Having a business also means that you need to organize and promote events to publicize your offerings. Organizing an event or a workshop can be a very stimulating and exciting way to improve your relationships with your current clients and finding new clients. It also helps strengthen your rapport with your clients and build company value.
Hosting and organizing events, workshops or seminars can help develop yourself in your area of business, find new opportunities to scale up your business and publicize your brand and your campaigns.
However, it is also a time-consuming activity. Not only do you need to prepare the content and logistics for the event that will be hosting, but you also need to promote the event properly.
There is nothing more frustrating than having done all the work, and finally ending up with only a few supporting friends as your audience. It is important to know the basics of how to start your work on the event and on promoting it.
So here are a few ideas that will help you organize the program and promote it to the right audience.
In Brief : How To Promote Your Workshop, Seminar Or Event
- Understand Your Audience – Importance of understanding audience demographics for effective event promotion.
- Have A Great Design Team – Emphasizes the need for a creative design team to create engaging promotional materials.
- Manage Social Media – Utilize social media platforms for event promotion, including creating banners and leveraging local bloggers.
- Make Your Event Shareable – Encourage sharing through ‘share buttons’ and referral discounts to maximize event visibility.
- Organize Contests – Use contests, both online and in collaboration with local events, to attract interest and participation.
- Publicize Your Event – Promote events through online platforms, emphasizing the economical benefits of online promotional postings.
- Write Blogs – Utilize blog articles for cost-effective content marketing and building interest in the event.
- Use Hashtags – Leverage Twitter and Instagram with event-specific hashtags for increased visibility.
- Use Press Releases – Consider press releases and local newspaper ads for broader event coverage.
- Get Interviewed – Seek interviews with local media outlets to share insights about the event’s theme.
- Ask Your Friends To Share Your Event – Encourage friends and family to share the event on their social media networks.
- Attend Events For Networking – Utilize relevant networking events to distribute event materials and make announcements.
- Ask Your Followers To Share – Engage Twitter followers to share the event for increased credibility.
- Send Personalized Email Invitation – Increase trustworthiness by sending personalized email invitations to your mailing list.
- Develop A Plan – Stress the importance of a well-defined marketing plan for consistent and effective promotion.
- Keep Updating – Maintain enthusiasm by regularly updating attendees with event details and countdowns.
- Be A Speaker – Promote the event by speaking at other events, generating registrations and avoiding last-minute cancellations.
1. Understand Your Audience
It is really important to understand which audience fits your criteria perfectly. Knowing your domain, your audience demographic such as age, gender and qualifications, and understanding the niche market you want to target will help you promote your event in a more strategic and organized manner. This way you can expect maximum audience at your event or workshop.
2. Have a Great Design Team
Make sure you have a great design team who can help you create a creative poster/picture which reflects your brand and what you are offering. With this poster or picture in your hand, you can now use this as a pre-announcement of your event and post it on relevant social media platforms. The people who respond to this pre-announcement might be the ones who are really interested, or who are willing to share the event later on.
3. Manage Social Media
Make sure you manage and leverage social media platforms to publicize your event. One of the first steps to take would be to create a separate page on your website offering all the details of your event.
Create banners that align with the same message as your posters and put it up on your website, Facebook page, twitter handle and any other social media platform your company actively uses. You can then direct people to your website or your event page thereby keeping track of the traffic and the promotions that you are doing. You can also use local blogger’s websites to post your banners. This will automatically work as good advertising for your event.
4. Make Your Event Shareable
Make sure you use ‘share buttons’ at the end of the event page, so people can easily share the event with others online. You can also offer people referral discounts for sharing your event and getting their friends to sign up for it. You can do this by giving them a referral code when they buy the tickets online on your website or your blog. Using this code, they can avail their bonuses and refer more friends as well.
5. Organize Contests
You can organize various contests and tie-up with local festivals and flea markets happening close to your event date. You can even host online contests on Facebook where people can win either a free ticket or get a discount on the event price.
6. Publicize Your Event
One of the best, most economical way to publicize your event is through online promotional posting especially on platforms that allow you to search for niche groups such as Linkedin and Google Plus. You can post on various Linkedin groups that have the exact audience you are looking for. And all this you can do for free!
Just make sure you post as often as possible, once a week or once in 2 weeks in order to keep the momentum going. If applicable, you can also use other social media platforms like Pinterest.
Online advertising is a great way to publicize your event as it helps you choose the exact demographic, area and target audience you are looking for. You can advertise on various platforms ranging from social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Google Plus, Twitter to Google advertising which helps you choose the perfect website to reach your audience.
7. Write Blogs
Writing blog articles on your own blog or sharing your articles on already established blogs is a great cost-effective way to spread the word about your workshop or event. It is also a great way to showcase that you know the subject of the workshop that you are hosting as you can give an in-depth analysis of various topics. This type of content marketing also keeps people interested in your work and builds curiosity around the event. You can even share your articles on your social media pages to gain more traction.
8. Use Hashtags
Leveraging Twitter and Instagram as a platform is also a great option as it offers the option of using a special hashtag for your event. You can get people near looking at your event simply by using the right hashtags.
9. Use Press Releases
Depending on the scale of your workshop or event, you can even put out press releases and send it to relevant media channels for publicity. You can even post ads in local newspapers about your event and have them cover it for you.
10. Get Interviewed
Get in touch with local and regional newspapers, websites that work in your niche and find out if they would be interested to interview you about the theme of your event. Make sure you approach them with a relevant, interesting angle for a story. If your event is linked to a trend in your industry or to a trend in society in general, they would definitely be interested in interviewing you.
11. Ask Your Friends to Share Your Event.
Ask your friends, family, to share your event in their social media as this helps get the word out in circles other than your own.
Whether you realize it or not, you have a lot of friends on social media including Linkedin and Facebook. You can go ahead and invite all the people you are connected with via social media. It helps if a few months before the event you can start building up your list of contacts on social media.
12. Attend Events For Networking
Attend various relevant networking events near you and make sure you bring leaflets or posters of your event to the meetings during the promotional period. You can distribute the leaflets amongst the attendees and maybe even ask for a few minutes on the mic to announce your event details. Make sure you keep your announcement short and interesting so that you can grab people’s attention.
13. Ask Your Followers To Share
You can ask your Twitter followers to share your event on Twitter. As more people start tweeting your event, the more credible and trending it will become.
14. Send Personalized Email Invitation
Check your entire mailing list and make sure you send out personalized invitations to the entire list. This will add more trustworthy factor and will get people curious and paying attention to the event.
15 Develop a plan
A multi-channel marketing and promotion plan that spells out and strategies what you need to do each day and week in the lead up to the day of your seminar. If you don’t have this in place, you know what happens? You make it up as you go along. Then you get busy with life, developing your content, or a million other things … and all of sudden it’s been 3 weeks since you last sent out a promo. Or you rush to toss something together … and your mediocre effort produces mediocre results. Developing a plan increases the likelihood that you’ll contact prospects frequently enough about your event and develop a solid message that you can carry through from piece to piece. Having a written plan means you can delegate the implementation of the plan to someone else! Your plan must include as many different options for promotion as you can use, integrate your approach for a smoother flow of information and designed to increase the anticipation right up until the close of ticket sales to gather those last-minute signups.
16. Keep Updating
Have a countdown for your event! You can announce new and exciting aspects of the event and keep updating on things such as food and drinks, speakers and exciting quotes about the event. This is a great way to generate enthusiasm towards your event and it will get people to check up on the happenings of the event more often on social media.
17. Be a Speaker
And finally, one of the best ways to promote an event is to attend as a speaker to various events. This way you can publicize your event at the end of your speech and also get registrations on the spot. This will prevent last-minute registrations and cancellations and avoid people getting hit by a case of buyer’s regret.
As an experienced coach, I know the work that goes into promoting your seminars, workshops and events. But that shouldn’t stop you from going for it and promoting it anyway. Once you get the hang of it and once you get the momentum going, nothing can stop you from taking it to the next level.
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