A seasoned event organizer approached me when she was in the following situation:
- She wanted to launch a regular semi-annual dance event in a beautiful reconstructed venue.
- Her own circle of students would not be enough to fill the venue, so she needed to target a larger audience.
- She did have several online assets in place (website, mailing list, FB Page), but she had no experience with custom targeted digital advertising.
I helped her set a promotional strategy, create images and text for the campaign, and set up a Facebook ad campaign on a rather limited budget.
The overall marketing strategy consisted of:
– Hiring a well-known DJ in order to attract dancers from his social circle.
– Involving 2 other dance organizers as partners: they each had their own social circles to which they could promote, they came from different backgrounds and contributed with their own experience in the decision-making process.
– Creating a personalized email newsletter and having it sent to three different mailing lists.
– Building up momentum on Facebook organically by posting in various interest-related groups, on the business pages of the three co-organizers and by having a custom-made cover photo announcing the launching event for the personal profile pages of the three co-organizers.
– Creating several FB image advertisements and targeting them to custom-picked audiences interested in social dance in cities within a 200km radius (which happened to address people in 4 different countries). The ad campaign ran for 7 days prior to the Special Event and used less than €50 in total.
– Post-event, following up with a limited organic campaign of spreading the video from the launching event.
Services rendered in summary:
Strategy formulation, organic Facebook activity; FB advertising, email marketing
