This guest post is by Maricar Jagger, public relations officer at the University of Portsmouth (UK) specialising in events management and promotion. She looks after a number of different events from public lectures, concerts and exhibitions, to building openings and conferences, as well as the occasional staff parties. She holds an MBA and an MA in Arts Administration from the University of Cincinnati (USA).

As an event organiser, I love to see innovative event marketing that captures the imagination.

What makes for good event marketing? It should be fresh and eye catching, expressing the sense of fun you will have at the event. It shouldn’t cost a lot. And remember that simple can be beautiful!

For this post, I wanted to share a few good example of innovative event marketing ideas I’ve come across recently. For even more top tips, join the chat about event promotion over on the EventTribe forum.

Your condom in the post

I love opera and I go to see the productions of the English National Opera and so I naturally joined their mailing list. The standard mailing is an A5 card with a pretty picture of a scene from the opera and text.

One day I received something that made me look twice. The postcard was square and it was a blown up picture of a condom packet. It simply stated in bold, Don Giovanni.

Imagine the impact on people who don’t know about the opera. If you had seen the card lying around on the dinner table, like mine did, someone would want to pick it up and read what it was all about.

The postman must have had a chuckle and read the card. If you find it in a pile of junk mail, you would want to read it first before you recycle this!

Now, I know Don Giovanni pretty well so it made me chuckle and thought, I might just go for the fun of it, because ENO was willing to take a risk and had fun with their marketing. I liked their boldness and the opera must therefore be interesting.

Golden Envelopes, 30 to celebrate 30th Anniversary

Simon Seligman, Marketing and Communications Manager for Music in the Round (Sheffield), shared his recent event promotion that caught my eye.

To celebrate MitR’s 30th birthday, a coordinated team of volunteers got up very early on a Saturday morning and left 30 toy instruments attached to Golden Tickets right across the city.

The Golden Tickets gave people a free pass to the Haydn Weekend Festival, or a family ticket to their latest children’s concert.

They had 18 of the 30 Golden Tickets returned to the box office within 7 days. More were families who chose the Family concert ticket, but around 7 took the option of a pass for the entire Haydn weekend.

Simon was inspired by something he did in his previous post at the Nottingham Playhouse. To promote the Cinderella pantomime one year, they left 50 red shoes all over Nottingham, focusing on areas where he knew their usual audience did not live.

Attached to each shoe was a label that offered a free family ticket to the panto if the shoe was returned to the box office within 7 days. They had 43 of them back!

The first was handed in 2 hours after the shoe had been left at a cashpoint, by a woman who came out of a night shift, was exhausted, needed to get some money out, and saw the shoe. She was so excited she came straight to the Playhouse, a building she had never heard of, or ever been to before, and claimed her ticket!

Is it a plane?

Taking an integrated approach to marketing, paired with a novel idea (or two), can work very well for an event.

Chloe Marie Palmer runs GosFest, an annual music festival in Gosport, Hampshire (UK). Founded in 2013, it followed on from the hugely popular and long running Gosport Festival/Gosport Waterfront Festival that was largely organised by the local council since the 1990’s.

For the festival, Chloe and her team work on attracting bands and festival-goers from all across the country and even internationally.

The organisers have to think of new and creative ways to market the festival and building partnerships has given them their biggest gain. They work with 150 bands across the festival. With the 35 acts on the main stage alone they have garnered a combined likes of 4.3 million on Facebook, as well as a combined Twitter following of nearly 4 million people. Can you just imagine the power they have on social media alone?

Last year they sent up a plane with a banner, which was seen by a lot of people. It was very attractive and got in the paper and on the radio. It was cheaper than a full-page advertisement in the newspaper, which they knew would have covered the stunt anyway.

The plane flew across the Gosport harbour. They then used social media as a competition for people to spot it and take a picture. Down on the ground, they had a Minion mascot and a band playing at the ferry terminal whilst this was going on.

In the evening they gave out flyers in Portsmouth (the event was happening in Gosport) and people were saying they had seen a plane that day with it on. What a way to maximise impact by taking an integrated approach.

 Promoting a colour run

 Clare Clay of Linkedup Fundraising is an experienced hand when it comes to running events. She has organised events for the Wessex Cancer Trust for many years. In 2014, she organised the first Colour Me Happy Run in Portsmouth. To promote the event, she wrote an extensive marketing plan incorporating both on and off-line platforms.

Using the theme of the run, she decided that the promotion had to be an explosion of colour to reflect the day, and so she set about to capitalise on the visual aspects.

For example, she took a photo shoot in the Southsea Rose Garden (while in full bloom), keeping the costs down by using friends to pose as a family having fun together. A graphic design of the run route and descriptive text were added to create a compelling visual story.

These visual assets were then heavily promoted, using social media along with conventional direct marketing and newsletters to spread them to their intended target markets.

Clare timed the release of these visuals on different platforms at different stages in the run-up to the event to keep the momentum and excitement going. She used the milestones of Kilometre marks to recruit runners and then used the same graphics as a countdown to the day in weeks and then days.

The result? Her team recruited 613 runners in no time at all and also had some fun in the process.

 Got a nose for a story?

Event marketing doesn’t need to be complicated.  If you have a nose for a story, it can work to your advantage.

Operatic tenor, James Edwards retained Keren Burney of Compege PR to raise his profile whilst supporting opera companies in their event promotion.

Knowing that national press coverage would be hard to achieve for an established opera singer who is not yet a household name, Keren worked on a story angle that she felt could be of interest to a respected national journalist contact.

James was adopted at birth and Keren arranged for him to tell his story. So she organised an interview at the rehearsal set in London. The journalist brought with her an experienced press photographer. Additionally, Keren also provided a range of personal and stage shots of James, as well as background information.

The result was a half-page article was published in the Sunday Telegraph with a number of photographs, under the title “I’ve felt pain of a Madam Butterfly baby, says star tenor”. Leading with a mention of the opera, the article also mentioned an adoption charity, PAC-UK, which James supports.

Summary

Whether your event is aimed at a few hundred or a few thousand, you can see that there are no shortness of ideas out there. Take a good look into your own event and see what the possibilities are and be bold!