15 Practical Ideas to Promote Your Next Event

You know the saying: ‘When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it make a sound?’

Now, event promotion is similar: you are hosting an event but are you promoting it too? Without promotion, do you think that it will go on? Certainly not. Without advertising, attendees won’t show up because no one knows about the event.

Planning an event marketing and promotion might sound easy but it is not always that simple.

Nowadays, you most likely have seen massive branding of events promotions. To be fair, you are probably thinking either of: ‘Hey, we don’t have that budget to play with’, or ‘What are some new creative ways to excite consumers, improve the brand’s reach and increase qualified leads?’

So, what are we waiting for? Let’s jump into some of our favourite ways to promote your event, inexpensively!

1. Advertise a really memorable promotion that has been tailored specifically towards your target audience.
2. Consider offering discounts and encouraging your visitors to bring friends.
3. Location. Location. Location.
4. Create an event that will be remembered, something with an edge.
5. Offer cheap snacks and drinks to your guests.
6. Make sure there is an area available for children, with activities such as a bouncy castle, a ball pit or firm area for playing.
7. Bring along a mascot.
8. Engage with social media by holding a competition and encouraging ‘likes’ or ‘shares’.
9. Utilize all of the resources you have available.
10. Market your new concept to pubs and bars in your area.

Free event promotion

1. Offer early bird registration.

In my opinion, one of the easiest methods to promote your upcoming event is to post an advertisement offering early bird registration. Provided that you commence publicizing your event beforehand and inform your audience that there is a deadline of one week prior to the event, people are likely to register early.

It can also tell you how to extend your event further – is it of interest to people? What objections are they raising? Should you improve your marketing strategy?

Early registration before the programme begins helps measure your audience’s interest, and it also encourages them to buy tickets at the best possible price and make the effort to purchase them early on.

2. Place a sign outside of your company.

Of course, in terms of raising local awareness of an event, old-fashioned banners are excellent.

Write it up for publication outside the business. If you don’t have a physical location, post banners in the area around where you’re hosting your event.

3. Create a creative landing page.

The landing page represents the first point of communication for your event. Therefore, you need to advertise all the event-related information on it, such as a day and a time of the event, its venue, key topic, objectives and goals.

Furthermore, you can create an agenda so your invitees know what they are about to see or hear. This is the place to post about speakers or influencers you’ve encountered.

You can also add photos or videos from your most recent event, and dedicate a page to frequently asked questions (FAQs) so that you can triage customers to the information they already have.

And of course you want to link to your social media sites, and put a call to action on the page for people to buy tickets.

4. Participate in content marketing.

Make sure to create a blog post about this on your content marketing channels before you host your event.

It might be creating a call to action with a YouTube video (demonstrating or describing the event or the art created), blog posts where you talk about or describe the event, a podcast where you discuss the event, or social media posts.

Regardless of whether you’re posting content marketing assets through earned media or owned media, amplifying with paid media will help you spread the word of your event.

5. Have event-specific branding.

Another is to leverage event branding, and make your event a brand in and of itself. This way you can promote your event separately to just the conference attendees. This is how we at HubSpot promote the INBOUND event: our event, INBOUND, is separate and distinct from our brand. We don’t just say it’s an event for our customers – it’s an event for any marketer, sales, and service professional who wants more education and to get further with their businesses.

That means, minimally, that you should treat your event brand as different from your company brand. If Google hosts an event website, have it on a different URL, with somewhat different colours, with somewhat different content. You want people who are unfamiliar with your business to consider attending an event they happen upon; making it seem like an offshoot of a company they don’t recognize will reduce the amount of curiosity and interest you can initially inspire.

6. Use email marketing to reach your target audience.

Needless to say, your current audience is a great way of reaching people by email.

You should advertise the event to several different audiences, perhaps primarily segmented in terms of interests or location.

This way, everyone who knows about your company can be informed about the event. Also, let’s say you offer a discount on products to anyone who signs up for your email service, you could offer email subscribers a discount to ensure that your current fans of your company join, too.

Social media event promotion

7. Post behind the scenes before the event.

Social media is another important way to promote your events.

As a consumer myself, one of my favourite event-promotion tactics is through posts presenting a behind-the-scenes view of my favourite brands. Whether it’s a well-curated BTS Instagram story or post featuring your company preparing for a concert, BTS content is an easy and effective way to pique the interest of fans.

Post social media before your event. Post photos of the people who are coming to your event, or cute décor or things that you can put on your event. It makes you so hype to anybody you want it to go to and make you guys buy a ticket for your event.

8. Retargeting of social media ads.

We all know how much time is spent on social media. Social media retargeting ads are a good way to stay updated on whatever you are promoting especially if they saw it on any type of social media account.

You want your customers to see your brand repeatedly, and to keep the event fresh in their minds. A person may think an event looks really cool or is a great idea, but they’re not ready to actually buy a ticket – retargeting is a great way to land these customers at a later date.

9. Create an event hashtag.

Using an event hashtag attached to your event as a source of communication is the perfect way to chat with your guests and people still considering registering. With an event hashtag, you can flag and stay in touch with future attendees.

This will also be beneficial in pushing your reach higher and in making more of them who know and see your events.

You can also ask questions and interact with the participants here during the event.

10. Collaborate with keynote speakers, influencers, other brands, and sponsors.

This is one of the most powerful ways to promote your event. On the other hand, recall that event sponsors are looking into the best way to promote their event.

You can also form brand affiliations where you partner with other brands to educate their audiences about your event as well.

And also, promote your keynotes, your influencers, anyone that you’ve worked with, the heck. Because they can go out to your audience and make this event even more popular than it already is.

For instance, people will already be following many of the speakers at your events, so get them to let their audience know what you’re doing. This gets things outside your regular audience and out into the wider world.

11. Run a social media contest.

If you have run social media contests before and it was successful, a social media contest or giveaways will work well to promote your event.

You can also launch a giveaway, where the winner will receive entrance tickets. Maybe they have to like your posts or make a comment, and also tag some friends. In any case, social media competitions will boost your publicity.

12. Create a social media filter.

If you want to share information about your event on social media, you can do so in the form of a social media filter, which you can design for your event and the platform of your choice.

If your contacts are generous enough to disseminate the filter, your event gets automatically advertised to the audiences of your contacts.

13. Social Media Promotion.

Social media adverts cannot be undermined in event promotion. In fact, it is said that people spend almost the entire day on social media. The most effective way of advertising events to people who are cold is through social media on the same platforms. For example, by promoting events to similar audiences on Facebook, it can be really effective.

14. Post on Facebook and community groups.

Social media communities and groups are also great for promotion of an event, be it a Facebook group or a subreddit.

Also helpful is a social media event page, so as to spread the word among various groups or communities.

15. Host a social media challenge or takeover.

Social media challenges/takeovers are always popular and fun. A social challenge will let your audience interact directly with your company or brand and a social takeover with influencer will reach for your entire audience again.

Advertise your event with social media posts, challenges, even live streams of the event, not to mention acquisitions.

And now that you have some ideas about how to the event, let’s start thinking about the when. How will you schedule this out? How far in advance of your event will you do these things? Let’s discuss below.

Event promotion timeline

3-4 months before your event

• Email marketing: email previous attendees, grant early bird discounts, etc.
• Post in social media groups
• Create a Facebook event
• Promote influencers / speakers / sponsors
• Start the website / landing page
• Create event-specific branding
• Post banners on site

6-8 weeks before your event

• Promote influencers / speakers / sponsors
• Set up search engine campaigns and online ads
• Produce content marketing assets
• Run a social media contest
• End early bird promotions

3-5 weeks before your event

• Email Marketing Drip Campaigns
• Retargeting of ads on social media
• Have partner brands / sponsors posted about your event
• Create a social media filter

1-2 weeks before your event

• Create a social media hashtag
• Post behind the scenes on social media
• Use the last call message

2-6 days before your event

• Send an email reminder to prospects
• Apply on social media
• More BTS content

Day of your event

• Run your hashtag
• Be active on social media
• Take photos / videos and post them online
• Get in touch with your participants online

After the event

Thank you for coming

Check out the success of your event promotion

Did people talk about your thing? Were Content Marketing Excellence and Lifesaver Aponia part of that conversation? How often do the technical solutions you put in actually drive ticket sales?

Circulate a poll – to employees and customers both – about how people liked the event, what they liked, and what they think could be improved, etc.

Promoting your event is kind of like juggling. A lot of pieces are in motion. Here’s a list of things to help you, though it is by no means comprehensive. Use it to get your imagination going. How should you promote your event?