A lot of planning, time, and effort go to making an event successful. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean there will be attendees in your event. And promoting an event is easier said than done.
While there is no one size fits all method for marketing a party, there are a few helpful tactics that you can play with to incline the odds to your side.
Check out this guide on how to advertise a party to get people to attend.
Know Your Target Audience
Before even setting an advertising budget, you need to know who you’re trying to pursue to come to your party. Having an idea of the ideal attendees can guide you on how to advertise a party.
Some of the factors to consider when deciding on who the target audience includes:
- Who they are
- Why they’d be interested in attending your event
- Where they spend the most time online
After this, consider building a profile in line with the characteristics of your target audience. This includes their professions, age, location, and interests. You’ll be able to advertise more effectively with this vivid depiction of your guests.
Create a Hashtag and Promote It
A special hashtag for your party can increase the social buzz and create more awareness, which could eventually boost attendance. When creating your event hashtag, keep it sweet, short, unique, and relevant. This may sound simple, but not all statements make good hashtags.
Also, your hashtag will only help if you make good use of it. Promote it everywhere you can whenever you get a chance. This includes social networks, dedicated emails, event’s mobile app, and website.
The hashtag allows your audience to engage with speakers, event content, and each other as well. It also helps you know what is trending around your party in real-time as you’ll be getting real-time feedback.
Start Early
Many people know how to advertise a party. The problem is that they start promoting the event when it’s too late. Starting early helps in gaining momentum and help reach a broader audience.
Start advertising at least 6-8 weeks before the event to ensure a more extensive outreach. This helps in boosting the attendance rate as potential attendees have enough time to clear their calendars and make travel arrangements if need be.
Create a Facebook Event Page
Chances are many of your attendees may be active in social media. The network can help you spread the message to a vast audience.
Every time you RVSP, Facebook promotes the party by showing it to all your friend’s newsfeed. The great part is that all of this is free.
Facebook also allows you to show ads to every person who has been on your website before. This is known as retargeting or remarketing. You can showcase your tickets to people who visited the site and never bought one.
Retargeting is a very powerful marketing strategy as many people will rarely buy a ticket for an event after seeing it for the first time. This is exceptionally accurate for big-ticket events like conventions and conferences.
Sell Special Tickets
Plain old one-time tickets are alright, but if you really want to make sales, you need to be creative. Here are some ticket ideas that may give your potential audience a soft nudge.
- Early bird tickets. These come with a discount for people who make the purchase first.
- Group tickets. This encourages people to bring their friends along. Give a discount to people buying multiple tickets. This discount motivates the attendees to spread the word to friends and relatives, and you gain free publicity in the process.
- Ticket bundles. If you are offering food, drinks, or any kind of merchandise at your event, think of a way to combine this with ticket purchase. “Buy a ticket and get a free meal for two” is a classic example of how to go about this. Marketing ticket bundles also gives you a rough estimate of how many people are interested in the products you’re offering.
- VIP tickets. These tickets are slightly expensive than your general tickets, but the buyers get more privileges in return.
Event Marketing Services
With all that said, marketing a party can be exhausting and time-consuming. You might not have enough time to focus on advertising the campaign and organizing the event. Also, you want people to experience exactly what you’re selling in your ads.
In such cases, it’s best to outsource the advertising to event marketing services and focus on other aspects of the party. Besides, they have enough resources and knowledge on how to get you more attendees.
Motivate Your Attendees to Share
Your attendees are your greatest fans. They loved your event enough to sign up and buy tickets from you. It should be hard to convince them to help spread the word.
Encourage them to share the hashtag with your friends and actively promote the party. To motivate them, offer them a free dinner or drink for anyone who signs up as a result of their effort.
Your guests aren’t the only people you should talk to. Your speakers and performers can play a huge role in spreading the word to a bigger audience. Besides, the larger the audience, the more eyeballs will roll to them during the presentation.
Make it easy for the performers and guests to share the event information with their following.
Use Photos of Attendees
If you’ve previously held another event, leverage its photos to advertise the event. Take an excellent picture for your attendees and create an update. If possible, identify the people on the photo and tag them.
This will give them a chance to comment and talk about how fun the event was and how much they learned, which acts as a review for potential attendees. Many people depend on the customer experience of other people to decide whether or not to purchase a ticket, service or product.
Learn How to Advertise a Party
The number of attendees defines a successful party. You might be a great party planner, but without the right event marketing people might not show up to see your excellent work. Learning how to advertise a party properly can help.
The above tips will not only help attract an audience but the right audience as well. Targeting the right audience will ensure you sell or promote whatever you wanted to trade in your party.
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