How to promote an event: 5 actionable tips you can try

Promoting an event to attract more attendees is often the biggest challenge of event planning and management. 

After all, even after you’ve planned the perfect event, there’s no guarantee your target audience will come. And without guests, naturally even the most perfectly planned event is a failure. This is why you need to promote your event.

So, how should we make the most of event promotion especially when the budget is tight? Here are some actionable tips you can try to promote your event right away. 

1. Leverage social media

In this social media age, promoting anything on social media is an obvious choice. Most likely your target audience is also on one or more social media networks, and you should leverage this fact. 

First and foremost, figure out the social media channels your target attendees are in. It’s best to direct your focus on just a few key channels rather than spreading yourself too thin by targeting all prominent social media networks. 

In general: 

• If your event is focused on B2B businesses and/or professional audiences, you can focus on LinkedIn. There are various groups and communities of professionals interested in specific theme or topic, so you can target one or more community that fits your event
• Facebook still works with its more than 2.8 billion active users. You can create an event page to include all details about the event, and this is where you’ll interact with your audience
• Twitter is getting so much traction in recent years, and it’s great to share real-time updates before, during, and after the event. 
• Instagram and Pinterest are also great if you are targeting a younger audience, and are great platforms to share visual promotions like photos and videos. Also great to share photos from your past events, as well as key performers/exhibitors. 

2. Improve your online presence with SEO

It’s no secret that nowadays, we rely on Google to find anything new around us, including events. If we can ensure content related to your event showed up when your target attendees search for relevant queries, you can significantly improve the chance of getting more attendees. 

You can implement SEO to basically any content you’ve published online: Facebook event page, a blog post, social media post, press release, and so on. However, it’s important to note that today’s SEO is no longer solely about incorporating the target keywords throughout the content. 

Instead, SEO today is about providing high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience’s search queries, and while SEO is a pretty deep subject, we can actually do it in a relatively simple few steps: 

1. Develop your content, focus on providing value to your target audience while including your keywords naturally
2. Optimizing your site for technical SEO factors (mobile responsiveness, page speed, etc.)
3. Build more backlinks from high-quality, relevant websites

3. Make it as easy as possible to book your event

No matter how attractive and effective your marketing campaigns are when you promote your event, you won’t get too many attendees if it’s difficult to find and book a ticket for your event. 

It’s very important to make it as easy as possible to buy tickets, including:

Online ticketing on your website and app

By using event marketing tools and software by Eventtia, you’ll easily set up a full-featured registration and ticketing module on your website, and also other event management features like generating personalized invoices, discount coupons/early bird tickets, attendee tracking, and more. 

Third-party ticketing platforms

You can make your event available on various third-party ticketing platforms that are selling tickets online. This will provide more options for your attendees, but these platforms can also help amplify your reach in promoting the event.

Social media channels

You can, for example, link your Eventtia ticket booking link on your social media posts. Your followers can easily click on the link and purchase a ticket right away. If you create an event on your Facebook Page, there’s also a “Tickets” section where you can paste the direct ticket link for even more visibility. 

4. Crowdsource your effort

If you’ve hosted other events in the past and already have your existing community, then you can ask past attendees to share the Event page, or post pictures or videos of the past event to attract new attendees. 

If, however, this is a brand new event for you, then you can host online contests (i.e. via social media), for example asking them to submit videos connected to your event’s theme. You can offer free tickets for winners, as well as other freebies or discounts. 

5. Create a sense of urgency by offering special tickets

People love anything “special”, and you can consider offering special tickets such as: 

• Early bird: Discounted tickets for those who purchased early. You can set a limited number of tickets for sale as an early bird. Once your early bird tickets are sold out, you can also mention this fact in future promotions to further create a sense of urgency. 
• Bundles: You can, for example, bundle food, drinks, or merchandises you sell at your event with your ticket purchase. This can also help in giving you information about how many people are interested in your merchandise or food and drinks.
• VIP: VIP tickets cost more than the standard ones, but you’ll offer special privileges like better seating or better services. 
• Group/referral: A great way to get people to promote your event to their friends. This way, you can make it cheaper for them to buy multiple tickets as a group.