Finding Your Event's Marketing Niche
These days, it can seem like the term “social media marketing” is as ambiguous of a description as saying that you do “business”. There are so many social media sites out there that it can get overwhelming if you don’t narrow down your target market. It can also start to get expensive if you fire blindly in the dark by not narrowing down your targeting options.
In fact, I’m going to say something controversial: your event is not right for every single social media platform out there. If you disagree with this, think back to past social media marketing that you’ve done. I’ll wager that your ROI (return on investment) is never the same across all platforms. Even in events we’ve run at Ticketbud, we’ve noticed a high ROI in platforms we were at first skeptical of. Adversely, platforms that we dumped a lot of money into resulted in a lower ROI than expected.. So as a side note, please experiment with the plethora of social media sites today – you could find a vein of gold amidst the wasteland. But don’t feel bad if not all of them work out; Thomas Edison would be proud of you for trying!
The first step is to think of your target market. Where do they live? Where do they like to talk about the hobbies that interest them? For example, if your event is arts and crafts oriented with a high female turnout, Pinterest is the obvious choice. Events are even more varied than the social media sites out there, so what about events that may not be as obviously rooted in one media platform?
Facebook:
The nice thing about Facebook is that nearly everyone uses it. And for marketing purposes, it’s one of the best. If you’re an event organizer and you’ve done previous events, then take the email lists that you have and look into Facebook’s custom audiences advertising option, found here. This is a powerful feature that allows you to input a list of emails and cross-reference them with Facebook users. If the emails were used to create their Facebook accounts, you will get a custom audience for your ad that is like the people who previously attended your event. Although you may find this contradictory, I recommend looking into Facebook for a solid portion of your social media advertising dollars due to the fact that nearly everyone has one. One last tip that will seem counterintuitive at first: if you set your bids for ads higher, you’re more likely to receive more clicks and thus Facebook will reduce your cost per click. This equates to a significant cost savings.
Twitter:
Twitter has been pushing its advertising feature for a couple months now and I’ve personally used to it to great effect. You’ll want to use Twitter for your platform if your event is more tech, comedy, or concert oriented since Twitter users tend to enjoy experiences along those lines. Twitter’s userbase also tends to skew male. If you want to advertise to a certain group, you can target people who follow companies and people who are like the people you want at your event. Twitter is also a great before-and-after platform provided you encourage your eventgoers to live tweet. If you want more information on how to leverage this powerful platform, check this article out.
Instagram:
Instagram’s advertisement feature is still in its formative stages. At the time of this writing, Instagram advertising isn’t widely available. It helps to know that Instagram is used less by adults and more by teens. What Instagram is better for is using it for during-and-after event photos: encourage eventgoers with rewards to take photos and post them with your personal hashtag.
Pinterest:
Although it’s also in a nascent period, Pinterest’s promoted pins tool has a lot of potential-with more than a few caveats. First off, it’s common knowledge that Pinterest is made up almost entirely of women, but there are also men who are interested. So if you’re trying to promote a monster-truck rally, you’ll probably want to pass since the target market is too small. As long as your event is more specific to women, you can’t lose by trying out the promoted pins.
LinkedIn:
If your event is tailored towards professionals or more for adults aged 30-50, LinkedIn can be extremely useful when it comes to advertising. You can search by Job title and by location to create a highly targeted and highly converting campaign which will bring the right people to your event. LinkedIn’s audience is much more educated than any other social network.
Conclusion
I should note that while these are all paid opportunities, there are tons of unpaid opportunities for each of these channels as well. This article was designed purely to look at paid options. Unpaid opportunities are extremely varied, and we will be looking at them in future posts. Thanks for reading and be sure to let me know if there’s any other networks out there you’ve found success in!
]]]]> ]]>