Today we’re going to talk about Event Marketing.
There are a lot of great reasons for your business to you either host or co-host/co-sponsor a local event. Things like brand awareness, supporting a cause, celebrating a milestone in your business, a lot of reasons to consider doing this as a marketing strategy for your business. But today I want to talk more about the “How” to promote it as opposed to the “why”.
There are a lot of great either low or no-cost ways to promote a local event. Platforms like Facebook and Google My Business allow you to create an event listing, put the information out there, and then you can take that information and share it to the other platforms that you’re using such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat things like that. And the reason you want to focus on doing these events and creating event listings to promote the real-life event that you’re hosting well, there are a few reasons. On Facebook what it’s going to do is it’s going to allow for even more reach above and beyond what is already attached (following) to your page. So as an example when you create that Facebook event listing, it’s going to show your audience that you’ve created that event. They’re going to get a notification. It’s already bringing awareness to the event. Then what Facebook is going to do is it’s going to share it to other people. It’s going to share it to people that are near the location of the event and it’s going to serve it up as suggestions to people in your area based on events that they’ve RSVP’d to in the past. So you’re getting more reach on your event and it allows for the people that do want to go to your event that are either connected to your page, or want to go to your event if they are RSVP’d to it, to share it. It’s just bringing more and more awareness.
Non-profit Event Example
I will give you an example. With Jacksonville Beach Golf Association, last year we had about four days to promote a Youth Golf Clinic around TPC week. It was kind of a last-minute thing that we did. We create the event listing. We shared it out there, all the board members shared it, a bunch of local people shared it and ee had over 100 kids show up to this event.
This year – actually today is our 2nd Annual Event and we are going to take a little field trip here in a second and go out to the event. We are expecting over 200 kids to come to this event today. We’ve done this with zero marketing budget as it’s a nonprofit, but we’ve gone through the steps I just talked about. We created the event online. We’ve had people share it, and now there’s a ton of awareness around the event. It is great for the Association spreading the game of golf at The Beaches and doing what its mission is. It is also helping businesses – like Adaptive – and other local businesses that support this cause to bring brand awareness to them.
It is a great marketing strategy if you can do it and I highly recommend it. So let’s go check it out and see some of the fruits of the labor.