University is a great place to have events. It’s an important tool for allowing students to bond, learn, and to develop social skills, but for a business, it’s a brilliant way of getting your business out there.
Assuming your event requires a student demographic, young people are crucial to business development in terms of ‘staying fresh’ and keeping up with the latest trends. Learning from these events helps keep in mind what the younger people respond to, and what can help businesses move forward.
However, even when you have your audience in mind, the most crucial part of making an event a success, or learning curve, is for people to actually turn up. This is where promoting an event is fundamental to its success.
With this in mind, here we look at how you can promote your event in a university, to ensure it meets all expectations.
Get Your Detail W’s in Place
The details are the core of promoting an event anywhere, which means they have to be solid. So what are the W’s?
Who, What, When and Where are the essentials that have to be ironed out before promoting your event. These are central to how your event will be promoted because the details will also have an influence on the style and appeal to the target demographic. It should also include why people should come to your event, which could be seen as the most important question during the promotion.
How are you promoting your event?
In an age where there is a multitude of options to promote an event, it’s a good idea to think carefully about how it would be best to reach your target audience. While the internet is a very powerful tool, don’t disregard producing something to ‘hold’. Even now, in 2019, people still buy programmes for shows, magazines, and like to have a physical representation of something they are interested in. This will also play into what your event is based on. If it’s around IT, maybe digital-online promotion is the suitable option; however, if you have an art club or gallery, digital print would perhaps speak much louder to that target audience.
Consider promotional material for the event itself. Banners, leaflets and magazines will not only catch the attention of people but will also leave a lasting impression (which could also be important for subsequent events), and give people something to take home with them.
What should be in your promotional material?
Apart from the very essential details, a full, enticing description of what you have planned needs to be in the promotion to encourage people to come.
Keeping your student audience in mind when creating the promotional material is critical. Students love a chance to engage with others and have fun, so it would be helpful if the tone were inviting and possibly not too much like work!
What is the best way to engage with the audience?
Presumably, your target audience at a university event would be students, so with this in mind, it’s time to promote the event through the channels that are most relevant to them.
In this case, it would be social media platforms, student chat groups, and promotional emails. However, don’t underestimate the power of physical, visual information. Posters and leaflets still go a long way in promoting events and having these placed up around the university can have a direct influence on the number of people who know about your event.
The more people that know about the event, the likelihood of more people coming increases.
Another interesting point is that students like to share things themselves. Having a poster or a leaflet to take a quick picture of and post on social media could be one of the fastest ways to promote an event, within the target audience you want to promote it too as well! With tools such as QR codes and VR becoming more prevalent, a crossover between print and digital could be the perfect solution.
Here at Brightsea, we offer a high-quality Digital Printing Service for all your promotional material needs. Don’t hesitate to get in touch to find out more!