Hosting promotional events can be quite a fun thing, but they can also be quite stressful in the run-up to it and organising everything. If for example, you’ve started your own café, and it’s been a dream of yours, and you finally got it up and running one of the best things you can do is for a promotional night, so people can taste test your coffee and your treats that you have as well as mingle and get to talk to you and find out what you’re about. Here are 4 tips that surely help you to throw the best promotional evening for your small business.
By Team Savant
Image: Cody Chan
Think About Who You Are Inviting
When you’re throwing a promotional evening for your small business like a café for example, then you want to think about the kind of customers that you’re gonna want in your business and how you can get the word out about your café. You could host a VIP promotional night where you invite small business owners and fellow business owners down the street where your café is located. This is beneficial as it could be a way to sway them for you to be there. Stop on the way to work to grab a coffee and a bit of breakfast before they start their day. You could also offer exclusive discounts for local business people to come to your café and in return have flyers or promotional business cards in their store. Another great idea is to invite local and micro-influencers. Big influencers are great if they live in the area, but if they don’t you want to think about inviting some smaller and micro influencers who live in the area. This is beneficial as when they are local influencers, the majority of their followers will be living in the area also. So this is the prime audience that you’re gonna want to reach. So if you invite them for an evening of coffee, cake and chatter, they can share their thoughts and promote your business on their platform. This could help you also get out to a wide audience and different demographics that you may not be able to reach on your own.
Promote It On Social Media And In Person
When you’re hosting a promotional event which isn’t exclusive and is for the public. You want to try and get as many people as you can to come whether they just fit in and out or stay for the whole event. A great way to do this is to promote on social media by sharing the event details on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. You can also create paid ads where you’re able to promote your event to a certain demographic and you can choose the location of the area you’re in. This means that more people locally to you will see the promotion for the night and can be more inclined to come. Another great thing to do is get some physical promotion. A physical promotion that you would want to look at is a flyer, so you could look at flyer printing and get some promotional literature which you can hand out to students or local business people. You could also give it to different businesses which are located in the city centre that you’re based in, and to get the flyers to bring people in you could offer an exclusive discount on the flyer which they could either cut out or bring the fly with them to the event and they could get a free drink or a free cake if they bring it with them. This can also help you monitor how effective the flyer marketing was. So if you wanted to do it again, then you knew exactly how effective it would be.
Think About Entertainment
For any small business, no matter if you’re a café, clothes shop, or bakery, hosting a promotional event and having people come in for some freebies is great, but you also want to entertain people who come in. This just makes the night so much more enjoyable. People enjoy it and are talking about it for the next few days, and it will also make them more inclined to share it on their social media platforms and promote you through word-of-mouth. A few ideas for entertainment could be a local singer who could serenade throughout the evening. You could also look at a magician who could go around to the participants of the evening and do tricks. Then if you have the space you could get something like dancers or a band to play. You could also use it to help a local creative artist showcase themselves as well, which may also help your budgeting costs as if they get promotion through it, they may not need as high a payment. This could be something like a musician, improv, actor or comedian.
Stand Out From The Crowd And Your Competitors
On the day of the event use social media to your advantage, you could host competitions with last-minute VIP tickets up for grabs for the winners. You could also do competitions in the event and on social media to help build your following and audience, this could be winning free coffee for a month from your cafe or if you own a vintage clothes store they could win a brand new outfit. Make your event stand out by enticing people into your business plan and vision. Show off how amazing and kind you are and also show how you are going to help the community. A way into the hearts of the community is to give back.