Pre-event promotions are an extremely important part of each event - while there’s a limit to the number of people that will end up attending any event, pre-event promotions create the opportunity to reach up to 10 times or 100 times more people through the pre-event email blasts and social media posts than will end up attending the event.

If you want to maximize the value of your effort and the efforts of all involved, you want to create opportunities for the stakeholders to maximally benefit from the Pre-Event Promotions in conjunction with, but separate from, the benefits received on the day of the event.

As an example, with very effective pre-event promotions, sponsors could receive enough click-throughs from the pre-event promotions to make the pre-event promotions more valuable to them than the benefits they receive on the day of the event.

Also, because there’s a limit to the number of vendors, presenters, and performers that can be included on the day of the event, there are typically many more prospective vendors, presenters, and performers that would like to be a part of the event if given the opportunity. We use Promotional Partner stakeholder group as a way to create a package of pre-event, event, and post-event opportunities and benefits for these prospective vendors, presenters, and performers so that they can be included in the cultivation of the ecosystem they’re a part of.

The cornerstone of any pre-event promotional campaign are the event promotion videos. These are a series of videos of varying lengths that help inspire/incentivize people to attend the event based on the feeling and/or benefits conveyed in the video.

The primary promotional video should be professional and polished, quickly summarizing the feeling and benefits of the event, along with all the vital details, including date, time, location, and hours, so that in theory, someone could successfully attend the event based on the information in the video alone. This video should be as short as possible (30-60 seconds max, if possible) to inspire people to want to watch it, and to maintain attention all the way through.

This video should be featured on the website, and on all in-house social media channels. The video should prominently feature sponsors, and may briefly feature vendors, presenters, and performers if can be done so successfully without extending the video too long.

In addition to the short (30-60 second) video “commercial” for the event, it will often be valuable to create a longer video which allows for more time to feature vendors, presenters, performers, and all the benefits of attending the event.