We have promoted a lot of offline events for clients in a variety of industries and thought it was about time we shared our best practices! Here you can learn how to promote your event through social media and give the event the boost in attendance you’re hoping for.
1) Invest in great media.
Everyone wants to get a sense of what to expect before attending an event and how it went the year before. A sure fire way to do this is to create a stunning, concise, and informative video. This video should then be leveraged everywhere; event page, social pages, articles, affiliates, etc. Host it on Vimeo or YouTube and make sure it’s all about what the potential attendees will get by attending!
Here’s a good example of building hype for a recurring event.
2) Give away tickets to help generate more and more buzz!
Start with hosting the content or giveaway on your blog and keep sending traffic back that way. Get email captures, shares/engagement on social, and more. Always give more than one to a winner so they can bring a friend. Keep the contest super easy and straightforward and consider bringing on third party judges to leverage their followings. This is, of course dependent upon the type of contest.
3) Socialize Your Google Ads
If you have a Google+ page and are using Google AdWords to promote your events you can add social proof to your paid Google ads. This increases the credibility of your ads because it showcases how many people follow your Google+ page. Here’s how to do it.
4) Interview Speakers/featured guests to generate more content.
Presenters tend to be a really big reason people attend an event so leveraging that keynote speaker and getting them maximum exposure is a great way to generate content and promote the event. This also serves to give the speaker exposure, which is something they want. We consistently interview experts.
5) Build up to the event on your blog and social.
Organizing the events, interviewing the experts, and your own industry knowledge would be a great blog post! Consider pooling tips from the experts into a blog post and sharing it on social. Don’t forget to create a gorgeous graphic to go along with it!
6) Create graphics for each speaker.
This will be a good way to encourage the speakers and affiliates to share this on their social channels as well.
7) Create a quick and easy way for people to share that they’re attending your event!
A quick click on their end and the event can be seen by a lot of people who may now consider attending. Consider just putting it on the landing page and having quick links to share on major social platforms.
8) Create a widget to encourage social conversations.
This will read conversations about your events straight from Twitter so you can display them on your website! a Twitter widget on your site.
Take a look here for more on how to embed a Twitter widget on your site.
9) Create a Facebook Events!
This may seem obvious, but people do search what events are going on in their area and people like to show their interest to get reminders. (And show their friends!)
If you have multiple events, consider create an event calendar:
10) Use the Facebook Pixel to retarget.
The Facebook Pixel is a fantastic way to retarget your ads to people who have viewed your content. Essentially, someone could have visited your page, and then next time they’re on Facebook, the Pixel would ensure they would see your ads and be reminded to look into the event again.
Give some, or all, of these ideas a go the next time you have an offline event that you need to promote! There’s no reason you not to leverage social to boost the attendance of your event to people who are already loyal to your brand. And to reach people who have yet to discover you!