Organizing an event is one thing, but ensuring that people attend is another entirely. In this day and age, most of us have a rough understanding of how marketing works, but that doesn’t mean that we have the skills needed to sell out an event.
That’s why we’ve worked on this article, bringing together our top tips for the websites to use to get the word out about your events and boost your ticket sales.
So let’s dive in and take a closer look at the best websites you can use to promote your event.
Evvnt offers ticketing as well as event promotion, but the thing that’s of most interest for readers of this article is the fact that it offers syndication, allowing you to push your events out to over 5,000 different event listing websites and calendars from a single submission. You only have to provide your event information once and then Evvnt will do the hard work for you.
The Best Of is a UK-based website that’s designed to “showcase the best of everything”, and that includes events. Of particular interest here is the fact that it offers regional boards that go down to a city level, which makes it easy for you to ensure that you’re reaching the right people and getting your event listings out to the communities that are most likely to attend.
Meetup is purpose-built for events so it has an edge over a few of the more generalist sites that we’ve included because people turn to it specifically to find events that are worth attending. It’s also more focused on the socializing and networking side of things, making it a pretty good bet for conferences and business events. If people register their attendance on Meetup, they can also see who else is attending and start to think about whom they might want to meet while they’re there.
Reddit is a difficult one to get right, and it’s not the kind of community that will welcome you if you just start promoting yourself out of the blue. Still, if you’re already a Reddit user and you’ve shown your dedication to the community by participating in discussions on relevant Subreddits, you can get away with a little bit of self-promotion. Just make sure that you post about your event in places where it will add value to people rather than just spamming up their feeds.
This website is designed to help you find days out and things to do in your local area, and it’s another one that allows you to niche down and join subgroups based on the cities and areas that you’re active in. From a user perspective, it allows people to “search for events, clubs, and classes by date, postcode, and type of event”. As an organizer, it allows you to promote your events up to a year in advance.
Yelp is one of those websites that everyone has heard of but not everyone has necessarily used. It’s primarily used for hosting crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses, but it can also be a great way for you to promote your events, even if it’s only through the venues that are playing host to you. It’s one of those where it might not necessarily be perfect for event promotion, but which you can’t afford to miss out on as it is so popular.
This is another UK-specific website. It’s more geared towards live music, family events, festivals, theater shows, and other entertainment-based events, but that’s not to say that you can’t use it to promote conferences and other business-based get-togethers.
Eventful is designed to be an online calendar and event discovery service and is a must if you’re hoping to reach people who might not necessarily have heard of your event otherwise. That makes it a great pick for promoting an inaugural event, but it’s also perfect for those serendipitous little discoveries that can help to boost ticket sales and drive attendance.
The idea behind Eventcrazy is to showcase events and to make it easier than ever before for people to discover what’s happening nearby. It has less traffic than some of the other sites on this list, but it’s still worth listing your site here if you get a chance. You might just be surprised by how effective it can be at pushing people to attend.
Okay, okay, Craigslist might be a little bit old school, but that doesn’t mean you should discount it. This classified ads site has sections devoted to everything from housing to items for sale, community updates, and concerts. Depending upon the type of event that you’re running, you might just find that Craigslist is the perfect place for you to get the word out.
Of course, these are just a few of the websites that are available to you when it’s time for you to promote your next event, and the list is by no means exhaustive. Still, it makes for a pretty good starting point.
Obviously, you should also use your own website to promote your events, as well as any social networking sites that you’re a member of. And in the meantime, we’d also love to hear from you!
Be sure to let us know about the events that you’ve got coming up in the comments, and feel free to keep the discussion going by telling us about some of the sites that you’ve had success with. You can also follow us on your social networking sites of choice for further updates. We’ll see you soon!
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