Understanding what type of communication works best for the audience you are looking to target is essential. Once you have selected your target audience and your method of communication, then pick from these choice options ideal for event marketing.

1. Facebook

With a minimum of 2.19 billion monthly active users, Facebook has retained its position as the social media channel with the widest reach. The network allows you to reach the most varied of audience in terms of geo, gender, as well as age. Today, everyone from your newly born to your 96 year-old grandma is on Facebook. Even the house cat has an account. This is the channel for you if you are looking to reach out to the maximum audience to sell tickets online.

2. Instagram

Instagram has a slightly different approach to advertising and appeals to those with a high sense of visual aspect in their event. It’s popular with the millennial generation, especially women. Ideal for art festivals, dance performances, F&B events and the likes, Instagram is poised as the perfect social media channel to promote your exquisite pictures and videos.

3. Twitter

If you are looking to reach the wittier section of the millennial generation, Twitter is the network for you. It’s a fast-moving platform said to reach its post peak within 18 minutes. It’s best to have a new witty remark ready to keep relevant.

4. Snapchat

Snapchat is considered the trendsetter among social media channels. It offers you a unique mix of a younger crowd slewing towards the fairer sex.

5. LinkedIn

LinkedIn works great for more serious marketing. It targets professionals when they are in the mindset to make complex decisions. LinkedIn is especially useful in the Education industry, as targeting can be highly specific, and reach out to the exact audience for a particular program.

6. Pinterest

This is the only network that reports higher usage in rural areas as compared to the metropolitan mainstream. It is widely used to promote DIY workshops, craft fairs, and cooking-related events.

Choose Wisely

Remember, while marketing on these platforms, you not only need to keep the target audience in mind but also how you present your content to them. For example, while long textual marketing techniques may work on Facebook, visuals are the way to go on Instagram.

The post The 6 Ultimate Social Media Channels for Event Marketing appeared first on Yapsody.

• One billion hours of video viewed on YouTube every day
• Over 500 million people are watching video on Facebook daily
• Time spent watching video on Instagram is up more than 80% year over year
• Videos are six times more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than photos, and three times more likely to receive retweets than GIFs
• Snapchat has 10 billion daily video views

Here’s how video marketing can boost your social media marketing plan for events:

1. Broadcast live and get more attention

Using the ‘Facebook Live’ feature, you can broadcast videos to your audience in real-time. Apart from Facebook, social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope also provide the live video feature.  You can rope in your event’s performing artists and use this feature for promotion in the run-up to the event.

According to Facebook, users spend 3x more time watching live videos than videos that aren’t broadcast in real-time.  Your Facebook followers automatically opt-in to get notifications when you are “going live” which further increases visibility. Once your live broadcast is complete, you can upload the video to your timeline for those users who missed it. This feature is also helpful to give a sneak peek of your event to potential attendees who might show interest at a later point in time.

2. Grab attention early and sell tickets quickly

It’s important to grab the attention of your audience within the first 10 seconds or less, failing which they’ll stop watching your videos and move on. Within the first few seconds, you must convey the purpose of the video to your viewers and also offer some interesting information about your event, like early-bird discounts, and offer for meet-n-greet with artists, etc. You should capture interest during the first or second frame of the video before users have a chance to scroll away.

3. Optimize for search to garner more views

As you would have noticed, most social media platforms have inbuilt search options wherein you can search using terms such as hashtags. Consequently, make sure that your videos are SEO optimized to get noticed in the search engines of these platforms as well as external search engines. To make sure your videos are optimized, add proper headline and description to your video posts. Also, add relevant hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to boost search results. On YouTube, apart from the title and description you can add keyword tags to your videos.

4. Keep clear call-to-action in your videos

A call-to-action is an invitation to your viewers to take action which is why you should end your videos with a bang. Video content marketing needs to garner certain user actions, whether it is getting them to visit your event, share your video, or purchase an event ticket. The most effective place to add a call-to-action in your video is at the end. While creating videos, you must define a proper flow viz. ‘Introduction – Content – Call-to-action’. Keeping call-to-action at the end helps to motivate them to take your desired action.

5. Take your audience behind the scenes

The reason your audience follow you on social media is to know you better and get glimpses of how you run your business. When you do the latter, they connect with your brand. Once they get connected to your brand, it improves brand loyalty which is vital to growing your business.

So, showing videos such as behind-the-scenes, artists performing rehearsals, or the crew setting up the event – can garner interest and brand familiarity as well as engage your audience.

6. Capitalize on trending topics and hashtags to boost engagement

Like all other posts on social media, you need to leverage trending hashtags and topics while posting your videos. Capitalizing on these can help you connect with your audience regularly and eventually lead to fulfilling 3 content-goals. Delivering content that interests your audience, increase engagement level, and boost the number of views for your videos.

7. Run video ads to a targeted audience

You can run video ads to a targeted audience, including relevant users whom you haven’t already connected with on social media and get them excited about your upcoming events. Marketing videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have ad options that focus on increasing  views and engagement.

If you want to be sure about your video ad campaign, make sure your YouTube marketing is on point. If you get good engagement and views after posting a video on your page, you are more likely to get better results when you turn that video into a video ad campaign. It will eventually help you save a lot of money, which you can otherwise use to promote your event on other channels.

To sum up

After having implemented the above elements if you do not check the performance of your videos, all efforts go in vain. Monitor video analytics components such as the number of views, reach, average view completion rate, average view duration, etc. – to keep a tab on the effectiveness of your videos.

To sum up, video marketing stands out as one of the most in-demand forms of marketing currently. If you aren’t including videos in your social media mix right now, you are incurring a lost opportunity.

The post 7 Ways to Leverage Video Marketing for your Events appeared first on Yapsody.

1. Got A Secret?
Let your attendees in on little secrets to get them talking. If your event is a product launch, click pictures of your product and watch as your followers try to guess what it is and what it does. Plus, the fact that the story will destroy itself after 24 hours leaves it all to the memory and serves as a more interesting challenge.

2. What Happens Backstage?
As much as attendees want to enjoy the event, they also wouldn’t mind knowing what happens behind the scenes. Keep updating them about the venue, click pictures and videos of your team working on something, or simply chilling together. Remember to keep it funny and engaging.

3. You Should Do It, Too!
Being the event planner, it’s your job to keep posting stories before and during the event. But, if you find ways to make your audience do it, too, they’ll be indirectly promoting your event. One way to encourage them would be to have photo booths with funky props at the venue, or have entertaining performances during the breaks.

4. Tell Their Tale.
While Instagram Stories is a way to broadcast a message to the entire community, making it a little personal could actually make you a favorite among your followers. For example, post a picture asking people to comment their queries, and respond to these queries by uploading a 10 second clip in your story along with the username of your guest and the question they’ve asked. That way, they’ll want to view your story if their question was picked.

5. Peekaboo!
Curiosity is the best marketing tool, they say. Use this to your advantage by not revealing all details about your event all at once. For example, if you’re having a performance by a celebrity or a speech by a renowned personality, just drop in hints about them in your stories. You could put up blurred images, or rhyming clues, or even quotes by these people to intrigue your attendees. Maybe you could also announce a small reward for anyone who guesses it right!
Whatever little games these platforms are trying to play within themselves is not your concern. For you, as an event planner, this is yet another promotional tool to use to market your own event. The fact that you need to consider is that using this will help you reach out to a bigger audience in better ways, maybe, and that’s all.

The post The Event Planner’s Guide to Instagram Stories appeared first on Yapsody.

Has your business still not reached the heights you feel it deserves? It could have something to do with the customer service you’re providing. There are a few ways of attracting a customer to your business; here are a few of them-

1) Do you have an online presence?

Given the fact that all communication and interaction seems to take places online in the present generation, customers are going to judge you by your online presence. Are you available on social media? What would be the first thing customers see when they google you? All of this matters and they play a key role in ensuring the popularity of your company. Unless you give them something that they like, your customers wouldn’t even give you a second look. As they say, the first impression (in this case, your digital presence) is the last impression.

2) Have you optimized your website?

If you’re a company that’s largely dependent on customers, you need to make sure that your website is search engine optimized? Where does your website feature if someone looks up a product or service you provide? You must understand something, customers are pretty ruthless.  Also, they would rather visit websites that feature near the top and appear trustworthy. That is why you need to pay special attention to SEO and ensure that you make it to the top of the list. If you haven’t done this already, you now know why you’re missing out on customers.

3) Are you on popular social media?

Seldom will you come across customers who do not have an account on social media? All of you out there must be pretty active on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or even SnapChat. Now if you look at the other companies around you, you’ll see that they all have pages and groups on social media. You too need to make a move as soon as possible, if you haven’t already. Attractive images, relevant blog posts, impressive posts- these are things that will appeal to your audiences. The logic is pretty simple nowadays- more the number of likes, the more popular a page is. Cruel and unfair, yes, but true no doubt.

There you go. In a nutshell, the easiest and the most popular way of attracting customers today is to widen your reach online. You need to make sure that customers do not have to scour every nook and cranny of the World Wide Web just looking for you. If customers acquisition is your main goal, you need to start nurturing the online presence of your company.

The post How to Attract Customers to Your Business? appeared first on Yapsody.

Well, there’s always Snapchat. Wondering what that is or how it’s of any importance to you? Look at this way, this could be your best shot at SMM (social media marketing). It is a social media platform where you can share all kinds of photos and small videos with your friends. If you were to come up with marketing strategies, this would be the best way to power up your event. Pre event or during the event, this is the best way to keep your customers hooked. Why, even some of the biggest names in the industry are turning towards such social posts to promote their brands.

1) Wider Reach

Who uses Snapchat? The younger generation. Who’s your target audience? The younger generation. See the common factor? Duh, using Snapchat event campaign would give your marketing strategy a boost like no other. By using Snapchat for your event promotion, you would be giving off the impression that you’re “cool” and “hip”. Isn’t that what you want, anyway?

2) It’s An Event Enhancer

It is not just the pre event marketing that makes a difference, how you promote your event while it happens is important as well. Recently, participants in some of the most popular events kept snapchatting while the event was on. And let’s just say, it experienced an immediate surge in popularity.  An important aspect of PR is spreading the word, and Snapchat  can help you do that. Get a press release out. Use blog posts. Do whatever you think is necessary to convey the message.

3) Video Sharing

You know what’s better than an email blast? Sharing videos, live or otherwise. You could share a sneak peak of the upcoming event nearby, only to fuel the excitement of the eager customers. They’re fired up as it is, trigger a chain reaction of excitement and “I can’t wait anymore” via Snapchat! What could be better than that?

4) Competitions And Contests

Snapchat users love a good challenge. Organize some quizzes or little fun contests for them. For instance, if you’re having a concert by a famous singer, you could keep posting little titbits about the artist in question to keep the customer hooked. That would help with your search engine optimization as well.

5) Coupons Valid For Short Periods Of Time

Promoting an event is all about enticing the customer just enough to make them take the next step. You could post offers and deals, of course for short spans of time to intrigue them. In these cases, partnering up with other companies would do the trick. So what are you waiting for?

You’ve got your target audiences statistics, haven’t you? What’s the best way to reach out to them, according to you? The best part about Snapchat is that it’s not only for the younger generation. With social media platforms like this, promoting your events or concerts become exceptionally easy!

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