Promoting Your Event

You’ve planned your Culture Days event, now it’s time to get everybody excited about attending it! Once registered, your event will be promoted on the Culture Days website where you’ll have access to a variety of resources. However, there are many tools at your disposal to get the most out of marketing and promoting your event.

Culture Days tools

When you log in to your Dashboard on our website, you will find a resource page where a variety of material is available for download. These customizable documents can be great assets to your marketing campaign. After filling in with your your event information these documents can be distributed throughout your community. While we access much of our information online today, other forms of advertisements are still very effective. You can circulate the information about your event in local newspaper ad spaces, or even print off posters to be displayed on public event boards.

Digital marketing

Social media can be an essential tool in marketing your events and boosting your attendance over the course of the Culture Days celebration. During the National Congress for Culture, Culture Days gathered some tips from experts in the field. You can check out the pointers the videos below.

What’s your goal?

You should always define your goals, purposes, time frame, resources, audience, and network before you start. Once you’ve identified your aims, you can decide which digital channel is the best fit for you.

Where does your audience spend time online?

Try to think like your audience or customers. A digital marketing strategy starts with understanding your audience and finding out where and how they are active online. Interact with your audience: ask them for feedback and listen to it. Adopt an audience-centric strategy. Once you understand them and how to find them on the Internet, you’ll be in a better position to design a digital marketing plan that grabs their attention.

Digital marketing doesn’t always happen digitally

Many take for granted the presence of a divide between the online and offline spheres, and it’s common practice for print and digital marketing teams to launch separate, disconnected campaigns. This barrier, however, is unnecessary and unproductive. Audiences and customers casually cross multiple marketing channels in a single hour and frequently see a billboard ad, a promotion flyer and a social media campaign within nanoseconds of each other. When it comes to connecting your online and offline programs, the most important thing to remember is to make sure that your interactions, both in the digital and “real” worlds, feel natural and human. Always “humanize” your social media marketing.

Find your advocates

Essentially, a brand advocate is someone who enjoys your product, organization, group, service, etc. so much that he or she tells other people about it online and/or offline. Identifying, enabling and cultivating these brand advocates is a great low-cost, high-return strategy.

Promote alongside peers

Nurturing your passionate audience members and motivating them to share your content is key, but sharing their content in return and encouraging their initiatives is equally crucial. Oftentimes, especially in the arts and culture sector, you have the same target audience. Join forces to leverage each other’s content and cross-promote one another.

Becoming a Feature Event

Culture Days wants to brag about you! We are always looking to highlight exceptional and exciting programs. With thousands of events being registered leading up to the Culture Days celebration, you’ll want to make sure you get the most out of our promotional opportunities.

For more information about how to become a featured event, you can contact your provincial representatives, but here’s a few tips to get you started:

• A picture’s worth a thousand clicks: the event photo you choose has the power to take your promotions to the next level. It should be eye-catching and not include any text (please don’t use Culture Days poster reproductions).
• Your event must be participatory! We want to see unique approaches to engaging audiences; this means hands getting dirty, music being made and attendees getting into the groove together.
• Make sure your event description is concise, snappy and compelling
• Make sure your event is easy to share: let’s face it — social media is necessary to drive audiences. If you’re talking about your event on social platforms, we want to know! Be sure to tag @CultureDays in any posts (don’t forget your Provincial or Territorial Culture Days handles!) to show us how you’re engaging the public.

The sooner you register your event and begin promoting it, the better your turn out will be. Make sure to be in contact with you provincial Culture Days representative. They will be able to assist you with any questions you might have about the promotion of your event.