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Marketing is an important piece to building and maintaining long-lasting and ever-present relationships with your audience. By continuously and successfully informing, increasing awareness, connecting with students, and encouraging engagement, you will have a greater chance of creating a valuable partnership.
Top 5 Suggestions for Marketing Your Event
Top 5 Suggestions for Marketing Your Event
Planning Ahead
Once you and/or your team have solidified your event plans (location, date, time, etc.), it’s important to begin the process of your marketing timeline. The timeline process will include asking questions like:
How and where would you like to market?
Flyers, social media, CONNECT.
When will you post about the event?
This creates deadlines to ensure your message is being heard in a timely manner and not on the day of. This will allow your audience to determine if they can or cannot set aside time to attend your event.
It’s almost imperative that you plan ahead when it comes to event marketing, especially when you have to also create the graphics for your flyers, social media posts, newsletters, or websites, as well as, a caption that grabs the attention of your intended audience.
By thinking ahead, it can mean the difference between a well-executed project and one that is thrown together haphazardly.
Posting in Advance
We’ve established that developing your marketing timeline in advance will help you prepare for the time between the first initial post to the day of your event (or even just getting the word out about your group). Well, now it’s time to make that post. You’ve prepped the materials, you have your captions, and you may even have a website to include.
You can begin with posting on CONNECT, though only primary contacts and positions with full access over Events can create events within an organization. If you don’t have the proper permissions, you should first refer to your primary contact or your site administrators in order to request the required access.
Though, if you do have access, the process of creating and completing the event detail form is pretty simple (especially when you have all your information). But if you ever get lost or have questions, there is a link on their home page that will provide you with a step-by-step guide.
Next would be posting on your own social media pages.
Repeating Yourself
People need to hear about your event many times whether that is through email, friends, social media, a website, or CONNECT. Repeating yourself on all platforms allows more people around campus and on social media to see your event and become curious about it and eventually remember it. You have to give your audience one message, but even for that message it needs to be repeated again and again and again or it will be forgotten.
To simply put it, repetition is the key to a successful marketing campaign because marketing is not a one-time fix, it is an ongoing strategy that will help your event and group flourish throughout the school year.
Ask for Commitment
Don’t be afraid to ask for commitment. By this, I mean having people consider RSVPing through CONNECT, asking to send them reminders via email, or sending them a google invite that will show up on their own calendar allowing it to be a constant reminder.
CONNECT has even made another helpful article on how to manage attendance at an event, I’ll also put the link into the chat.
Include the Details
Start with your standard foundation of gathering all the necessary information, like the date, time, and location. It’s very important to include these details because your audience will feel confused and may even become uninterested in what you had to offer.
Your descriptions hold valuable information that will hopefully pique the interest of your potential attendees.
Tactics and Creation
Tactics and Creation
Organization
Organization
Useful ways to keep organized:
Asana
Google Docs
Spreadsheets
Captions
Captions
How to properly caption a post:
Pay attention to detail - when, where, how, why
Capture your audiences attention by intention of others by wording properly, get straight to the point, use emojis, be fun and engaging.
Be conversational and community-oriented
Use a "you" language not an "I" language.
It's vital to keep organized when it comes to developing new content ideas, scheduling posts, planning out potential collaborations with other student groups (ex: social media takeovers, events, etc.), keeping an outreach email list, marketing timeline/plans, and even organizing photos/videos. Keeping organized allows for greater success and helps the planning process become less stressful. Give it a try and thank us later.
Before you can start creating your content, it's best to first understand what you are trying to sell (ex. an event or group meeting) and who are you trying to sell them to? This will give you a foundation that will in turn help you begin generating effective messages and graphics. We also understand that developing content can seem intimidating and/or impossible. But give yourself the time and space to become creative, to think outside the box!
Captions lure in your audience. It's what they read to know what you are trying to offer them. It has the capability of either piquing their interest or have them scroll right past.
Keeping Accessibility in Mind
Keeping Accessibility in Mind
"Most people would agree that the internet is a magical place because of its vast amounts of knowledge, resources, and entertainment. The internet was created to be accessible to anyone, but unfortunately, that is not the case with many websites and digital resources. Barriers such as poor design, lack of alternative text, and missing captions for multimedia, aren’t just an inconvenience, but can actually prevent certain users from being able to access digital content at all.
With the rise of multimedia authoring platforms like social media, blogs, and other self-publishing tools, anyone can be a digital content creator. When posting or publishing content online, it is essential that digital accessibility standards are met so that everyone can have an equitable experience.
In this article, we will explain what digital accessibility is, how using it benefits everyone, and how you can easily start implementing digital accessibility into your everyday life."
A very special thanks to Corrine Nightingale with the Student Media Tech Team for writing this article, "Intro to Digital Accessibility." For more information on accessibility, check out the link below!
How to Develop a Marketing Timeline
How to Develop a Marketing Timeline
Keep relaxed: When we’re in a calm state, our brains aren’t thinking a mile a minute or trying too hard to find ideas, it’ll just come naturally. Because when we begin to feel pressured due to an upcoming deadline, it causes us to feel strained and we begin to not think correctly. Plus, once a plan has been set in place, you’re now able to begin working on essential elements of print and online marketing items like the copy (or caption), the graphics, and the design.
Work as a team: Working with a team will encourage the group members to become efficient and feel valued when they are able to contribute to something that produces results. You'd also able to accomplish a lot more in an hour than if you were doing it by myself. So, working as a team helps facilitate fresh ideas, inspire creativity, and encourage productivity.
Settle on which platforms you’re going to use: Ideally, you would want to post or market your group/event on every platform that you may have because repetition is key. The more your audience comes across your promotion, the higher the possibility of them becoming interested and attending.
Look into the future: By looking into the future you will be able to settle on deadlines (for example- the dates in which you plan to post your information on social media), anticipate the needs of your audience, whether that’s accessibility needs (digitally and/or in-person) and being able to answer any questions that your audience may have. This will ultimately help you stay one step ahead in your planning process, especially since it’s better to be proactive than reactive.
Use your calendar: If you plan to have a group meeting or an event at the end of the month, would you post about it that same week or that same day? Hopefully not. Ideally, you can first post about it two weeks in advance (along with additional reminders throughout the next few weeks) but what is the specific day that you want them posted? Look at your calendar. Look for a day that feels right for you, in terms of your own availability because it is easy to forget to make that post when you’re in the middle of a work shift, a study session, or even in class. So look at your calendar and determine the days that best fit your schedule, while allotting time between the first post and your event.
Photos and videos
Photos and videos
If you are using a photo of someone to promote an event or your group (even if you aren't making money-- but for sure if you are selling anything!), you should have them fill out a photo or video release and keep it for your records:
Resources and Articles
Resources and Articles
The Student Media Tech team has some great blogs that can help you think about tools and communication strategies. Check them out here:
The PSU School of Business has a great page focused on Marketing Strategy for student organizations here:
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