Hosting big events around major holidays has long been an effective way for businesses to boost sales. It’s a no-brainer for business owners and marketers: you’re always looking for new opportunities to boost sales and build brand awareness, and your customers are feeling festive and looking to have a good time. Halloween parties are the perfect events to get people in the door. Costume contests, karaoke, a live band, drink specials; all these things make Halloween parties goldmines for nightclubs and bars.
But how do you get the word out?
If you’re not already, it’s time to leverage your business’ social presence to spread the word and make some damn money.
Why social media?
Simply put, social media is the best way to reach lots and lots of people. Your grandmother has a Facebook. Your dentist just sent you a friend request. (Which is weird for you because you’ve been ducking him for the last two years.) Your crazy cousin is spouting off about politics again. And most importantly, your customers are using social media.
Social media is the best way for your business to not only reach a large number of people, but also the right people. You want to drive people to your Halloween party? Social media is your best bet for reaching your loyal customers and converting newcomers.
Okay, but how do I do it?
The first part is planning. Having or a strategy in place to promote your event will make the whole process much smoother. Focus on promoting the event a few weeks ahead of time, that way you can generate some buzz before your customers make other arrangements. As the date draws closer, start to ramp up your promotions. Post about it on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Make sure you’re on people’s mind.
Create engaging, brand-consistent promotional content. Try something like these:
The feed layouts of Facebook and Twitter mean that people will scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and…
… until they find something interesting, so you have to create eye-catching content to draw them in. And if graphic design isn’t really your thing, don’t sweat it. There’s plenty of tools and stock photo sites out there.
That’s nice, but how do I make sure even more people hear about this?
We work with hundreds of small-business owners who ask that exact question. Your best bet is to turn to Facebook ads. While paying Facebook may not sound like the most exciting thing you do for your business, our friend Mark Zuckerberg has made the Facebook advertising platform one of the most effective means of reaching potential customers.
Create ads to boost events and target them to people in your relevant business area or create a custom audience from your email database to reach those prospects who are more likely to give you their business and show up to your events.
How do I know this is working?
Mr. Zuckerberg has also made the Ads Manager an incredible resource for tracking the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. At any point in the campaign you can go through and look at how many people your ads have reached, how many engagements or clicks they’ve received, the amount spent and so on. You can also tweak targeting, budget and creative elements at any time to make sure you’re maximizing the effort and money put into marketing your event.
