In conversations with some of the members that come to my events something pretty interesting came up.

It was the whole topic of promoters basically shoving events down the throats of their potential audience. Immediately a thought bubble popped into my head and I envisioned a promoter dressed as a caveman/barbarian with a big bat, clobbering people and dragging them into their Club Cave.

What do I mean by this?

Well when it comes to Flyers, MySpace, Facebook, Emails, Text Messages etc. they continually yell, I’m the biggest, brightest, bestest (yes that’s a word) promoter in the whole wide world and you need to come to this event. Something I like to call the Car Salesman Syndrome. These promoters and event marketers try to shout as much and beat their potential patrons into submission, until they agree to attend the event.

However, what these marketers don’t realize is that their audience is much smarter, intelligent and educated when choosing to make their decisions of how to spend two of their most important assets, time and money. They’re not stupid and they don’t believe you when you’re the 97th promoter yelling “We’re The Best!”

With so many marketing messages hitting them anyway, they’ve grown quite jaded as well and have started to ignore a lot of marketing. With all the noise, clutter and “clubs”, they’ve put on their marketing blinders and ear muffs.

So what can you do to encourage patrons if you can’t throw the club to their head and drag them to the event?

1. Don’t Be Another Barbarian, Be a Friend

You want to come across as someone who is genuinely interested in providing them the best experience in exchange for their time and dollars. You shouldn’t fake this either, because people can smell insincerity a mile away. You want to be seen as their friend who by the way throws great events and not just another promoter. Especially when right now people are starting to compare promoters to sleezy car salesmen and even worse telemarketers yelling buy buy buy.

That’s definitely not what you want.

As a friend it’s easier for your audience to trust you and now you’re not marketing but making a recommendation.

Studies show that when it comes to making decisions people trust the opinion of their friends way above say marketers, politicians and company execs.

This makes sense right?

When last have you called up Paramount Films to ask their opinion about a movie that’s coming out? Probably never… You call up your friend Joe who saw the movie and asked him what he thought about it. Hey, if Joe says it’s a good movie, you should at least give it a glance.

Be the friend, not the angry barbaric promoter.

But how do you do this?

2. Don’t Use Clubs

Before text messages there were emails, before facebook there were flyers, video, radio ads, tv ads etc which are all useful tools, but event marketers have turned these tools into big heavy clubs and have bombarded the market with them. Again people have grown sick and tired not of the tools, but how they are used.

What I’ve been doing for quite some time now, is changing the messages and tools from broadcasting messages, to messages that create conversation, that come across as entertaining, that don’t seem as invasive to people, so they don’t feel scared opening their inbox.

I’ve actually sat down and planned the use of the tools, email, text, video, audio, facebook etc and how to create marketing that not just markets the event, but also entertain and even make other look forward seeing what’s next.

With video especially I’ve been seen dancing, making an ass of myself but also informing people and encouraging them to come party with me.

I’ve positioned myself as Trends, my crazy friend who’s just like me, laughs, has issues, and by the way is having an event this weekend. Let’s go check him out.

Sit down and find creative ways to bring your message across without blasting another … “Big Party this Saturday June 3rd” message.

Initially doing and changing the tone of your marketing will seem like it makes no sense at all, but it definitely works and helps you break through the clutter of barbarians forcing people nto their caves

3. Encourage Their Friends to Spread The Word

With you using your marketing material in a different way no encourages people to spread the word. You now have a pass it on appeal, where their friends are saying, “Hey check out this video.”, “Here’s a funny pic for the event this Friday!”, “Check out this event, all our friends are going!” Again as mentioned above, people believe and look to their friends for recommendations.

Especially with social networks like Facebook, it automatically creates the pass it on appeal whenever anyone comments on your notes, images and videos. Your content then goes viral because you spent time to make messages worthy of comments and tagging.

Their friends will then see the interest generated around the images, audio, events and videos and come to check it out.

Outside of social networks you can encourage other to pass your message along by adding a “Tell a friend” button or link to your content.

Another important thing is for you to tell your new friends “Please share this” and pass the message along to your friends. Tell them exactly what you want them to do.

Once you’ve become their friend and used the tools in a way that’s less invasive and brutal they’ll be more than happy to share your message with their friends.

Using these three tips to go from Barbarian to Friend you will see a big impact and lift in your event turnouts and response from your audience. Not only that, it also helps cut your marketing expenses because now you’re influence others in a way that’s more viral and more impactful to your bottom line.Now you can spend less on your advertising that sometimes is hard to track and know how effective it is or not.

Take some time now, sit down and come up with ways using these tips to make your marketing better. Put down your caveman club and reinvent the way you communicate with your potential patrons. Yelling bigger, better, funner makes you look like another me too promoter, only adding to the marketing noise and clutter.

Hopefully you found this post useful and will pass it on to your friends and fellow event marketers.

Remember to comment below and let me know what you think.

- TRENDS
EventMarketingTips.com

Image Via Flickr

Written by TRENDS for - EventMarketingTips.com. EMT is an outlet for all my latest lessons, adventures, interviews, resources, rants and more about Nightlife, nightclubs and more.

Tweet This Post