Welcome to our blogpost, where we dive deeper into our e-blast content!
1. If you have a design team or paid employees that create your marketing, you should still meet with your students frequently to discuss ideas for how you want to market events and programs, and take the ideas to the designers to turn them into something visual. Things to consider: What was successful before? What was unsuccessful? You don’t have to stick to one poster and you can create different types of content beyond a poster.
2. Why waste time building content for a platform that your target audience will never see? example. Audience that was born in the year 2000 and after likely do not use Facebook as their source for information. Where it may be an appropriate platform for alumni events, is it necessary for orientation or similar events?
3. If there are trends or hashtags that the current and incoming class are using, it’s in your favor to follow these trends closely and try to incorporate them into your marketing to increase visibility and likeliness to receive engagement. Are there popular songs you can add to a graphic? Is there a challenge or dance or re-enactment that you can build into content you are sharing? Are there any polls or challenges you can present to build engagement? So many ways to meet the students where they are.
4. With Back to School season around the corner, just two months away in August, your events for those first weeks are likely set in stone or near the final steps in the process. You should begin announcing these events. Add the event to online calendars, include them in e-mail letters, physical mailers, social media, and then of course as students return for move-in, begin the full push for promoting these events.
5. Flash from the past type of posts are always a great way to show the energy that an event brings, and gives the audience an extra push to come out and see for themselves. It also is a great way to get engagement from previous attendees, especially when they see themselves having such fun in pictures and video clips. College is all about the memories!
- Watching your social media engagement is a good way to know where you may need to make changes leading up to an event, or before holding the same event again, whether it is just the marketing plan itself or providing more information, or tweaking parts of the actual event.
- It is important to remember that you will never please everyone on campus, no matter how great of an event you are bringing. While important to monitor the engagement and responses, do not associate some negative or indifferent feedback as the opposite of success!
Pro Tip
Spend some time this Summer to plan ahead for marketing you will use later in the year too. You may not have all of your content finalized, or every event planned, but building a content plan with placeholders and ideas will be helpful when your students return for the Fall, allowing you to stick close to deadlines and goals, which in the long run make every other step of the booking process easier! If you know when you want to announce an event, or at least know when the event will be, or even know that you would benefit from promoting it at another event based on past success with engagement and attendance, you can always work backwards from those specific dates to set your goals. Check out what other events will be happening around your dates/events and see how they are using social media to build an audience. Perhaps you could collaborate on posts or events and grow your audience that much more.
This content is put together by Team Babco as a general resource. We are always happy to connect and talk about ideas to help you with your events. Call us today, at 757.962.8777 for more information about our services!