Event Marketing – We stand accused of selling out
But we’re talking about event marketing. So we are quite happy about selling out.
We’ve been asked many times to promote clients events. Gigs, talks, auctions, open days – pretty much anything where they want a lot of people to turn up, free or ticketed.
We’re obviously not a huge fan of leaflets and flyers. You often don’t have the time or money to get artwork done, printed, proofed and then distributed. So we’ve been investigating and testing some of the free event listing sites.
Sites like:
- List – www.list.co.uk
- Skiddle – www.skiddle.com
- Eventbrite – www.eventbrite.co.uk
- There are loads of them if you do a quick search
You’re going to need to create an account and then create a listing on each one of them. It’s a faff but worth doing. We’d definitely recommend doing it. There’s no harm. It’s just a matter of how much time you have.
But these are free event listings, so you’re relying on people visiting the site and searching for “what’s on” in their area. Obviously you can pay for your event to be marketed. But that is onsite – and they don’t get huge visitor numbers.
Not like Facebook. And that is where we’re had some great successes.
Here’s what you need to do.
- Get yourself a business page if you haven’t already
- On the page ‘create an event’ – it’s very easy.
- Publish it.
Now that will go into the feed of all your followers. They can say whether they are ‘going’ or ‘interested’. And when they do – their friends on Facebook will be notified.
And ss the event you’re marketing approaches, Facebook is going to start messaging friends of people ‘going’ or ‘interested’ saying “John is going to an event near you” and give them the event details. Ditto with people who have said they are interested in going.
Facebook is spreading the word for you right at the time when people will be thinking about what they are going to be doing tomorrow or tomorrow night.
And it’s doing it to people a) who have friends who are going / interested in going and b) are in the area where your event is taking place. That’s a winner.
And it’s free. None of the other sites above do this. And none of them have the sheer volume of users that Facebook does.