Some of the work we enjoy most is helping our partners out with their incredible events! From elegant award galas, to multi-day, action-packed music festivals, to educational conferences and seminars – we love diving into event social media marketing and video production.
There’s never a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to marketing strategy, but we wanted to share some of our basic tips and tricks for creating some buzz around your next event.
Here’s the vlog with Lucas to get things going:
PRE-EVENT MARKETING
You gotta pay to play on social media to get noticed. Run ads on channels your target audience uses – we recommend Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. These can be general ads that simply provide event details, or a video ad with sponsor interviews, a hype promo video or ticket giveaways. If we’ve learned anything about pre-event social media marketing is that people LOVE free stuff.
Seriously, they go nuts.
The integration between Facebook and Instagram makes it super easy to manage your marketing budget and content for both platforms in one place – the Facebook Ads Manager. You can create custom or Look-Alike audiences to target the exact people you want at your event.
If this is a first-time event without any prior video footage available, don’t worry! It’s still possible to create an awesome promo video with stock footage, animation or interviews with your talent or emcee. Just be sure to snag some video at the event for next year’s promotion.
DURING THE EVENT
The most important part of live event coverage is actively engaging with your attendees on social media and making people at home wish they were there!
Go live on Facebook or YouTube, get some shots of people having a great time and post it on your Instagram story and comment on posts about your event. Also, make sure your event uses a singular, memorable hashtag for all posts, and encourage others to use it as well. This provides you with user-generated content to repost, and increased engagement will ensure your hashtag is more visible on people’s feeds.
Check out this Instagram highlight from one of our most recent events, Brimstone White Knuckle, to see some of the live event social coverage.
OTHER RESOURCES
A great way to thank your sponsors and showcase your successful event is to create a recap video to post on all your social channels. These are some of our favorite videos we get to create because we’re able to share some incredible experiences and show off just how awesome our partners are.
Recap videos can also be easily reworked to make a promotional video for the next event. That’s some great double-dippin’ for all the video footage you capture.
If you’re working on a shoestring marketing budget and have to choose between pre-event coverage or a post-event recap video, we recommend focusing on pre-event marketing (especially for the first year) – because you want people to actually show up, right?
Here’s the recap video for the Brimstone White Knuckle event mentioned above!
If you’re planning your next event and need some help with social media strategy or video marketing, give us a call! We’d love to offer suggestions and partner with you.