by jonc | Feb 14, 2019 | Promote
Intro
If you’re like most event organisers, one of the biggest challenges you probably face when running an event is creating an effective marketing strategy. Most events have small teams, and everyone in that team ends up doing a little bit of everything.
Like most event organisers, you probably don’t have the luxury of having a dedicated social media team religiously going through various channels ensuring plenty of engagement. Nor do you have huge budgets to spend on adverts and campaigns.
Instead, you have to get creative in making the most out of what budget you have and ensure you maximise the return on your spending. The end goal is usually the same — to spend as little as possible yet still sell more tickets for as little effort.
It can be a tricky one to get right, but not impossible! Here are some of our top low budget marketing tips for your event.
Collect and Understand Your Data
You’re likely marketing on several different channels, whether that’s email, digital advertising or various social media platforms. All these channels can provide you with essential data that tells you who’s looking at your event and what’s working.
Reviewing that data as frequently as possible is essential in building an understanding of who you’re marketing to and who your potential attendees might be. Understanding which marketing channels are working best and who’s engaging with that marketing means that you can tailor your marketing budget to where you see the biggest return on investment (ROI).
To learn how to be more efficient with your budget, to work out who to target and where to target them, do the following:
- Set up tracking links to your post. Tracking links are the best way to see where people came from when they found your event listing/website. Bitly offer a great free service where you can customise the link and track not only how many people have clicked on the link but which social channel they came from and where in the world they’ve clicked from. They offer a paid service which offers more features, but for basic link tracking their free service is perfect!
- Look at how your social media is performing. All social media channels offer ‘insights’ into how people engage with your posts. You can look at views, likes and shares which tend to come as standard. Some platforms also offer you insights into link clicks as well as profile clicks. If you run a business account on some social media channels you can even check the ages, gender and time of day when your posts receive the most engagement.
Refine Which Social Media Channels Are Used
There are several social media channels available for you to market your event. Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest — the list goes on. Every one of these channels is both time and cost consuming. Once you’ve gathered your data, you’ll be able to make a more informed decision about which social media channels work best for your event.
The best way to make your event marketing budget go further is to the only fund in the channels that will work best for you. For example, if you’re running a music event, you should probably throw marketing on Linkedin out the window! Or, if you’re running a fashion event, Instagram is the best platform to showcase all of your great visual content.
Suppose your budget is limited; just pick a couple of social media channels – where you’re already seeing greater engagement and focus on those. If you’re unsure which platform is working best for you, go back to step one and look at the data from the platform you’re already using. Look back over time to see if your engagement on some platforms has grown or dropped.
Automate Your Social Media Post
A great way to save you time and money with your social media posts is using automation tools. Automating your marketing posts for your events will help you reduce the amount of time spent manually managing your campaigns, meaning you can be more productive and improve the content that goes out.
There are plenty of free tools that can help you with this:
- Buffer – With Buffer’s free service, you can schedule multiple posts to be automatically posted when you decide across multiple platforms. It works across Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram. There is a pro version of Buffer; however, if you’re looking to save those pennies to reinvest in your event, the free version can offer you everything you need.
- Planoly – Planoly is purely an Instagram automation tool, but it does have some other powerful free features. You can plan and schedule your posts and look at basic stats from the previous week or 30 days. Another cool feature of Planoly is that you can grab stock images or other accounts images directly through the platform to share on your own feed. So if you’re running low on the content, you have the option of ‘regramming’ others’ content to bolster yours. There are multiple paid–for accounts, but the free version should be more than enough to get you going.
Reach Out To Partners and Influencers
Sponsors, vendors and even your attendees all can be a part of your marketing team. Discover ways to engage with them on social media and reach out to their fans and followers. This way, you can expand your reach to those who may also be interested in your event.
The best people to reach out to build engagement are influencers — these guys are the pros of social media. We aren’t saying to reach out to huge celebrities who can be incredibly expensive to have promote you. Look out for ‘micro-influencers: those that fit your niche and have a smaller yet more targeted following. These are the influencers that are perfect to market your event to and get behind you.
Conclusion
Marketing budgets can be a nightmare, especially when you’re running a small event, and you’d rather be spending the money investing in your event. Whilst you can’t eliminate all marketing costs, we hope these tips will help you save a bit of money and make your budget go that little bit further.
by jonc | Feb 7, 2019 | Promote
The use of influencer marketing has grown exponentially over the last few years due to the ever-increasing growth of social media. Influencers are common users to promote brands and products through sponsored posts across social media. Influencer marketing can involve anything from product placements to brand mentions. These influencers are generally paid per promotional post.
However, more and more brands are beginning to use influencers to promote events.
An incredible example of the power of influencer marketing for events is Fyre Festival. Despite the festival itself being a complete disaster, without the influencers creating such a large hype before the festival it may never have spiralled out of control as quickly as it did.
Rohan Midha, managing director of the PMYB influencer agency, says that while Fyre itself was a failure, the marketing choices behind it were not. He told the BBC:
It just shows how powerful influencers can be. Influencers can reproduce the largest return on investment…That’s across the board.
Werner Geyser, the founder of the Influencer Marketing Hub, agrees, saying since the release of the documentaries his web traffic has spiked a curiosity in the industry has increased.
If anything [the Fyre Festival documentary] was showing utilising influencer marketing was part of its success in terms of marketing the event…It’s all publicity at the end of the day. I think brand managers and influencers will be more cautious and that can only be a good thing.
Influencers’ primary purpose is to boost visibility and engagement around the brand and event. Read on to discover the best practices when using influencer marketing.
Create Great Visual Content
The main reason to use influencers for events is it can promote it for you on various social media channels. But you always need to keep in mind that influencers won’t share posts of your event if it doesn’t look good. Influencers have an image to maintain, so they need to constantly be sharing visually appealing content (images/videos).
If the lighting or decor is n’t up to standard and they can’t create good content, they may not be as keen to share your event with their followers.
It is crucial that the event is ‘Instagramable’. There needs to be plenty of opportunities throughout the event to take good pictures. Whether it be something as simple as good lighting or even event accessories such as place cards, food, banners and table settings. From there they will proactively share Instagram Stories, photos and live feeds to show their followers how ‘awesome’ your event is.
Understand Your Guest List
You can’t get just any influencers to promote your product through sponsored posts. This works the same for events. You cannot just invite any influencer to your event. You need to ensure that you invite influencers that appeal to your target market, audience and attendees. This means you should really study your guest list and your social media audience.
Take a look at the various demographics and identify which influencers would be the most effective for your event. Asking your audience directly is even an option through polls and surveys on social media. This again brings greater engagement to your event. By gathering this information from their responses you should be able to gauge exactly what kind of influencers your audience would like to see at your event.
If your guest list includes any non-paid influential people within your community it’s worth checking their social media accounts see if there are any specific influencers they follow. This should give you a better idea of whom to invite and whom to avoid.
Generate Buzz Before Your Event
In many cases, you want influencers to talk about your event before it even begins. They can share pictures of an invite or even what they plan on wearing! The most important thing is to share details about the event to inform and remind followers about it. This helps generate a buzz around the event and encourage people to keep an eye out for more event-related content.
Creating this buzz before your event is especially important if your event involves some kind of audience involvement, such as product launches, concerts, etc. Generating pre-event buzz is great if you’re looking to drive higher audience attendance or if you need your attendees to take some kind of action before the event itself.
Have your influencer share plenty of event content
The whole point of having influencers at your event is to get their audience and reach to engage with your event. Briefing the influencers before the event is also essential, as you’ll need to encourage them to share as much photo and video content with their followers, along with a relevant event hashtag.
Sharing a live feed or stories from the event to document their experience is another useful tool. They shouldn’t just share content after the event is over, but share content throughout the event itself to let their followers get a real feel for the experience of the event.
Live content from events is a great way to build authenticity around your event. As everything is captured in real time there’s less risk of audiences thinking the content has been edited in any way. It makes audiences feel involved and makes them feel closer to your brand and event.
Share content after the event finishes
Using influencers to create content about your event is a fantastic way to expand your reach and potentially bring new audiences to your event. Keeping the momentum going after your event is over is also a great way to keep that audience engaged, especially if your event is recurring. It brings another level of credibility and keeps your current audience engaged.
If you had professional photography at the event, sharing those images on social media and creating blogs will give your profiles and brands a professional image. The images will look exciting and aid in creating the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) when alongside a line of plans for your next event.
This may drive attendance at your next event as well as encourage other influencers to potentially reach out to you and join your next campaign.
Sharing the influencer’s direct content is an amazing way to build engagement with your current audience; it can lead to growth in both your own and the influencer’s following. Just ensure you get their permission before sharing their content.
Conclusion
These are a few of the best practices when using influencer marketing to promote your event. Planning is key with this, so plan your campaign carefully and ensure you have plenty of time to build that hype and organise what elements of your event you want to highlight, capture and share. Influencers can be incredibly busy, so make sure you give them plenty of time so they can execute your carefully designed plan. If the influencer you have in mind can’t make your event make sure you have a list of backups to invite, so you can carry out your plan as efficiently as possible.
