Learn how paid search and social media can help you promote your business’s time-sensitive events or special events.
Businesses, whether they are consumer- or B2B-based, often have time-sensitive events that can be promoted with paid search and social media.
When promoting business events, it is important to think of this as an entirely separate strategy.
Let’s dig in!
What Events Are Possible to Promote?
Let’s first look at some examples of possible “events”.
- Booth of company at tradeshows
- Participating in tradeshows
- Product launches
- Webinars
- Open houses
- Sales events
- Grand openings
- Adoption of pets
- Sports events
- Register for classes
We have opportunities for all advertisers, but generally we are looking for notable activities outside of the normal business with limited engagement.
Things to consider before you set up a campaign
It’s always beneficial to include the special event in your campaigns as an ad copy or sitelink. However, the event should be given a unique targeting strategy and messaging strategy.
Each event should have a new campaign to suit its setting and track conversions/ROI.
Event campaigns will be given their own budget instead of being shifted from ongoing campaigns. This will allow the main account to remain stable and retain its volume.
Four Tips to Design Event Campaigns
There are many factors that you should consider when promoting events, beyond creating a campaign and allocating a budget.
1. Awesome Creative
Promo text ads and images should be written in accordance with best practices.
It will be tempting to add text overlays to your images/video assets about the sale or event.
You should be aware that each ad platform has its own editorial guidelines regarding the text and image ratio. Please ensure you read these guidelines so that your ads are approved quickly.
There are many bells and whistles. Ad texts can be added to Google Ads or Microsoft Ads by inserting a countdown timer and ad customisers. Microsoft provides a detailed explanation on how the countdown function works.
Although the countdown timer is one type of ad customization, it is an excellent reason to get started with ad customizers.
Advertisers can dynamically fill out the copy of ad copy using Ad Customers. This is based on user’s location, search terms, device and other factors.
Event ads are as varied as the responses they can get.
2. Timing
It is crucial to plan your event campaigns in a timely manner, particularly if the event is short-term or only for a day.
- Are you looking to reach your audience at the exact event? Or do you want to build up to it over days or even weeks?
- Is it necessary to use a different approach for the promotion of the event during the build-up?
Promoting weeks before a webinar or product launch is a good idea. Local events might only need a few days to be fresh in the mind.
Pay attention to the time that the ads will end when you set the run dates and the ad schedule. Google will close at midnight on that day so you may miss a whole day.
Facebook allows you to choose a time for your posts. This is during military hours.
3. Localities
While the geotargeting will be heavily influenced by the event’s location, there are some things you should consider.
Geo-targeting for advertisers will vary depending on the customer base. Take this example:
- The city’s sidewalk sale will be within a defined radius.
- Large events, such as a tradeshow, will attract both local and international visitors.
- Hyper-targeting a national audience, such as a webinar will pose the greatest challenges.
You may choose to allocate budgets to the major metropolitan areas when you use national targeting. You can also review customer purchase data to identify trends in revenue and ROI by location.
4. Targeting
Events targeting will likely differ from main ad campaign targeting.
Let’s use the example of a tech show to illustrate how this can be applied in many situations where the event takes place at a physical location.
If your ad copy is relevant to the event, it will be important to target people who are nearby the event. Keyword groups such as:
- The show will feature technologies.
- Show attendees include companies.
- The show’s name, such as “tech Expo”,
These search terms offer a great opportunity for targeting people interested in this tech show.
You could use the audience lists to target your market within the search engines, either as a layer or by itself.
Our primary target strategy for Facebook and other paid social media channels will be to identify and target interests and behaviors.
Bonus Tip: Leverage Local Events Even If You’re Not Participating!
Assuming that you were hosting or participating in the events during this post, that’s fantastic. However, you can also take advantage of any events related to your business for extra exposure.
Home shows, for example, are full-swing in spring.
Even if your company is not participating in the show you can still use the exposure to promote your services, and/or related content on your site.
With new ideas for promoting your event, you can think creatively about ways to reach your target audience by focusing on location, searcher intent and relevant interests.