We all know that events are the best place to spend time with your family, colleagues, and friends. But to host an event and promote it across social media is one of the most challenging factors. Because getting attendants for the event is not as easy as it seems. That’s why event organizers rely on social media to get a better audience. Now comes the main part for event organizers is to learn how to promote events on social media?
Any event organizer should never rely on getting participants from one source or medium. For example spending on ads heavily on traditional media but not on digital media. When you invest everything in just one medium, you are bound to miss a lot of opportunities from the other medium. As you don’t know what holds you there on the other side.
To expand your horizons, you should always consider investing in social media for better reach. Because there are proven statistics that social media is the best platform to get conversions and create awareness about your event.
With a well-thought planned strategy, you can easily get respondents for your event. This will help you to sell tickets or event merchandise.
In this blog post, you will get to know the importance of promoting events on social media and how to promote your event with ideas.
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Importance of promoting an event on social media
Promoting on social media platforms is something that should never be ignored. Because the benefits that you are going to achieve by promoting an event on social media are limitless. As you can’t predict the human behaviour that how they are going to react to the event. You will get to know insights on how you can improvise it or even position it better through this method.
1. Brand awareness
Social media is the best platform to create brand awareness for any event. As you know, people are more actively engaged on social media than ever before. You can find people of every age group, gender, and locality. That’s what makes it the best place to promote your event. It will be important for every event organizer to promote extensively on social media as it creates brand awareness. This will even give you a better chance of understanding the market response for your event.
2. Get better conversions
The social media platform is one of the best ways to get an effective conversion. If you are selling any event tickets or merchandise, social media promotion is a much-required process. This even creates an opportunity for you to upsell or cross-sell tickets for products. As we have seen brands engaging on social media and promoting to scale their growth. You can even get real-time engagement statistics. Through this technique, you can easily calculate the ROI for your ad campaigns.
3. Get targeted attendants
There are multiple ad targeting opportunities that are provided by social media channels. Any brand can target its users based on interest level, designation, and education. Let us assume that you are hosting an art event, obviously, your target audience would be the artists. You can easily target people who have developed an interest in art or who are working in the field of art. Through these in-depth targeting strategies, you can easily get relevant participants for your event.
Read in detail: Why Social Media Marketing is Important?
How to promote an event on social media?
Since you understood the importance of promoting the event on social media, now it’s your turn to learn how to promote it. As an average social media user is being pounded with tons of promotional posts, grabbing their attention is not so easy as it seems. When you can position promotional campaigns uniquely, only then you can capture attention from them.
However, social media platforms are one of the best places to speak all about your event. What it offers, benefits of attending and what are they going to achieve from it. When you can convey these messages effectively through social media promotion, you’ll easily get better conversions for your event. Let us now understand the steps for promoting your event on social media.
1. Create a strategy
First, you decide what are the goals and objectives that you need to assign for the social media promotion. When you are able to decide the goals and objectives, you can proceed to other steps easily. Because event organizers fail to do this basic step. When they don’t know what the KPIs are, it is very hard for them to convey to the social media marketer. And then the marketer won’t be able to execute the campaign correctly.
Basically, you need to analyze what kind of goals and objectives you want to achieve. Whether the campaign is going to be for brand awareness, getting participants, or even selling your event products. Depending upon the type of requirement, you can easily create a social media strategy.
2. Set up social media accounts on every channel
Creating a social media account on every channel would be imperative for you to promote an event effectively. Because you can’t predict the nature of the campaign, how is it going to react on what program. For that reason, you need to try to utilize almost all social media channels for efficient reach.
Ensure that every social media account that is going to set up has been filled with appropriate details. You need to check the about section of every account whether it has inserted details like your event name, phone number, and website address. You can also insert descriptions in every social media account to help the viewers understand what it is all about.
When you provide the required details in the about section of social media accounts, this helps the audience to get credibility. It also develops trust between your event and the end-user.
3. Follow design guidelines
When you assign the promotional collaterals for designers, ensure that they are meeting the social media design guidelines. Because every social media platform has its own specific design requirement. And through this way, social media channels display the designs to the audience on their news feed.
If you comply with the design guidelines, you will easily get better reach on social media channels. This has been proven tactics and even social media companies suggest that you need to follow the requirement. As the audience can see the promotional brochure or social media post in an exact format from their mobile or desktop device. This creates an engaging experience for them.
4. Use compelling headlines
Headlines are the best way to grab the attention of your audience. Many social media marketers spend a lot of time brainstorming for the headlines and captions for the ad campaigns. Because there are several reports where people have received results that Headlines are one of the key parts to driving response from users.
Did you know that you could even test the effectiveness of your headlines or social media captions? The process to test is called A/B testing. Basically, a marketer will be using multiple ad copies with different headlines or captions. Through this, they will check which headline is performing better.
This makes it easy for event organizers to heavily invest in top-performing ad campaigns. You should always see that your headlines are catchy, drive interest and create value to them.
5. Use branded hashtags
Hashtags are one of the creative ways to engage with your target audience. Because hashtags are memorable and help to track all the social media campaigns. Many brands are successfully utilizing this strategy for effective reach.
Every social media channel has a scope for inserting hashtags. Whether it can be Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. All the social media platforms are rooting for the hashtag strategy for you to get effective results.
You need to come up with a hashtag strategy that is relevant to your brand. Allocate one primary hashtag and 2-3 subsidiary hashtags for your event. The hashtags can be based on the locations, type of event, and even your event name. Through these ways, you can easily come up with a branded hashtag.
6. Use a website landing page
When you are driving traffic from the ad campaigns to another website, ensure that you use a proper relevant landing page. The importance of a landing page for any campaign is limitless. When you can use the landing page effectively for your campaign, you’ll easily find better results.
Landing pages are crucial for any event. Because you can’t describe more in the social media posts, but you can give out all the information from the landing page. This will help your audience to understand the event better and sign up for it.
This even helps in search engine ranking. Whenever your audience sees your social media post and searches it on Google or any other search engine using your event name, your website with the landing page pops up. This will help them to get better clarity and is an effective way to improve conversion.
7. Host contests
A social media contest is one of the best ways to spread your ad campaigns. With minimal efforts, you will easily scale higher reach. You don’t need to invest heavily in the gifts, even a small reward will work. This is one of the best ways to create brand awareness for your campaign.
Some of the sample contests can be that you see people appreciating you to tag your peer groups. Another strategy can be to share the social media post on their news feed. Through this technique, social media marketers try to create a viral campaign.
If we see in terms of effectiveness, there are guaranteed conversions for this technique. People are always excited about the freebies, goodies are the gifts that they are going to achieve from it. Marketers take advantage of this opportunity and ensure that their campaign reaches new levels.
8. Create discounts, coupon codes, or vouchers
This is one of the popular techniques used in traditional media marketing. But did you know that these techniques work effectively even for online social media promotion? People are keen to get discounts, coupon codes, or even vouchers. This is one of the creative ways to engage with them and make them sign up for your event.
Giving out offers or coupon codes always works for any kind of social media campaign. This can be a B2B or a B2C event. As it creates a Win-Win situation for the event organizers as well as the audience.
This not only provides value for your audience, it even helps you to track your campaigns effectively. Because the audience will use the coupon code on the website to purchase the ticket, through this technique you’ll easily come to know that social media is driving the conversions.
9. Reach out to the social media influencers
When you are going to promote your event on social media, I should be always open to multiple strategies. In the year 2021, there is a huge growth in the rise of social media influencers. Every top influencer will have millions of followers, it will be convenient for you to get a sponsorship from them.
This sometimes helps to create a brand ambassador kind of opportunity for your event. This will heavily boost your credibility and get effective results. Because whenever any event is endorsed by a top social media influencer, there creates a better connection between your event as well as the audience.
You need to analyze based on your event, whether it is for business purposes, lifestyle, travel, and so on. Based on that, you can reach out to the social media influencers from the respective verticals to promote your event.
10. Monitor and optimize the performance of a campaign
The best thing about promoting your event on social media is that you can track every activity from multiple channels. It creates a chance for you to improve the performance of your campaign.
You need to regularly check the performance of your campaign. This can be done through social media management tools which give you real-time insights and analytics.
As you will be running multiple ad campaigns and you find that there is a scope of opportunities for a specific campaign. You can heavily invest in it to get better results. This is one of the ideal ways where social media marketers use this technique to promote an event.
Read in detail: Why Social Media Advertising?
To sum it up
Promoting an event on social media requires a well-planned strategy. When you can see that the social media platform is already congested with ads, you need to stand out from the crowd by executing creative campaigns.
Always ensure that the information you are sharing should be relevant to your audience and event.
Do not miss out on any social media channel for promotion. Because that is the only way for you to drive better results. As you can’t predict which social media channel would favour your event.
If you have any queries regarding the promotional techniques, drop down a comment below.
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