Follow these guidelines to help your event advertising succeed.
When we are making ads for events, we want people to see our ads and come to our events. Good ads help get positive responses, bad ads are ignored or may even encourage people to stay home.
Whether you are posting the event on our Event Calendar or another one, do it right!
Post your event everywhere you think you have a good audience that is appropriate for your event. “You’ll never catch tuna in a fresh water lake!” Fish where the fish you want are. Yes, that means post your event in multiple calendars.
Our event calendar is limited to events in Oregon’s McKenzie River area. In our area, you can also list your event on McKenzie River Reflections Calendar. Eugene Weekly has a calendar. For tourism related events you can also submit to Eugene Cascades and Coast‘s calendar. Each organization has its own rules about posts it accepts.
Your community will likely have a number of places where you can post your event. Most events are also well served by posting on social media, especially Facebook. Again, post as many places that your target audience is likely to see your advertsiment.
You are not just making a listing, you are making an advertisement.
“Sell the sizzle not the steak”
Elmer Wheeler
Have you ever heard this quote before? You need to find the “Sizzle” in what you are offering.
Get me excited about your event. What benefits will I receive by participating in the event? What makes this event noteworthy or great?
Content: Words and Images Matter
Words
Of course you need to include all the basics: Who, What, Where, When and “How Much does it Cost”
Yet there is more than just adding the bare minimum amount of information to your Event Listing to making a great advertisement for your event.
Headline:
“Your first 10 words or more important than our next 10,000”
Elmer Wheeler
If you don’t choose the right 10 words initially, you won’t get the opportunity to share the next words.
In advertising, copywriters can easily append more time on the headline than the rest of the copy. Shorter is better, should help people quickly see that something is of interest to them, inviting them to click or read further for more info.
Formatting:
Formatting is super important. Long unbroken groups of words discourages most from engaging and reading your content.
Use Headings, bullet points, quotes, bolding and underlining to draw people’s attention to key points. Don’t forget white space, break up your text. Insert pictures to help build emotion or desirability.
Images
One picture is worth a 1,000 words.
Ancient Chinese Proverb
Just as important as a good headline, the image is extremely important. It gives a window to the event – a peek into the value or emotion I might get from attending the event. It can draw people in to learn more, it can also quickly encourage people to ignore your listing.
Choosing and Image
A good photo will help draw interest in your event. More than words can ever do.
Sources of Images
- Past event photos.
- Photos of event space or location
- Photos of people expereincing your event or activity
- Photos of products available at events
Many people are not adventurous and need to feel like the event is a good fit for them. Show the location, activities and people they would expect to see at the event.
Take Photos
Always take photos at your event or have someone who can take good photos do it for you. ALWAYS. You will have images for future events and you’ll have memories of this one.
These photos are essential for promotion. You can use them on Social Media to help boost excitement. Be sure you get permission from people to take photos, especially if they are close up or their face is clearly visible and you plan on publishing the photos.
Look for “Instagram moments” in your photos. It’s OK to move things around to stage pictures for us in future promo images. Images can always be cropped later and color balanced if needed.
“It always drives me crazy when an organization has been hosting events for decades but don’t have any photos of past events or event images posted on their Facebook page.”
If you need help with getting or editing Photos, reach out to our team. For McKenzie Community members, we can help provide professionals for free or low cost to help you get the right image.
Photo Images – Size and Editing:
Sizing for Event Featured Image
Images should be 1024 x 576 in size. Sizing is important for the consistency and professionalism of the website. It also is important when we share events on Facebook.
Here’s an example of an image I posted this morning:
You can save this as “event-image-template.jpg” if that is helpful. Each time you open it, the image will be the correct size in your image editor / photo management tool.
Photo Editing
Consider your source – if you think the provider of the image will have a problem with you editing the photo, limit your edits to just fitting the size required.
Shrink vs. Enlarge – shrinking and/or cropping a large image is better than stretching a small image. Stretched images look pixelated and are not professional looking:
You are better off putting a smaller image and centering it on our standard image size with a clear or a complimenting background, the same with a smaller image:
In the above case we had a logo, I used a colored background so you could see that this is the standard event image size, (a white or clear background would look better than this color).
Here’s another option for using smaller images:
Use a background of the same image enlarged and then center the smaller image in the middle of the image. You avoid pixelation and still maintain the look and feel.
If you look, you can see the edge of the main image – it’s obvious on the upper right of the image, less noticeable on the rest of the image due to the background. The idea is to keep the focus on the main part of the image and stay graphically appealing. This is a neat trick, yet may not work for every image.
Texts/Logos vs Images:
Generally a logo or text by itself does not make a good image for promoting an event.
How to Elevate a Logo in an Event Image:
If you can get your logo with a clear background (graphic designers usually provide this to their clients for use on websites) it’s not hard to paste this on top of a good image. In this image we added a slight shadow to help make the logo and entire image pop.
This is a much more powerful event photo – by adding the image of the river with the drift boat to the logo, the final event image evokes more emotion and elevates the Chamber logo.
Editing the image for Color and Exposure
Let’s face it, most of us are not professional photographers. Our photos may need help. Even professionals get better final images by adjusting their images with photo tools.
You do not need to buy expensive photo editing tools! Your cell phone has tools build in, as does your tablet and your computer. If you do a lot of editing and want better tools I love Affinity Photo 2 for high quality image editing at reasonable, 1 time purchase price (under $70). There are many other high end image editing products that are fantastic, but not a good value for most of us.
Good editing tools can make a HUGE difference. Your cell phone likely has some decent tools built in.
On my iphone, in my photo app is the “Edit” button
On my Mac, I can edit “Adjust Color” under “Tools”
There are similar tools on Android and Windows.
When to get Expert Help
For many of us, this is a hard question to answer. Especially when your event is being hosting by a community group or your event is low budget. When you can’t find people in your circles to do work for free or low cost, you’ll want to get an expert for help.
If you are going to spend a amount of time or energy to put an event together, its worthwhile too invest in some smart media pieces to help promote your organization and event.
How Do You find the Right Help
You do not need to spend a lot of money, there are likely low cost options within your group or circle of friends that can do a reasonable job helping. You will also have many local professionals you can engage.
Local Professionals
Media, photography and design services can get really expensive. I once did a corporate headshot with a fantastic local photographer, yet the pictures cost $200 each. For the project I was working on, it was well worth it and I’d highly recommend that photographer. Yet for most us and our small community events finding $50 to spend on photos or artwork for an ad may seem like a huge amount to spend.
If a professional has the overhead of a large office/storefront and staff, you should expect to pay a full professional rate of their services. Be sure to ask if they offer any discounts that might apply for your event.
Freelancers
Freelancers are a great place to find more affordable options. Without a large staff or expensive offices, they can often work for less. You can many online on websites like Fiverr or Upwork. Its harder to find a photographer for local shots, but its easy to find graphic designers and photo editors.
For people putting on Event in the McKenzie River community, we can help provide free or discount photography, photo editing and graphic design work. Reach out to us using our contact form.
Budgeting for Event Marketing
For me, nothing is worse than doing all the work to put on an event only to have low turnout!! Build in a budget for good promotion to maximize the exposure and participation in your event.
Putting on an event is expensive – consider the value of the time spent by volunteers, the hard costs for supplies, snacks and cost of venue (even if the venue is donated there is still a cost to someone to pay for utilities, cleaning and maintenance).
Choosing how to invest your limited resources and getting the biggest bang for your buck is important. Just spending money is not the same as doing good promotion. You need to “put up your flyers where people who are likely to want to attend your event will see them”. Advertise to the right target market. Some targeted Facebook ads might be a perfect place to start. (We can help with that too.)
Article by: Chris LaVoie
Note: This is an in process article. Submit your comments to help make it better. MCP free services are limited to people posting on our local Events Calendar which is for our local community events.