Organising an event can take all the planning in the world. However, without attracting the attention of an audience or participants, your occasion will fail to live up to your expectations. This is essential if a brand or event is to thrive long-term in a competitive market. 

Creating a unique promotion is a fundamental part of a brand strategy, helping you stand out from the crowd and conveying a key message – but how can you deliver a campaign that ticks all these boxes? We’ve listed a few helpful tips to help you along the way. 

Grasp Social Media opportunities

Like anything else in the modern day, Social Media is dominating the marketing world. But, despite most people understanding the basic use, only a select few understand its true pulling power. The possibilities are endless, and the more creative aspects prove themselves to be easier to memorise for a wider audience. 

Create a hashtag – Creating a hashtag – something short and simple – is an easy way to encourage public engagement. People can use it to talk about their own stories, and help grow a community between event attendees. 

Engage with enhancers – Spread popularity and word of your event by offering it out to media figures and popular bloggers. Invite them to attend your event and spread news of their involvement. This can encourage an audience from a different target group.

Create a countdown – Build-up the excitement each day by sharing a countdown to the event through your Social Media channels. We recommend doing this at least a week in advance, and through a seven day period to encourage last-minute knowledge of the event.

We would also encourage you to enhance your event through live streams, maintaining the hashtag, and making sure you generate sustained coverage beyond. This can promote the event in preparation for next year and spread the brand to people who weren’t able to attend on this occasion.

Gaining yourself some free publicity!

In an ideal world, all opportunities for publicity would be free. However, like most things in life, you have to earn it. 

The obvious way of spreading a message is through press releases, but to stand out from the crowd you have to make it less obvious that you’re trying to promote something. For example, as we’ve mentioned in the Social Media section, bringing popular figures on board is a strong way of gaining two-way publicity. Launching pre-event occasions, with interview opportunities between the press and your VIP asset can build relationships and make publicity easier to come by in the future.

Again, do not make your intentions obvious, media outlets rely on advertising to pay wages!

Paid advertisements

Before we discuss the possibility of paid advertisements, it is important that you understand where they should be placed. Only put them in places where they are going to be seen by your specific target audience, otherwise, it’ll be a waste of budget with little impact. 

If your target market is likely to read a publication or listen to a local radio station, then ensure you target these opportunities, especially with PR as well as considering paid-for advertising. Many media outlets will provide “added value”, perhaps through their social media channels. Through our significant experience and relationships with media outlets, we have generated tens of thousands of pounds worth of such value for our clients.

A lot of companies now opt for paid advertisement online instead of offline, and these again should be placed in the most relevant areas for your audience. In some cases, this may mean paying more per insert, but the return on your investment will be greater as it is more targeted. Online advertisement can be limited to a select group of people visiting a certain website. Whilst this can be easier to target a specific audience, it can be more difficult to spread the message beyond the select few.

Make the most of customer feedback

If your event is an annual one, make sure you pay great attention to the feedback of the most important people for any business… the customers!

Interacting with customers/attendees after each event can give you a good idea of ways to improve and you can run with some of these thoughts during your next campaign.

For example, if people point out that the previous event could have been better for their family with a funfair, make sure you stress the inclusion of the funfair as an attraction for the next event. This is a strong way of maintaining customer relations and making them feel valued as a customer to your brand strategy.

For more information, or how Bare Bones Marketing can help you with your own event promotion, please contact us on 01606 535035 or hello@bbmarketing.co.uk.