriptions should have consistency across the various social media platforms.
Craft Engaging Content
No matter how well you plan the event promotion, it will be less likely to yield the desired results if the content is not engaging enough. The content is one of the make-or-break factors for the success of the event’s promotional activities. It should be engaging, conversational, and exciting but should not look too ‘salesy.’ The content should be tailored according to the respective social media platform. For example, it should be short and crisp for Twitter, while content for LinkedIn should have a professional tone.
Set Your Timeline
When it comes to event promotion, you can broadly classify it into pre-event, during the event, and post-event activities. Regardless of the size of the event, it is always better to plan all the marketing activities beforehand so that you have enough time to execute them well. Also, you can set marketing timelines such as early bird, pre-launch, speaker announcements, last call, post-event, etc. You can plan the social media strategy for event promotion based on the timelines you have set.
Build Engaging Video Teasers
Video marketing is one of the effective tools for marketing an event. If done right, it can really increase your reach and build brand awareness. You can use it to provide the required information about the event to the target customers. You can showcase the speakers and event highlights which will prompt them to register. You can come up with engaging short videos for promoting on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. For boosting engagement, you can share short interviews or behind-the-scenes videos of the event as well.
Host A Contest
Running social media contest is yet another effective way to create momentum for the event. It can significantly boost engagement which further improves brand awareness. It is a cost-effective method to promote an event. You can come up with creative and engaging contests and make sure you get them shared by speakers and VIPs attending the event. Also, you can plan for giveaways before the event to grab the attention of social media users.
Let’s Talk!
Are you planning for social media promotion for an upcoming event? Allow our social media experts to develop and execute a result-oriented promotion plan for your company. We have social media experts who understand the tips and tricks for event promotion. Get in touch with us today for a free consultation!