How to promote your event on Instagram?

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:

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