You are planning an event and would like to raise awareness about it? You should consider Instagram promotional campaigns. They are easy to set-up and don’t require a big budget to reach your audience. It is a matter of targeting and efficiency
Advertising is a good way to grow your number of Instagram followers and event’s attendees. This article gives you some key steps to ensure the success of your promotional campaign.
Define a target audience
Comprehensive and precise targeting will ensure you optimise your costs and reach only the people who are more likely to become future attendees. It is very important to take the time to understand who your target is – passions, interests, favourite brands and celebrities, age, profession, marital status, location. You should promote your event to the people who are most likely to be interested in your event’s characteristics – theme, location, atmosphere, activities. Make a list of all those and consider checking out events and pages that are similar to yours.
A message that hits the nail on the head
What will you tell your audience? Find the right message, the one that will transcribe the DNA of your event and will appeal to your target emotionally. It must touch on important goals for your future attendees: learning, having fun, meeting new people, etc. If your message does not promise immediate or short-term impact on their lives, they will not remember it. Standing out from the mass of information that your potential attendees receive every day is not easy.
You can test messages and pictures over short periods of time on one or more of your target audiences. This will let you know which message is most appealing and generates the most engagement. You can even create A/B Testing campaigns on Instagram – this means testing 2 or 3 messages over a few days. Instagram will let you know which one performs better, and therefore which one you should spend your money on.
You can also broadcast different messages to different audiences. If you are organising gym sessions, you should probably target sports fans but also amateurs and anyone with an interest in an introduction class for instance. Your messages will not be the same for either of these targets and should redirect to different offers.
Communicate at the right time
It is important to pick the right time to launch your promotional campaign. It must be far enough from the start of your event to ensure registrations are done in advance but close enough to avoid potential attendees pushing it back or forgetting to register. You can therefore set up two campaigns based on these goals:
- Several months before the event — Increase your number of followers
- One month before the event — Attract people to your event and ticketing module
If you plan repeat events, think about the periods of time when your potential attendees are connected and likely to be receptive to your message: days and times. This is true for all types of events.
You can plan to display your ad during your potential attendees’ “break” times, i.e. between 12 and 2 pm, after 6 pm and at the weekend. Limit the number of user impressions if you think that after 3 displays your message either has been memorised, has no impact or will never have one. These options allow you to test and optimise your campaign’s performance and ROI.
Furthermore, significant moments in the year are a good way to communicate discount codes and launch marketing ad campaigns.
Balance and optimise your budget
Do not spend your entire budget all at once, spread it out over short periods of time to modulate it depending on your campaign’s initial results. Set a maximum budget if necessary. Regular monitoring of your statistics will allow you to readjust your budget, to rate the effectiveness of your messages and pictures fairly quickly: number of likes, clicks, and especially ticket sales or registrations.
The bottom line in budget management for an Instagram ad campaign is to strike a balance between spending more to reach as many people as possible and optimising your costs to address only those who are most interested in – or interesting for – your event.
Consider two campaign goals:
- Generating clicks and redirects to your website.
- Reach users with interests related to your event and redirect them to your website. By generating clicks, the goal is of course to encourage users to register or buy a ticket.
- Gain Instagram followers.
- Redirect users to your profile and build an audience base. You can then add content to your profile and interact with your followers in the medium to long term. The more loyal followers you have, the more adding content to your Instagram profile will make sense.
Keep the pressure on
Your profile may be followed by hundreds or even thousands of people, that does not mean that they see all your posts. Instagram’s algorithms show the most relevant content for each user, as the user cannot possibly view the thousands of posts available each day. It may be interesting to continue your advertising campaigns or to promote some of your posts so that they can be seen by more of your followers.
In short, Instagram’s new algorithm works this way:
- Engagement — likes, comments, clicks — on your posts is taken into account but so is the reaction time between post and action;
- Time spent by users looking at your posts;
- Engagement consistency and frequency from your followers will encourage Instagram to display your posts as a priority;
- Recency is used to showcase your latest posts;
- The content’s themes liked by users determines their interest to present them posts on these themes — sports, food, music, etc.
Promoting your event on Instagram has no secrets for you anymore. It is time to get started!
Once this step is done, planning and communicating about your event can be developed endlessly thanks to Weezevent:
