A Quick Guide on How to Use Social Media to Market Your Event to Success
Photo by Jacob Ufkes on Unsplash
Social media marketing for your event is a no-brainer.
It’s immediate, easy-to-scale, flexible, and cost-effective. Social media is a great way to market your event before, during, and after the big day.
It’s also an essential part of the modern event experience, and a goldmine for testimonials, reviews, and other forms of user-generated content.
Depending on your event reach, you need to plan strategies that utilize social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to bring in the best results. Each platform has unique advantages and demands from its users, so be sure to have a channel-specific strategy in place.
This post will offer you tips on how to best use social media to market your event to success.
COHESIVE EVENT BRANDING
Before you start, you should ensure that you have an event page to capture leads from potential attendees. This event landing page should have ecommerce functionality and be cohesive with the same visual branding as on your social media profiles.
You want any leads coming from social media to instantly feel ‘at home.’ A cohesive event brand will help build trust — an essential element of social media marketing.
INVITING THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Using Facebook advertising in order to target potential attendees on social media is a great way to increase attendee numbers fast. People are constantly scrolling through their Facebook feeds — you just need to be there with a great ad that gets people to stop and investigate further. (And with the demise of organic Facebook posts, ads are going to become an even more important event marketing tactic).
Once you have installed Facebook Pixel on your site, created your event page, and set up your ad campaigns, it’s time to dig into your audience Insights tab. This will allow you to get granular and laser-targeted with your ad audiences.
From your Ad Manager screen, go to Insights and search some high-level competitors. Look at the shared audience interests and take note of them for your own audience targeting.
You can even reverse-engineer your competitor’s audience by targeting people who like their Page or have expressed an interest in similar events in the past.
A Facebook Lookalike audience will allow you to reach a whole new audience who share the same characteristics as people on your mailing list or in your CRM.
It’s an idea to test a few different ads and run them at the same time, letting the algorithm decide which one is ultimately a better fit. Try out video ads, carousels, and clickbait titles to see what’s drawing in the most engagement. Urgency is generally a good strategy for event advertising, but you may also want to try out some punchy and emotive messaging.
SOCIAL CONTENT FUNNELS
If you can actually add some tangible value to your audience’s lives, you can generate a lot of interest in your event. By creating content that their answers key questions, hesitations, and pain points, you can attract attendees to your event via a subtle content funnel.
Rather than plugging away with the typical #eventhype posts, why not join in with industry conversations instead? You should do what you can to publicize the event through organic social media channels. Use hashtags and get involved in broader online conversations.
Be part of social media chats, groups, and communities (and not just when you’re trying to fill up your guest list). Credibility on social media goes a long way in today’s social proof obsessed world. Playing the long game pays off, so start building out your profiles now with some hygiene content.
VIDEO RETARGETING
Video is a fantastic medium for social media advertising — as well as a powerful driver of organic traffic. Invest in video that’s perfect for social media and share it on social video sites like YouTube for extra uplift.
Here’s how to make the most of posting a video on YouTube.
You do not need to worry about putting on a high-budget advertisement. A simple piece to camera, or interview segment with a guest speaker can be enough to draw intrigue.
Video ads have great ROI. Thanks to Facebook’s tools, you can find out exactly how much of a video an audience segment watched in your post. With this information, you can then figure out the right kind of incentivizing offer they need to see to draw in a ticket sale.
For instance, in the case of festival promoters, create a video ad that showcases the Indie bands that played the previous year. From looking at the Insights analysis, you can find out how many people watched the entire clip, versus those that only watched 10 seconds of it.
From a retargeting standpoint, you can retarget an ad that includes Indie imagery and an incentivizing split-payment offer to the ‘interested’ segment. To the less ‘interested’ category, you could send them a more general branded campaign to help trigger their awareness of your event.
MAKE YOUR EVENT SHAREABLE
Most people who attend events like to bring someone along, or at least boast about their life to their network. This is another critical reason why event marketing on social media is so crucial to event success — it’s the perfect place for a bit of old-fashioned word of mouth advertising.
You need to make sure that all of your site and social media destinations are linked and visible on all platforms. Make sharing the event link amongst friends easy, and incentivize sharing the event to maximize social proof. (Why not launch a fun chatbot that creates little custom invites for attendees to share?).
Social media ‘refer a friend’ tools can also be set up directly from your event ecommerce website. Always prompt a customer post-purchase to share the information with their friends, but make sure you ask nicely! Take the hard work out of referrals and make the process as easy as possible for the user.
USER-GENERATED SOCIAL CONTENT
Creating a branded hashtag for your event will help you generate pre-event traction on social media and help you easily collate user-generated content.
Social media competitions during the event are one of the best ways to create user-generated content that’s likely to get shared far and wide. Reposting a featured user photo from Instagram or Twitter can be a great way to publicize an event competition. (They also make for awesome embeds for a post-event blog post).
You can also seed user-generated hashtags after and during the event itself. Help attendees connect with each other and discuss all the goings-on. (All the while generating free publicity for your event).
INFLUENCE WITH INFLUENCERS
Social media influencers can also make fantastic points of contact on sites like Instagram and Twitter. Accounts with high numbers of niche followers can be thought of as industry thought leaders and an endorsement from them can be super valuable for your event.
Use sites like Followerwonk to find the big Twitter accounts in your industry and begin to follow them for a few weeks. Once you have to go to know their interests, try to build rapport, and then pay for them to promote your event in their posts. Or see if you can pique their attention with a free invite?
Use social media to promote your event in a comprehensive and inclusive way. Leave no stone of your social media strategy unturned and embrace paid ads, influencers, videos, and content funnels. You get what you put in — so get social and get winning.
Guest Author Bio: Victoria Greene is a writer for Victoriaecommerce and an ecommerce brand consultant. She likes to share tips with those looking to make a success of their business endeavors online.
Plan amazing event experiences and share your know-how and event industry insight with the Boomset community: