Event Promotion Ideas: How to promote an event successfully in 2022

The efforts and money you put into building any event go in vain if it does not reach the desired audience. Successful event promotion would be the most crucial step for any organizer after the idea. Here are the best Online event promotion ideas that can make your event successful.

The potential audience won’t be interested in attending your event if they don’t find your marketing activities engaging enough. With the industry’s ever-changing trends, it is essential for you to stay creative with your event promotion strategy to boost your event tickets sales online. 

Today, your audience is being exposed to too many brands, and it is very important for you not to get lost in their marketing clutter. Event organizers have a very limited time between the announcement and the actual event to create an impression in the mind of the target audience.

The success of any event would depend on its audience, and the engagement of your audience would depend on the success of your marketing campaign.

Creative event promotion ideas can help you stand out from the competition and boost your ticket sales growth.

First things first 

Before planning for promotions of any event, the event organizers must be very clear about the goals and objectives they want to achieve. The more clear the event organizer is with its objectives, the better it would plan its event promotions. 

In order to design a creative event promotion campaign, every organizer must be very clear with the answer to the following questions 

1. What is the idea behind organizing this event?
2. Who is the niche that you are targeting?
3. Why would your audience attend your event?
4. Where can you find your niche?
5. What incentive are you providing to your audience?
6. How are you different from other events? 

Many organizers don’t realize the importance of being clear about the event’s objective and enter into the trap of Marketing Myopia. Event organizers tend to promote what they want to offer instead of what the audience is looking for. 

Once you are clear with the answers to the above questions, it’s time for you to dive into the ocean of developing promotional strategies for your new event.

Every event organizer should develop their promotional strategy in such a way as to reach a large audience, stimulate interest in them, remind them from time to time and reinforce them to register for your event.

The goal of every event promotion must be to deliver what the audience seeks to receive.

Enter into the shoes of the attendee when planning your event promotion strategy.

Next Step To Event Promotion

Once you are clear with your objectives and know your audience, it is time to dive into designing your event promotion strategy. Designing an event promotion strategy is not an easy task. It takes a lot of effort to design and implement your event promotion idea. But if carefully planned and executed, it can do wonders for you. 

Basics for any event promotion strategy- 

Title – The title of the event must always be in alignment with the theme of the event. 

Tagline – Make sure to add a tagline to your event to convey what you are delivering.

Logo – The logo of the event should be such that the audience can associate the brand, as well as the event with it.

Color theme – The color theme of the event promotions must be consistent throughout the campaign. 

Message – Convey a consistent message through all the promotion channels of the campaign, especially event description.

Event Promotion Ideas During Different Phases of event

Your event promotions strategy would be divided into three stages – Pre-event promotions, promotions during the event, and post-event promotions. It is essential to consider all three stages while developing your event promotion strategy plan. 

Pre-Event – Event Promotion Ideas

This is the most crucial stage for any event as this takes the most time and effort to develop and implement. Any event’s success would depend on how well you engage with your audience before the event, giving them a reason to join.

The efforts put in pre event engagement stage would determine the number of attendees turning up for the event. Following are some of the creative event promotion ideas that you could implement to invite the audience –

Event before Event

One of the most creative ways to promote your event and attract your audience is by organizing different events before the actual event. 

Your potential attendees for the event would be willing to participate in the contests to get free tickets. They would spread the word for your event in order to gain more points. These contests can help you multiply your current reach and generate additional traffic on your event website and social media.

The pre event engagement ideas are not just limited to contests but can be in the forms of –

• Short Instagram Live sessions by the guests or performers
• Some social or fundraising events before the actual event
• A free educational course
• Event promo in the form of a virtual tour 
• Encouraging Live Tweeting

List your event on Event Discovery Platforms

Event Discovery platforms are a great way for every event organizer to start promoting their event. Any person planning to attend any event would usually visit event discover platforms like AllEvents.in to check the upcoming events based on their interest, geography, and schedule. It is your chance to win this attendee by being present on these platforms.

These platforms segregate events based on different criteria like event type, interests, geography, schedule, and online offline. 

Allevents.in is one such platform where event organizers across the globe can create an event, present it and market them professionally. 

Secret tip: Event organizers can get their own event websites from AllEvents for event ticketing.

Let your Mascot represent your Event

Mascots never go out of trend. A character representing your brand throughout the campaign is a very creative method to promote the event. For years, many brands have been successfully using mascots that represent their brand.

There are many benefits of using mascots to represent your event. The most important of all is the recall rate of the event. Constantly showcasing the mascots in all your posts would create a brand association. 

The attention span of any user on the internet today is significantly less. And with the invent new media, it is going further down. In such a situation, Mascots can be a valuable tool to grab your audience’s attention and impact their minds. 

The same mascots can be used for on-site marketing during the event. 

Playing with ticket pricing

Playing with the pricing of tickets is like playing with the mind of consumers. Single price ticketing might not be very effective for your event. Strategizing your ticket pricing would definitely have an impact on your ticket sales and boost your income. 

Every event organizer should try out different ticket pricing strategies such as –

• Early Bird Pricing
• Group Pricing
• Bundle Pricing
• VIP
• Ambassadors 

You can try different ticket types with the help of event listing websites. Some of the event listing websites allow you to create multiple ticket types also in multiple currencies. Try to set your ticket price in a way that triggers a sense of urgency in the minds of the audience.

A few famous options are – 

• AllEvents – In Free plan
• Eventbrite – In a Professional plan 
• Evvnt.com – With a pricing plan

Here’s how you can set early bird pricing in 1minute.

Multiply reach by making your audience your event ambassador 

The best way of gaining trust along with promoting your event is to let your attendees speak about your event. The best part about this promotional technique is that the attendee is motivated to attend your event and promote your event to his social circle. This is one of the low-cost yet effective techniques.

Increasing events Engaging your audience by making them ambassadors could give you benefits in the long run. Over time, you’ll be able to develop your community.

You can make your audience your ambassador in the following ways –

• Referral marketing – Event Ambassadors
• Featuring feedback and reviews of the past events
• Live Tweeting
• Geotagging filters on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat

With the above techniques, you can make your attendees post about your event, and in this way you will e able to reach their contacts.

Art of Storytelling

The best way to interact with your audience is to tell them a story instead of marketing your event. Good stories would build great events.

In fact, the audience recalls stories 22 times more than just simple facts. 

Event marketing is not about the tickets you sell but the story you tell. 

Great event marketers would use storytelling as a tool for promoting their event in order to engage the potential attendee in a conversation that could ultimately prompt them to attend the event.

The story about your event should convey a message. It can be in the form of how you came up with the event’s idea, the event’s lineup, or a story revolving around its theme. 

Good stories would lead to better engagement with the potential audience, which would increase the likelihood of them attending the event, making the event successful. 

Mystery Marketing

Curiosity is not only the cure for boredom but also for capturing the attention of consumers. 

Humans have a tendency to find the answer to the question which is deliberately left unanswered for them. And this is an excellent way of marketing the event as well. 

Mystery marketing creates curiosity in the mind of consumers to know the unknown.

Marketing your event mysteriously can prove to be one of the most influential and creative ways to promote an event. It can generate interest like no other form of marketing. 

Event marketers can leverage mystery marketing in the following ways – 

• Complete mystery event
• Secret events with the main event
• Creating a mystery contest
• Secret gifts for the audience
• Unexpected guest appearance

Make your audience follow you on social media to resolve the mystery.

Mystery marketing can sometimes prove to have negative results when it is too mysterious. The audience for the event would like to have a complete idea about the event for which they are paying. But successful planning and execution of mystery marketing can do wonders for your event. 

Innovative Invites

Invitations (via emails or through other channels) can be the first point of contact for most of your target audience. It is essential to engage your audience at the first point of contact.

Every event organizer must ensure that the impact of their invitation is impressive enough to generate a positive response. And in order to generate a long-lasting impression event organizers must create their invitations as innovative as possible. 

With changing trends, email invitations have also evolved. HTML email invite templates have become very popular recently. You can design them according to the theme of your event and run your email marketing campaign with the same.

Want some free ready to use downloadable event email template?

AllEvents.in provides a variety of event invite templates that are categorized based on the type of events.

Gamify the process

One of the most creative event marketing ideas is the gamification of the pre-event process. The event can be presented to the target audience in various creative ways. 

Gamification of the process serves many purposes. It makes the audience more engaged with your content. It increases the time they spend on our event website and increases the probability of attendees booking tickets for the event. 

Some methods that you can apply to gamify the process are –

• Making the registration process in the form of a game
• Providing virtual badges and goodies to the attendees at the time of registration
• Allowing attendees to create their own dashboard and arranging some virtual games around the theme of the event and allotting scores to the participants
• Making a leader board in case you are using affiliate marketing
• Allowing your attendees to create their own avatars and share them on their social media handles
• Using testimonials in the form of Avatars which can be shown on your event website and other social media handles.

Create innovative thumbnails

Directing your potential attendees to your event landing page is the primary purpose but the most challenging part of any event promotion campaign. And thumbnails can be the most effective way to attract your potential attendees landing them on your event registration page.

Innovative thumbnails accompanied by creative texts can encourage a great number of people to get registration done for your event by visiting your event website. If you don’t have your event website, you can create your event’s landing page for free by publishing your event on AllEvents.in

Create your event landing page with AllEvents.in→

Using innovative graphics and designs

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs. 

Designs are the face of any event. Good designs can make your event promotion campaign perform better. Often, the audience would judge your event based on the designs that they are exposed to. 

Design is what will make you stand out from all the competitors in the market. 

Creativity and innovation in your designs can help you engage your event’s audience better. The designs’ uniqueness will attract your audience to visit your event registration page and buy tickets for your event.

Creativity can be applied to your designs in many ways. Some of them are –

• Using unique digital characters to promote your entire event
• Using a dedicated color theme and font style throughout your designs
• Creatively Using QR codes for event registration
• A standard yet unique style of designs in all the posts
• Making your Instagram grid stand out from the rest.

To start with designing amazing graphics, you can use tools like –

• Canva
• Adobe Spark post
• Crello
• Vectr

BTS – Behind the scenes

It takes a lot of effort and courage to build an event. Why not leverage it in front of the audience?

It is always an excellent opportunity for the company to take advantage of exhibiting the hard work behind making the event happen. Event marketers could capture small moments while preparing for the event and regularly post the same on social media platforms.

Posting your event’s in-the-making process would create a sense of confidence in the community you have built on your social media platform. The ones following the thread would definitely turn up to see the final results of the event.

Instagram Reels

Social media is the best platform to promote your event. AllEvents users get most of their tickets sold through social media. 

But it is imperative to change with changing social media trends. Promoting event on Instagram by creating reels is the new trend. And for event promoters, reels can be a very effective way to promote your event.

Event promoters can make reels on the following –

• Promotions
• Showcasing the agenda of the event
• Showcasing the guests/lineup of the event
• Number of reasons to attend your event
• Event invitation videos
• Event building process
• Behind the scenes
• Countdowns
• Live audience feedback
• Testimonials

Instagram Guides

The Instagram guide is a new feature recently introduced that is basically a crossover between blogs and carousels.  You can post multiple posts along with descriptions to each. For event organizers, using an Instagram guide can prove to be a very successful event promotion idea.

Event marketers can leverage this feature by creating guides about –

• Previous events
• The lineup
• The Guests
• The partners
• The sections of the event
• Schedule of the event
• Things to know before attending the event

Find out more such tips and tricks to get maximum out of your social media efforts with this free webinar.

Promoting your event in other events

The primary purpose of any event marketing campaign is to find the right audience and target them to attend your event. And what better way to find them than by collaborating with similar events, Marketing your event in another event is a great event promotion idea.

Spending your marketing budget to promote your event in similar events would yield you a very concentrated and high-quality niche community that is genuinely interested in attending such events.

By collaborating with other events for cross-promotions, you can target lookalike audiences for your event. In this way, you also leverage their efforts to attract the audience for their event. 

For online promotions, you can set up ad popups for event advertising on their websites to target their community. 

Retargeting interested audience

Have you experienced ads related to your search history? This kind of promotion strategy is known as ad Retargeting. 

Retargeting is the best way to promote your event when you are confused about how to promote an event with a niche audience. Retargeting can be done in many ways. Be it google ad retargeting, social media ads, event listing platforms, email marketing, or push notifications. 

Most of the methods to retarget your audience falls into the category of the paid form of marketing. But some platforms allow you to retarget your audience for free. 

AllEvents.in is one such platform. With AllEvents.in, you just need to publish your event. We will help you retarget the audience interested in your event with the help of reminder emails and push notifications.

Want to set automated reminder emails for interested audiences? Publish your events on AllEvents.in →

 

During Event – Event Promotion Ideas

Most event organizers miss conducting promotional activities during the events. The promotional activities undertaken during the event helps you build a long-lasting image of your event and your brand in the audience’s mind.

It creates an impact that enables you to retarget them for your next event. It also provides an incentive for the audience to participate in post-event promotions (Reviews) as well.

Following are some event promotion ideas that you could implement during your event. –

Let your guest talk about your event

You can count on various people to talk about your brand and events as their stakes and benefits are also attached to your event.

These stakeholders include chief guests, performers, Judges, partners, and sponsors for your event. Never miss making them post about your event.

Think about an influencer doing Instagram live from your event. This will increase your reach and create fear of missing out on audiences who are not attending your event.

Get into the social media of your audience.

When you promote your event on social media, it will definitely boost your brand visibility. It will be beneficial for your next event marketing.

You can make your audience post about your event in the following way:

• Arranging a small competition were posting on social media is a part of actions.
• A themed and exciting photo wall where attendees can click pictures.
• Gifting your attendees with swag goodies to showcase.
• Encouraging the audience to take small videos and pictures and tag your social media page.

Pro tip: You can try creating an event on Facebook to sneak into the eyes of your target audience.

Collect maximum pictures and videos

Past event pictures will ensure a good experience for people and encourage them to purchase tickets for your next event without any fail.

During the event, You should try collecting maximum pictures and videos that will help you in the next event promotion. Posting exciting videos and pictures can also create fear of missing out among audiences who haven’t attended your event.

Post-Event Promotion Ideas

The main idea behind post-event promotions is to reinforce our brand even after the event. Organizers often work hard to build the event and promote it to the audience but forget to pay equal attention to post-event feedback.

Feedback can also act as a promotional mechanism by targeting the audience who attended our event and giving them the incentive to attend our upcoming events. Post-event promotions can help you make your next event better than the previous one. It helps you improve the user experience. Following are some of the post-event promotion activities that you can try for your event –

Leveraging event feedback as a testimonial for the next event

Any event is not successful before you get feedback from the attendees about the event. Event feedback froms are a very crucial part of any event. You not only get a chance to interact with your attendees but also chance to develop long-lasting relationships with them. 

Feedback received from your event attendees helps you judge how well the event is being perceived by the audience and what changes can be made to make it even better. You can also create a Facebook group to get feedback from your community and promote future events.

Most organizers use automated feedback emails to collect feedback from attendees. Some event ticketing platform will make your work easy and collect feedback from your attendees on your behalf. That is super easy way to collect feedback.

Feedback received post your event can also be used as a promotional technique by the event organizer to show your event’s success. This feedback can act as testimonials on your website. 

Check out this example on how to use feedback as a testimonial 🠮

All three phases of event promotions must always be in alignment with each other. Pre-event promotions would help you increase the attendance of your attendees, while promotions during and after the event would help you improve user experience and brand awareness. Post-event promotions often work as pre-event promotions for your upcoming events as well. 

Create fear of missing out

After completion of the event, the photos and videos of an event will help you create fear of missing out among the audience who haven’t attended the event.

Try reposting every story or post where your audience has tagged you, that will encourage more people to post about your event.

You should post audience reviews and stories about how successful the event was. This will act as pre-marketing for the next event. You can create a short movie and distribute it on all of your handles.

Leverage your event as a lifetime money-making opportunity

If you are hosting an event where people can get value out of it by just seeing the video For example A webinar, seminar, workshop, or Ted talk; you can make money even after your event is over.

You can record your live event and sell it as an demand video event after your event. People who have missed out due to any reason will love to get your video.

There is the various platform where you can host the recorded event. AllEvents.in has one such option where you can monetize your videos without paying any hosting monthly charges.

Pro tip: You can learn more about Events on demand and how to monetize your YouTube videos →

Distribution of your event

Some event organizers put in a lot of marketing efforts and create valuable content for the audience but fail to get the desired results. The very reason for the same is the lack of distribution planning.

In marketing, it is often said that distributing the content is more important than the content creation itself. All your marketing efforts go in vain if you can’t deliver the content you created to the right audience.

While deciding how to promote your event, event organizers must also plan how to distribute the campaign in order to reach the targeted audience.

Wrap up

Marketing your event is mission-critical for the success of your event. Here are the key points from the article

Be clear with the objective of your event and create your marketing ideas around the same.

• Segregate your Promotion strategies into – Pre-event, during the event, and post-event promotions.
• Get listed on Event discovery platforms like AllEvents
• Be as creative as you can with marketing your event.
• Maintain consistency throughout your campaign.
• Play with ticket pricing – Free tickets, Early bird tickets, group, and VIP.
• Create your community for long-term benefits.
• Retarget your interested audience and induce them to attend your event.
• The distribution of your campaign is as important as the content itself.