©2020 Claire Divas, Editor - Likehack

Introduction

Facebook has over more than 2 billion active users with no sign of slowing down and acts as an ideal platform to promote an event or tradeshows. It provides the ability to reach your exact audience by age, interest, location, and behavior. Facebook is considered a hybrid platform; any activities you post on Facebook can be cross-promoted on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.

Why Businesses Need To Market Trade Shows And Events On Facebook

Facebook is an ideal platform to promote an event or trade shows to reach more than 2 billion active users. In traditional marketing, businesses tend to create awareness through advertising events on radios, newspapers, or billboards. The audience needs to remember that information and note down the time, venue, or important details on diaries. While in Facebook marketing, people would much rather just hit the interested button on your event post as they surf their Facebook Feed. Each update and information regarding the event will be received in their Facebook notification section.

Marketing your events and trade shows on Facebook would provide you the opportunity to connect with your customers and give them the best experience that would make your brand unforgettable. Let’s have a look at 10 ways to integrate Facebook marketing into your events and some of the important features and techniques that drive more engagements for your event or trade show marketing.

Pre-show Facebook Marketing

Create an event page on Facebook. The discussion area of the event is a great way to post announcements or answer questions. You can also link the ticket buying option, where your attendees can buy tickets without ever leaving your Facebook event page.

1. Build A Content Strategy

Create an effective content strategy by planning a reliable and cost-effective source of traffic and manage your vital parts of content such as content creation and publication. Some of the tips to create a winning event marketing content strategy are:

• Post often about registrations and early-bird deadlines
• Share your posts to event partners, potential collaborators, and influencers
• Create an impressive hashtag and share the same across all posts
• Share behind the scenes event preparation before launch
• Reveal speakers or special guest in creative images and tag them in posts

2. Facebook Ads To Target Right Audience

Design an engaging call to action with either ‘Interested’ or ‘Get Tickets’ depending on your objective that perfectly match your goals. Get more reactions and sell more event tickets through Facebook event ads. For new methods always do your testing.

• Create a lookalike audience of people who have already converted on your event ads
• Show ads to people within 10 miles of your location
• Focus on people who match your targeted demographics
• Do your split testing to find you are always getting ad clicks

3. Build Community With Like-minded People

Creating a community of like-minded people for your business can help you reach your target audience more consistently. Find the likeminded with popular hashtags, users based on location, members with the same business and build an effective community. Create space for your community members to share stories, ask questions, get inspirations and effectively respond in the group to increase brand loyalty and credibility.

4. Leverage Influencers

Influencers are social media users who have an actively large following. If you want to reach more audience you can leverage influencer to promote your event. Some of the biggest advantages of influencer marketing are:

• Influencers use unique content to promote your brand
• Connect with target audience organically
• Increase your brand awareness in a short period and generate quality leads
• Maximize your reach to a wider group of audience across multiple social media platforms

5. Video Marketing- Teasers, Q&a, Polling, Behind The Scenes

Take your event marketing strategy to the next level through creative video content. Nearly 69% of marketers prefer videos to perform best, also people react frequently to video content than plain text or images and the platform tends to prioritize this type of media.

• Teasers- Build hype through event teasers. Promote your event teasers, inspire them to take action and get viewers to click on your website.
• Polling- Share a poll with your audience and let people vote for their favorite options
• Behind the scenes- Boost engagements and humanize your brand by sharing behind the scene videos to give a glimpse into an exciting experience

At Show Facebook Marketing

The highest percentage of Facebook event posts occurs during the event, the largest type of event post was multimedia based such as images, quotes and videos and only 15% posts were plain text.

6. Curate Best Photos And Quotes

Here are a few ideas to curate the best photos and quotes to make your event photo-friendly.

• Share content from speakers- Post the key quotes from speakers to encourage sharing, tag the post with your specific event hashtag and by mentioning the speaker would spread the content viral among event attendees and other Facebook audiences.
• Backstage pictures- Entice sharing during the event by creating engaging multimedia posts. Reveal the backstage preparation by sharing behind the scene photos and videos to create enthusiasm, highlight exclusive interviews with people at the event.
• Photo booth- Create a photo booth allowing the audience to take and share fun images in a group or single and pay attention to little details that would make great snaps to post on your event Facebook feeds.

7. Empowers Attendees By Sharing Assets

Create a unified hashtag and use the same hashtag across various social channels. Generate quality content and make it easy for the audience to share the event by providing a variety of downloadable content such as video, article, graphics, email updates, newsletter updates and provide options to indulge various posting styles and image requirements for posting in various social platforms.

Take fun pictures of your audience, identify people and tag them in your posts which would create an opportunity to comment about what a great time they had and how much they are looking forward to attending your event again.

Post- Show Facebook Marketing

8. Follow Up With Event Attendees

When the show is over and people are returning, reconnect with your audience and say thank you or wish them a safe trip home. If the audience had complaints, follow-up with them to make sure those issues are addressed. Strengthen audience relationships with your brand and they will be more likely to engage with you for your upcoming event posts.

Pin your Facebook Stories to your Story Highlights to share them long-term. Highlights let you curate your favorite content and organize it with different labels.

9. Visual Testimonials

Visual Testimonials are effective ways to build brand trust also acts as user-generated content to increase brand awareness.

• Prepare an exit survey to receive comments from previous events.
• Interview audience and speakers and get feedback or opinions.
• Capture the statement of excitement about an event, specific sessions, or speakers.
• Create a video to showcase the enthusiasm of your event audience

Create innovative graphics or images with these comments as quotes and share these visuals in your Facebook posts, email signatures, blog posts, and other social media platforms. The audience would love to see their comments used and having these statements would increase brand credibility.

10. Measure Roi Through Performance Analysis

Set goals and social media metrics ahead of time to measure your campaign success, monitor your metrics and establish your benchmarks. Dive deep into your Facebook analytics to find how well your event marketing plan got executed. Measuring ROI (Return on Investment) shows you what strategy is working and what is not working that allows you to shift resources and tactics to be more effective.

These insights gained will provide you knowledge on how to develop a Facebook marketing strategy for future events.

Conclusion

Claire Divas is a dedicated, detailed and capable research social media blog writer with six years of experience. Extensively published in social media marketing technologies, with related expertise in Digital Marketing. .