The Event Promotion Playbook

You want to run an event for your business promotion, but are unsure how to promote it and get attendees.  This playbook of tips encourages cross-publicity from offline to online and helps to build up an email mailing list which will also help with future promotions.

1 – Creating excellent content about your event speaker(s).  This should be original so ask for an interview and video them as they talk to you.

2 – Edit their interview into 90 seconds long videos.  Include a start and end “card” with the event logo and your business URL.  Add sub-titles so the Facebook feed will play them and the watcher can understand.  Start to publish on Facebook and LinkedIn and link to the video on other relevant channels (local newspapers, Neighbourly, Chamber of Commerce etc)

3 – Publish the video to your Website blog

4 – Make a picture of the presenter and include a quotation from their 2017 speech.  Also share this on Facebook and on your blog.  On the picture, always have your URL

5 – Follow the presenter’s personal blog / websites.  This is so you can do curated content.

6 – Every Friday send an email to your mailing list with a link to the video you published that week.  Also include links to the other articles written by the speaker(s) from your list in 5 above.

Here is a good example of a preview video from a conference

https://vimeo.com/156510830

7 – Encourage readers to add comments to the videos as you share them.  What questions does this raise for you?  How would you solve this? Does this match with your experience?

8 – On the website, add a prominent signup to news form either by lightbox or on the page header – explain what people get when they sign up (Fridaynews with new educational video content and links to expert articles)

9 – Also publish the newsletter on the blog every week

10 – As the event gets closer, add in more publicity for the speakers on the theme of the event itself – you can do this by asking the speaking team to allow you to interview them by Hangout or Skype video chat.  Your interview should be 3 questions only.

11 – Get your video edited down to 90 seconds as in 2 above.

12 – Make a still image of the person with a quote from the video (just like above)

13 – Share on social, add to the newsletter, encourage people to comment or ask questions.  Ask the speakers to also share the video onto their website and social channels.

14 – Continue weekly until you release the tickets for the event.  By this time you should have a good mailing list of prospects and this will help early bird ticket sales.

The Webstock conference in Wellington each February is a very good example o this methodology – join their mailing list to see how it can be done.  Note their newsletter also shares jobs and event listings which is a very nice way to enable them to stay relevant in the year between conferences.

Go rock your event… and don’t forget to video it and release the video afterwards so the people who didn’t come realise what they missed!