As fall approaches, so does the festival of Oktoberfest. This event is associated with parties, good food, laughter, parades, cheer, and most importantly beer. No matter what kind of event you’re throwing for Oktoberfest this year, its success lies in careful preparation and then ensuring you have a healthy attendance.
This is only possible if you properly market your event. After all, people can only attend an event they know about. Having an active social media presence will make it easy for you to get the word out and promote your Oktoberfest. As such, there are a number of strategies you can use for this purpose.
We’ll be focusing on Facebook in this case since it allows you to widen and narrow down the scope of your event easily.
Create An Event Page
The first rule of promoting an event on Facebook is to create an official event page. This will act as the main stop for people to get information and updates. You can also send out personal invites to people and ask them to attend if you have an official event page. Moreover, it can appear in searches when people look for Oktoberfest events.
You can set up an event page in a few clicks. Once you do, you’ll need to start uploading content to this page. For maximum engagement, it is advisable to use graphical content like posters and flyers. They have much better information retention and get the message across faster. You can create them easily using an online designer such as PosterMyWall. You can also use the Oktoberfest flyer templates to get a headstart and prepare several posts in advance. This way you’ll have a buffer in terms of content.
Below is a good example of the kind of flyers you can create. It has clipart depicting beers, attractive colors to show a party atmosphere, and text to give the details of the event. Anyone who looks at it will instantly know what the event is, when it’s happening, and where it’s happening. Something similar can for your event too.
Entice Your Audience
Every festival has some performers or something unique it has to offer for its attendees. This depends on the kind of festival taking place and entices people to attend. In the case of an Oktoberfest, an organizer can offer free beer on entry, special games, etc to entice attendees to show up.
As such, you can start trickling down information in the days leading up to the event. Announce which performers are going to show up, what perks and discounts are you offering, etc. Entice your audience with these attractions and announce them one by one periodically to build hype.
Hold A Contest
People love getting free stuff. If there is a chance that they can get free stuff from any sort of event, they will likely engage with it. Using this to your advantage, you can hold a contest on Facebook and offer a small prize at the end which you can give at the Oktoberfest event. You can ask your audience to like or comment on a post, upload pictures of them enjoying themselves, or you may ask them to arrive at the venue and check-in.
Anything that will get them to engage. That will drive engagement on its own as well. Once they do, you can then select a winner(s) and then hand out the prizes at the end. Only a few will win realistically, but the goal is to get them to take part.
Run Paid Ads
If you want to take your Oktoberfest promotion to the next level, consider running some paid ads. This costs only a few dollars but will increase the reach many-fold. Facebook itself will promote your ads on people’s feeds and target a lot more people than you would otherwise. Of course you’ll still need to make the ads yourself which you can do easily with PosterMyWall’s Facebook ad templates.
These are professionally made templates that will give your ads a well-designed look. People would take you much more seriously and will engage with these ads. You can take a template, modify it, and then use it in your ads to run on Facebook.
Final Thoughts
The key to any social media is consistently posting content that will drive engagement. The more engagement you get, the more attendance you get, the more successful your event will be. A good social media strategy consists of simple but effective techniques that deliver results when used correctly. This article hopes to give you some effective techniques you can use to create a strategy of your own on Facebook. They are simple but deliver results when used consistently.