If your event is open to the general public – or to a certain type of business, it is important to work out your marketing strategy to ensure you reach as many people as possible and therefore maximise your audience – and make sure your event is successful – and indeed profitable!
Use social media
Social media is an excellent way of marketing your event and creating excitement – you first need to decide which platform is right for you – Instagram and Facebook tend to be the best platforms for events that appeal to the general public and LinkedIn is more appropriate for corporate events. Post on local community groups – these tend to have a large reach and people repost news that they are interested in on their own feeds, thereby increasing your reach. With social media, keep it short and to the point and use an impactful image to catch people’s attention immediately – people scroll through posts quickly so you need them to stop and read yours!
Sell your performers
Include images and videos of any performers on your posts and on the ticket booking site so you can give people a taste of what to expect – especially if the performers are not that well known.
Make your call to action clear
Make sure you are clear with your “Call to Action” – ie you are asking people to buy tickets. Include the date, time, price and the ticket selling information on any marketing materials – whether it is via phone or online. Include a clickable link/QR code through to the booking site when advertising on social media.
Post, post, post
Ask the performers to post the event on their own social media to encourage their followers to buy tickets – they will often have a bigger reach than you so use their audience if you can. Encourage all your volunteers (and friends and family) to like and repost your events to further increase the reach of your posts. A countdown 10 days to the event on social media – or whatever timescale you choose – also builds anticipation and excitement.
Branding makes a difference
Event specific branding – use your logo if you have one – will enable people to recognise your brand. Keep all your posts of an event in the same style so people immediately know who you are and what you are selling.
Special offers
In order to push people into buying tickets, you might like to think about offering an early bird ticket that has a reduced price. People love deals if they think they are getting good value for money. You could also offer five for the price of four tickets or a similar deal to encourage larger groups to come along – everyone loves a bargain!
Designing your marketing materials
Free design packages such as Canva are excellent at providing templates you can use – you can upload your own photos, logos, colour branding and so forth and then adapt the templates to fit the medium you are using – social media, posters and so on. They even enable you to produce animations that make your event pop on social media.
Creating a leaflet
If you have the budget to produce a leaflet, you may like to give some to the local library, tourist office and local hotels and B&Bs – even local schools may be willing to distribute your leaflets – depending on the event, of course – make sure it is age appropriate!
Ask your sponsors to help
If you have sponsors for your event, ask them to publicise the event amongst their staff and clients – many will have marketing email newsletters that they send out to their database and may be willing to include your event in them.
Free listing sites
There are a surprising number of websites that are willing to post your events for free – and talk to local newspapers to see if they will run a story for you – this is more likely if you are raising money for charity as they will be happy to give you free publicity if so. Whatever the theme, it is always worth asking!
How we can help
If you book your event with us, using our venues and online Box Office for selling your tickets, we can also help market your event on social media and in our own promotional leaflets (25,000 are distributed) and fortnightly emails to over 4,600 members of our mailing list. We automatically upload your event onto our ticket booking site which provides immediate exposure to our audiences – and we will also upload your event onto all the free listing sites too – doing all the hard work for you! For more information, simply email us at [email protected] or call 01749 834230.