Two words, one trick: Proper timing.

When it comes to marketing your event, timing is everything. You want to make sure that you are reaching your target audience with your message at the right time, and that you are not wasting your time and resources on marketing that is not going to be effective.

So, how do you determine the optimum marketing timeline for your business or event? Here are a few factors to consider:

• The nature of your business or event. Some businesses or events have a natural timeline, such as a product launch or a seasonal event. For these types of businesses or events, you will need to create a marketing timeline that aligns with the natural timeline of your business or event.
• Your target audience. When do your target customers typically make purchasing decisions? If you are targeting busy professionals, you may need to start your marketing campaign earlier than if you are targeting students.
• Your budget. How much money do you have to spend on marketing and advertising? If you have a limited budget, you will need to be more strategic about your efforts.
• Your goals. What do you want to achieve with your marketing campaign? Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales? Your goals will help you determine the length of your marketing timeline.

Meet The Optimum Event Marketing Timeline

Once you have considered these factors, you can start to develop a marketing and advertising timeline. Each event timeline can vary significantly depending on the scale and nature of the ticket sales, but here is a general overview of a typical marketing and advertising timeline:

• 1-3 months before the event: This is the time to start building awareness and excitement for your event. You can do this by creating a website or adding your event as a listing on StepOutBuffalo.com and Facebook, launching a social media campaign, promote to your email list, and reaching out to media outlets – things that don’t require a paid advertising spend (yet).
  
• 1-2 months before the event: Get to work on generating leads. The best way to do this is to start paid advertising campaigns for the event. Social media is a good place to start and offers useful location based targeting options – get started, analyze, and adjust!
  • Pro tip: If you’re looking to reach a targeted audience geographically and locals actively looking for things to do (spoiler: you are), there’s no better place to run an event advertising campaign than with Step Out Buffalo.

• 2-4 weeks before the event: This is the time to drive sales. You can do this by ramping up your paid advertising spends and offering last-minute discounts as needed, running flash sales, and promoting your event on your own social media channels. Analyze what you’ve done until now and double down on what’s working best based on your KPI’s, slow the efforts that are not working.
  
• The day of the event: This is the time to make sure that everyone knows about your event and that they are excited to attend. You can do this by sending out reminders via your email list, running last-minute contests, and promoting your event on your social media.

Additional Factors To Consider

Again, this is just a general overview. The specific timeline for your marketing campaign will vary depending on the nature of your business or event, your target audience, your budget, and your goals. When we work with our clients to promote events at Step Out Buffalo, we adjust the timeline depending on several factors including the target customer, size of event, time of year, event concept, type and category. However, by following these general guidelines, you can create a marketing timeline that will help you achieve your goals and promote your business or event successfully.

Here are some additional tips for creating an optimum marketing timeline:

• Outline your KPIs at the start. Knowing what you’re working towards and what metrics matter is key to determining next steps as you navigate your marketing campaign.
• Be flexible. Things don’t always go according to plan, so it is important to be flexible with your marketing timeline. If you need to make adjustments, be prepared to do so.
• Track your results. It is important to track the results of your marketing campaigns so that you can see what is working and what is not. Plus, this information will help you to improve your marketing efforts in the future.
• Experiment. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different marketing strategies. The best way to find out what works for your business is to try different things and see what results you get.

Put Your Event In Front Of More People With Step Out Buffalo

At Step Out Buffalo, our mission is to help our readers and followers find fun and interesting events across Western New York, from the Southern Tier to Niagara County and everywhere in between!

With our large audience full of potential attendees for your event, we make it easy to connect people with things to do in and around the Buffalo, New York area. No matter what your event is or its size, we can help you find people who are just as excited to attend your event as you are to host it.

When you promote your event with Step Out Buffalo we’ll showcase it in all the right places to all the right people. In addition to strategic website, email newsletter, and social media placements, our editorial team is well-versed in the local market and can help businesses create effective event listings and sponsored content that are tailored to your target audience and will be more likely to generate interest in your event.

Ready to get started? Tap here to contact us and see how we can help promote your next event!