2

Promoting the

event

How do you promote your event to your target markets? This chapter

provides a list of promotional tools and an eight week sample timeline  

from developing your marketing strategy to the event launch.

Promotion is one of the seven Ps of marketing. It's about communicating to your

potential audience   not only to get them to attend but to ensure that their expectations

will match the product they will experience. Think about what influences your behaviour

and how you respond to promotion. Also test your ideas among a number of people

within your target segments before you produce costly promotional material.

2

Before you start to promote the event, one of your tasks is to put together a promotional

strategy that's informed by your marketing strategy. Your promotional strategy will identify

the tools you choose to communicate your message, including areas such as indirect

advertising, direct marketing and the media. The timing and implementation of your

promotional strategy is designed to take your potential market through the buying cycle (see

Buying behaviour on page 24).

Setting a promotions budget 

Once you've identified your target markets and the best ways to communicate with them,

you'll have some idea of the communication tools you should use. This will determine

how you spend your promotional budget. 

There's no magic formula to calculate how much of the overall budget should be spent

on promotion. For small scale events, the promotions budget will often be a larger

percentage of the overall budget than for large scale events. Save money where you can:

e.g. by piggybacking on mail outs; doing duotone instead of full colour posters; asking

for sponsorship in goods and services; using e mail to distribute photos.

17

Smart arts

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