A well-managed, well-executed and highly-publicized event seems easy enough to achieve, right? Wrong! Effective event marketing takes weeks, months, sometimes years of preparation, especially for annual events that must keep up with social media’s ever-evolving trends and platforms. Social media is essential to successful events in today’s world. Not only does it give attendees a place to network, share pictures, memories, and engage in real-time with festival planners and goers, it offers a way for those interested to stay updated and have a vision of the event before it happens. Social media has become a critical and cost-effective tool to use when promoting events, and it allows marketers to leverage traditional advertising and digital advertising, driving down budgets, to reach a broader demographic.
When trying to figure out how to marry social media with traditional event coverage, it’s important to have all the details laid out about the event beforehand. Hiring an advertising agency with extensive live event social media management experience to execute your vision can be a major help, as an event can end up being a lot more work than planned. Knowing all the details, including the event’s brand image, a detailed schedule of events and guest appearances, logistics information such as parking, and a list of those in leadership roles will help an agency establish an effective marketing plan for your event and hash out a detailed social media schedule, which helps reduce last-minute chaos and allows festival management to focus on their event needs and tasks.
Make sure to utilize social media to boost awareness of the event, along with promotions during the event. Of course, traditional media like posters, flyers, and multiple medium ad campaigns are useful for reaching a direct local community; however, social media makes targeting those willing to travel for events easy. In the past, distance marketing was expensive and oftentimes not considered worth it for the price. Now, it’s easy and affordable to market anywhere in the world, and what better way to reach record attendance rates than to pre-promote at a low cost?
We know how time consuming it can be to plan an event from top to bottom, let alone market it and provide effective live coverage throughout the event. At BG Digital Group, we have extensive experience in providing award-winning event coverage, whether it be leveraging social media and marketing or purely social media marketing. Want to know more about how marketing an event works when working with us? Check out our recent case study on the Annual Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in Morehead City.
