Learning how to promote an event on Instagram is an essential tool for hosting an event of any size. Event promotion through social media platforms like Instagram is a free (or inexpensive) promotional tactic that allows you to reach a wide audience and capitalize on user-generated content to help promote your event.
If you have an upcoming event but no idea how to promote it, this article is for you! Not only will you learn why Instagram event promotion is so beneficial, but you’ll gain specific insight into what steps you can take to create a successful marketing campaign for your event.
The Benefits of Using Instagram To Promote an Event
Using Instagram to promote a future event is a valuable tool for recruiting attendees and selling tickets. While there are numerous perks of using Instagram to promote your event, here are some of the most important benefits:
- It’s inexpensive: Creating an Instagram account is free and allows you to access billions of potential attendees. Even if you choose to pay for Instagram ads, it’s relatively low-cost, and you can spend as little or as much as you choose to budget for it.
- You can keep the buzz alive with promotional content: With a well-crafted marketing campaign, you can continually churn out free promotional content for your event that gets people excited. Between the use of an event hashtag, stories and reels, posts, and Instagram Live, you can use a variety of content formats to reach a wide audience and keep your event fresh in people’s minds.
- You’ll gain access to user-generated content: User-generated content not only provides additional free promotional content for your event but is essential when hosting an annual event. For example, a music festival held each year will do best if there’s a hashtag where prospective attendees can see thousands of photos of previous attendees having a great time.
- You can get creative: You can post all types of behind-the-scenes content to promote your event; everything from artists warming up before a show to sneak peeks of items that will be auctioned off at fundraisers makes excellent content and keeps attendees’ interest piqued.
- You can directly interact with potential attendees: Promoting your event on Instagram allows your target demographic to engage with your content and ask any questions they may have, which gives you a chance to convince them to attend your event.
Tips for Promoting an Event on Instagram To Boost Attendance
While any amount of posting about your event will help promote it, being strategic about what and how you post will garner the best results and ensure engagement with active users.
Consider incorporating the following promotional tips into your marketing campaign to ensure you make the most of promoting your event on Instagram.
1. Properly Research Your Target Audience
Understanding who your target audience is ensures you create content that is relevant and compelling to them. To gain this insight, you should collect some fundamental information on your target audience, including their:
- Ages
- Gender
- Jobs and income levels
- Hobbies
- Education level
- Location
You can gather this information by assessing any previous data you’ve collected from attendees if you’ve hosted the event before, sending emails with surveys, or analyzing the audience of similar events.
2. Know When to Post
You can use Instagram’s algorithm to your benefit, but only if you know how to. The days and times you post matter and can significantly improve engagement.
Consider the following insights from Statusbrew to understand when the most effective times to post are:
- Posting on Sunday results in the lowest engagement
- Posting on Tuesday results in the highest engagement
- Posting on any day from 11 PM to 3 AM will result in the lowest engagement
- Posting from 10 AM to 3 PM between Monday and Friday will provide consistent engagement
3. Create a Catchy, Branded Hashtag and Geotag
Creating the perfect event hashtag is easier said than done, but coming up with a catchy, branded hashtag and geotag are essential to ensuring people actually remember to use it. When writing your hashtag, you’ll want to settle on something easy enough to remember and clever enough not to forget.
Consider the following tips for creating the perfect hashtag for your event:
- Make sure it’s not already in use: If you don’t create a unique hashtag, photos of your event may get lost in a sea of other posts that have nothing to do with your event. Search to check that your hashtag isn’t in use to maximize its efficacy.
- Don’t choose something long or difficult to read: Effective hashtags will be clear and concise. Although it’s preferable to have a catchy play on words, brevity is essential. In addition, make use of capital letters to make it easier to read.
- Choose something evergreen: An evergreen hashtag will be timeless and appeal to attendees for years to come, so don’t include things like the current year in your hashtag — this is especially important if you’re planning an annual event, as you’ll want to use the same hashtag each year.
4. Use Visual Content Strategically To Build Suspense
Instagram is all about visuals. While the copy is essential to communicating the details of your events, you can use exciting visual content to catch your audience’s eye and help them remember your event.
Incorporate content like visually stunning countdowns, clips of previous performances, notifications of early access to ticket purchasing, and more to help build suspense and encourage ticket sales.
5. Encourage Engagement With Fun Contests and Giveaways
Engagement is essential to the performance of your posts, and one of the best ways to improve engagement is through contests and giveaways. A single giveaway or contest can increase the rate of follower growth by 70% in three months compared to if you didn’t host a contest.
Contests and giveaways increase engagement, allowing you to build relationships with your vendors and show potential attendees what’s in store for them if they attend your event.
6. Connect With Your Audience and Answer Questions
Instagram provides a quick and easy way to communicate directly with potential attendees. Like, comment, and repost previous attendees’ posts, engage with users in the comments sections, and answer direct messages.
Connecting with your audience and answering questions increases the likelihood that people will attend your event.
7. Use Copywriting Tactics in Your Captions
Utilizing copywriting tactics ensures your Instagram event posts are informative and engaging. Event planning captions for Instagram should contain the following primary factors:
- Headlines: Use informative headlines that answer the fundamental questions of what, when, and where for your event. (Think of the first line of your post as the headline.)
- Post text: Write a short and sweet caption that reiterates the information from your post headline and encourages attendance
- Link descriptions/Calls to action (CTA): Include a way for attendees to learn more about your event, reserve their space, or buy tickets. Whether you suggest readers visit the link in your bio or use the Instagram ad “Book” or “Reserve” buttons, a CTA drives attendance
8. Don’t Forget To Utilize Instagram Stories and Reels
Learning how to promote an event on Instagram stories and reels will help boost engagement. While newspapers, billboards, and radio ads used to be the best way to promote events, Instagram reels now serve as an easy way for you to reach new audiences through the explore page.
In addition, hosting an Instagram live event is a great way to engage with potential attendees and offer a Q & A.
9. Direct Your Followers to the RSVP Link in Your Business Profile
Every Instagram post, story, and reel you make for your event should encourage ticket sales. If you don’t plan to use Instagram ads (which allow you to link directly to a ticket sales page), then be sure to encourage followers to RSVP via the link in your bio each time you make a post relating to your event.
10. Be Consistent
Consistency is key when you post content, and regarding the type of content you produce. Create a strategy with a cohesive brand voice, color scheme, and communication style to ensure each post resonates with your audience.
Although you want to keep content fresh and exciting, you don’t want to alienate potential attendees or confuse people about what your event will be like.
We’ll Help You Build Fail-proof Promotional Event Campaigns
Navigating digital marketing is a challenging and ever-evolving prospect. In addition, crafting a promotional event campaign can represent a time-consuming chore that, if not managed correctly, can cause you to miss out on an enormous opportunity to convert engagement into ticket sales.
Events.com Promote can help you advertise your events on Facebook, Instagram, Google, Events.com, the world’s largest event-based network, and many more channels. Talk to a marketing expert today to learn how Events.com can help you:
- Market your event across multiple social media channels
- Automate social media posts
- Save time and money
