Before an event, organizers frequently invest a lot of time, money, and effort in marketing without giving the subsequent phase any care. But after your visitors enter, your social media event advertising is far from over.
Connecting with your followers before, during, and after an event will help you develop an efficient social media event strategy. Here are some social media strategies for designing a fantastic online journey for your visitors, from beginning to end.
Define your marketing goals
Without properly identifying the goals of your event promotion, you run the risk of wasting time, money, and resources. Therefore, when establishing your target, be as specific as you can while still making sure that these goals are reachable.
Make sure you’re specific and clear about your event so that everyone can understand everything. Set your KPIs and measures to gauge your success along the way. Keep the spirits of you and your team high. Stick to the relevant objectives of your organization and the event.
Know how many attendees you will have
Decide who is most likely to attend your event, and learn everything you can about these target guests, including their behavior, psychographics, and demographics. Ideally, you have to develop a buyer persona as well.
Determine the marketing strategies and platforms that work best for this particular target market, and use them consistently.
Promote your event on social media
The options are countless with many different social media available. Let’s check some of them.
l Make a Facebook event page:
Create a Facebook event with all the information your visitors will require. Tag the official pages of any exceptional guests or speakers you’ve invited. Additionally, you can throw a giveaway for some event tickets as well.
You can publish announcements or respond to inquiries in the event’s discussion area. You could want to spread the news about exclusive pre-sale codes or provide the concert’s start and end times.
l Make a press release:
You can invite relevant media, websites, and influencers to your event so they can share the news with their audiences by sending out a proper, well-written press release.
Make sure the press release is well-written, not too lengthy, and strikes the perfect mix between being eye-catching and educational.
l Use countdown sticker on Instagram:
You can specify an end time and date with the countdown sticker on Instagram Stories. The clock’s name and color can both be changed.
Viewers have the option of adding the countdown to their own Story or subscribing to receive an alert when the timer expires.
l Create a brand hashtag:
You and your guests can easily access all of the content about your event posted on social media by using a custom hashtag. Also, the shorter the better. Use your hashtag in all of your social media posts and on printed materials and other marketing items as well.
l Use live tweets to make people informed:
Consider live tweeting as a fun and interesting play-by-play of the occasion.
Live tweeting your event establishes the direction and voice of the internet debate surrounding it. It helps record speeches or current conversations during conferences, debates, and speaking engagements.
Don’t forget the email marketing
A lot of event organizers forget that they can use email marketing as a way to grow their events. There are many ways to do this, and all of them are easy and inexpensive.
For example, you can create an email list for your attendees, send out reminders about the upcoming event and offer discounts on tickets. You can also promote your events on social media or via other channels.
Email marketing remains the most effective promotional channel when it comes to publicizing an event, despite all the newest marketing channels and technologies.
You can buy email lists from different providers if this is your first event and/or you are a new event organizer. While this won’t be as effective as developing your email database, it’s worth a try.
Have a professionally designed website:
Your social media presence shouldn’t be used as a direct replacement for an effective website.
You may easily create a professional website using one of the many professional event management platforms, and your event website should include the following features:
l venue address, day, time, speakers, and performers
l Simple registration and booking process with transparent ticket pricing
l Valuable content to entice potential attendees
l photos and videos of the speakers and performers
You can add an event page as a section to your website if your event planning company (or you personally) already have one. However, for the sake of SEO and customization, we’d advise developing a specific landing page. Event management companies are especially helpful with these tasks.
Use social media during the event
Even though it definitely won’t help with attendance growth (except perhaps for virtual or hybrid events), it can nevertheless increase attendees’ pleasure
l Live posts or tweets are especially useful for providing play-by-play coverage of an event on social media in real-time. Use the hashtag for your event in every post, and take advantage of the chance to interact with guests right away.
l Use social media posts during the event:
This can be done in a variety of ways, such as posting intriguing audience questions on the screen for the present speaker to address and respond to in real time.
Promote your event even after it’s over
This is very important because you want to tie all the loose ends and connect once again with the attendees.
l Father valuable feedback:
Reconnect with attendees, especially those who discussed or connected with the social media pages for your event. You can just thank them and wish them a safe journey back home. You can also encourage them to submit feedback and raise any issues they may have.
l Send some DMs to connect and reinforce relationships with your attendees.
As a bottom line, knowing which social media channels and content kinds your target attendees are engaged on will help you better promote your event there.
Your marketing strategies will be more successful the more you comprehend your target audience.
However, keep in mind that social media promotion for your event doesn’t end once it has begun. To make the most of the event, you should also use social media to create and maintain buzz before, during, and after it.
Furthermore, don’t hesitate to hire a professional event marketing company, able to provide the best event organization strategy for you.