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If you are even meagerly related to the events industry, you surely understand the importance and dread of these two words — Event promotion!
Though it is something extremely crucial and totally inescapable, event organizers often fail to understand its true essence. This leads to a situation where they go haphazard with their marketing and the results end up usually not so good.
Now event organisers or the hosts cannot be completely blamed for such errors. Event promotion is indeed such a diverse, complex and multilateral concept that it becomes really difficult for an individual to understand it in its totality. Every event needs something different for its promotion. Yet there are some things that all events need.
Event promotion encompasses all the efforts made to successfully market an event and does not require a huge budget.
So where do you draw the line? Where do you go conventional and where do you go totally unique? Well, there is no one definite answer to this question. But if you understand some basic essentials of event promotion, you can surely master the rest. Here’s a little guide that can help you through the process.
The Beginning
One thing that you need to understand is that pertaining to the scenario of today’s market, you need to have a good concoction of online as well as offline promotion.
You will never drive the results you want by focusing all your energies on a single platform. Instead, take an approach of organized diversification, starting with email marketing and social media.
-Josh Steimle, Entrepreneur India
You need to promote locally to reach out to the people living in all the target areas of your event. Plus, you need to promote it online to reach out to a broader audience.
The WHATS of Event Promotion
Offline Promotion
This process begins with two major questions:
- What are the target demographics of your event?
- Where can they be found?
The answers to these questions would set the basic outline around which the process of your event promotion can be defined.
1. Hoardings/ Posters/ Banners
Hoardings work as the primary tool of your offline promotion practice. This is because the human brain processes visual information quicker. Thus, some good graphics combined with some crisp and interesting content will do the job of grabbing people’s attention.
2. Flyers
The baby version of hoardings, flyers, are also very effective. Though they don’t catch as much attention as the hoardings, they are the best choice where large banners are not feasible. Follow a similar pattern of interesting designs and minimal content and you are good to go.
3. Personal/ Organisational Invitations
Your rather targeted and specified audience can be largely influenced by the help of personal or organisational invitations. Say, for example, you are hosting an event in the automobile industry, you should invite various companies and their employees with targeted invitations rather than relying on posters to do the job.
4. Local Media Promotions
The local media channels of your area can also work as amazing mediums to reach out to your audience. You can go for paid promotions in newspapers or get a speaker’s/ organiser’s interview circulated that is crafted to target the audience.
Online Promotion
1. E-mail Marketing
The most conventional yet a pretty successful online marketing technique is email marketing. However, make sure that you are not just sending out mass emails so as to land up in the spam box. Instead, indulge in some creative ways of using emails to get a larger audience.
2. Social Media
Marketing in any and every field today thoroughly uses social media. Being in the events industry, you cannot ignore it either. Social Media works as a medium that is going to give you the most far-fetched outreach. Though sometimes the people you actually end up reaching out to aren’t your target audiences, you can always work to fix that.
3. Event Website
Your event website works like the official online point of contact for your audience. It not only gives them all the required information but also works as a source of credibility. Thus, you event promotion strategy should definitely lay emphasis on the creation and spreading of your event website.
4. Registration Portal
Your registration portal can be a part of your event website or can be created separately. Either way, it has to be a strong, secure and user-friendly platform that prompts your audience to actually go through the entire event registration process.
5. Blogging
Blogging works as one of the most persuasive and effective online marketing technique. While all the other techniques limit you either with the word limit or the scope, blogging does nothing at all to restrict you.
Thus, you can inculcate as much information as you want about your event and make people have a better idea of all that they will benefit from it. Still, the sad part is that it is one of the most unexplored event promotion techniques. But if you have the resources and the scope, you should definitely go for it.
The HOWS of event promotion
1. Promotion is not equal to an advertisement.
This basic and the most crucial rule of promotion is something that almost all marketers forget. Promotion and advertisement are not the same thing. Advertisements just form a part of the giant that is called promotion.
Thus, all your event’s promotional activities cannot look like different versions of the same advertisement. Every aspect is to be dealt with differently and needs a different type of content and design. That is when they will work the best.
2. Cliched but true — Content is the King.
This cliched rule forms the crux of all the promotional activities in all the industries of the world.
No matter how strong the other elements of your event promotion are, content is the factor that frames the final decision. What all you are ready to offer does not matter, how you portray it does.
3. Overdoing is not just bad, it is sinful.
Promotions call for some regularity. You cannot just put a post one day or send out 100 emails and forget all about it. Repetition is the key to grabbing attention and influencing the perception.
However, it causes just the inverse results when you end up overdoing it. You need to be repetitive for sure, but once you go beyond a limit, you might actually end up irritating your audience which is not at all a good thing.
4. Uniformity is always attractive!
One thing that you need to engrave in your brain is that with each activity, you are not just promoting an event, but you are promoting a brand image. Your event is not a one-time transaction to last for a few days.
It is a long-term process that is going to benefit you in many ways. But for that to happen, the perceived brand image should be in sync with what you want the audience to understand. This is possible only when you work with uniformity and keep all the dots connected.
5. Call-to-action should be THE MANTRA.
And at the end of the day, you cannot forget the basic motive behind all your promotional tasks.
You don’t just want people to look at your promotion. You want them to attend your event. Keeping this basic goal in mind, always ensure that each promotional activity should end with a persuasive call-to-action.
6. Conventional Techniques, Unconventional Ways!
Basically, to ensure success when it comes to event promotion you need to follow the conventional techniques because that is what works. But you need to make the application unconventional because that is what will make you stand apart.
Now that you’re acquainted with the essentials of event promotion, get planning and come up with the perfect event promotion strategy for your event!
Wish to know how Hubilo can help you with marketing and promoting your event? Know more about us here.
Hiteshree Dudani is an event tech enthusiast who has successfully organised many eminent events. The list includes charity events, youth fests, seminars, workshops and a lot more. She is currently associated with the event technology company Hubilo. She works for the company's blog which has a wide range of useful content for event planners, event techies and event marketers.
