Promoting an event in seven days is challenging, but not impossible.
Whether it's a special sale at a retail clothing store or a seminar offering business customers more information about your software product, last-minute event promoting isn't likely to get you the results that you want. According to Business Know-How, planning your events far in advance helps you line them up with key points in your sales cycle and position them in relation to other planned promotions. Furthermore, beginning event promotion early allows you to forge good relationships with fickle media contacts, ensuring placement of your event's advertising in popular media outlets. Nevertheless, if you only have a week to stir up excitement, don't despair! There are some steps you can take to beef up the buzz and encourage event attendance.
Instructions
1. Analyze past promotions and brainstorm ideas for your promotional campaign. Review the effectiveness of items you've used to promote other events, including direct mail pieces and promotional emails; determine what characteristics made for a particularly successful promotional effort. If you can get a hold of competitor advertising, use what you like and don't like about their ads as a brainstorming springboard.
2. Develop a theme to ground your promotional efforts. Themes not only make promotional materials memorable, but if they're executed well, they make the event memorable and start word-of-mouth customer advertising after the event is over. For instance, Debbie Allen of Business Know-How used an Oriental theme to publicize her store's event, offering discounts inside fortune cookies and a Chinese lunch to customers.
3. Know what freebies your customers value and work them into your promotional strategy. If the first 100 customers will receive free tote bags, keep that in mind; you'll want to state any perks clearly in media releases, email invitations, Twitter feeds and Facebook event invites.
4. Contact local media outlets about your event, including newspapers and radio stations. Although a short promotional timeline gives the media less time to respond to your event, if you're polite and organized you might see some success. Designate one person as your team media contact, and make phone calls in the morning, before busy media professionals are swamped with distracting deadlines. Ask media personnel for their preferred times and methods of contact, and ask for an email address so you can send along a one-page media advisory.
5. Cruise websites that post information of interest to your client base, and consider whether they might have email lists that you can purchase. Send out email invitations, making sure to format them according to your theme and including any exciting event perks, such as draws, discounts and door prizes.
6. Evaluate your existing social media connections and use them to promote the event. Post event information and updates to Twitter, and ask your followers to retweet key updates to increase visibility. Set up a Facebook page for your event. According to Mashable, pages are better than groups because updates appear in user news feeds. You can also create a Facebook event and invite any contacts you have. Ensure your company and group members join the event, and update their Facebook statuses with event-related information.
7. Design and pass out flyers in public places. Use color and creativity to captivate, and include Twitter and Facebook links so interested people know where to go to learn more about the event.
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