How To Successfully Promote a Facebook Event to Increase Foot Traffic
August 15, 2018 (0 comments)
Many jewelry stores love hosting in-store events to drive foot traffic. Building on last week’s Facebook Event primer by
Smart Age, here are some helpful ways to market your Facebook Event as effectively as possible.
Before we get into the marketing, a couple quick key points.
Use a great event cover photo
The header image for your facebook event is important. It’s prime real estate to grab your visitors attention and explain what the event is all about. Make sure to use image dimensions that Facebook uses for different placements: on the Newsfeed of audiences, on the event page, and on the ‘upcoming events’ page.
785×295 pixels – for the event page
470×174 pixels – for the Newsfeed
150×100 pixels- for the upcoming events section
Also, the image should be indicative of the event’s content in order for you to generate interest and qualified response.
Get People Involved
Much of the time, your audience will judge an event by the activity on the event's Facebook page. Nobody wants to attend an event that seems dead. If I see an ad for a Facebook event, I can click the "interested" button. This will then notify me when the event organizers add something or when someone posts a question. This will show me a constant stream of periodic event updates. This promotes the event to me and repeatedly shows me why I should attend.
You should make efforts to get a conversation going on the event wall. On the event page, you can ask questions, conduct polls, and respond to comments to spark engagement.
How to Boost your Facebook Event with Business Manager
If you create your ad from Facebook Ads Manager, the first step will be selecting the objective of the campaign. Since we're promoting an event, the marketing objective will be “Engagement”and the option we have to select is Event Responses.
Once selected, proceed and select the audience for your ads. Give this some real thought. Where are the potential attendees located? Whats their age and interests?
Continue with the bid, budget, and optimization. Decide how much you want to spend and very important, select the best option to optimize your campaigns.
Since this campaign is an event promotion, we'll make sure to choose Event Response under "Optimization For Ad Delivery"
Now let’s work on our ad creative. This will be based on the types of promotional materials you have created for the event (you'll likely have Single Images but may not have a Video to share). It is VERY important to try a variety of ads, colors, and wording. You'll be able to see which ads are getting the most result. I would dump a little extra money into those ads if you see they're outperforming the other graphic options you chose.
Target A Custom Audience Based on Event Responses
Thanks to a Facebook update last year, you can now improve your targeting options using the new Custom Audiences from an Event. You can include or exclude people who had responded “Interested” or “Going” or send either group custom follow-up ads.
This allows you to do some otherf cool things, like targeting people who were interested in a previous event. This is really beneficial, because people who have showed interest in previous similar events might be interested in this one.
Set up is very easy. First, go to Audiences on the Business Manager and click on Create new Custom Audience. You’ll find the Custom audience from events under the engagement audience, so once you click on “new custom audience”, make sure you select Engagement option:
Next step is selecting the Event audience:
Heres the important part; you can set different conditions for your event according to what past users have replied in the last interaction with your event, and you can also decide if they have to meet ANY or ALL criteria. For example, selecting “people who have responded Going” as part of the audience creation, also lets you select the number of days in the past.
Remember that you can also select people who responded to a specific event.
This should give you a much better chance of success than just creating a Facebook event and expecting people to just show up! Hope this was helpful.
