When asking yourself when to start promoting your event online, there are a few questions to answer. While we rarely get to work with ideal timelines because of the humans involved in marketing (both agencies and clients), we present to you a suggested perfect timeline for promoting your event online.
Pre-Timeline
Schedule your event. This shouldn’t be a moving target. Don’t start planning event promotion until you’ve got your event details locked in. This is important because all other dates will work back from the date of your event, and you’ll likely find that you’re already running behind.
4 Weeks Out
Once you have established the details of your event, you should start the process of advertising it at least 30 days out.
This is the point where you should meet with an experienced digital marketing/advertising agency like Mediaura.
In your first meeting, the initial objective should be to identify your conversion goal. Do you want to sell tickets, show the event to as many people as possible, or perhaps sell an item associated with a specific date? It’s harder to sell pumpkins in January than in October, so knowing your goal will help us create a strategy for you.
There are a few questions to go over at this point in the process:
Do we need to build a landing page for you or does one already exist? Are you providing creative (copy, images, etc.) or are we? Each of these can add days or weeks to your process.
Do you have access to your existing platforms at an admin level? To advertise for Meta (Facebook and Instagram), we need you to be able to grant us access to your page.
3 Weeks Out
This is when your agency should be going over the ad concepts they have created for you, including static images, copy options, and suggested platforms. Once approved, these ads will be built into the approved platforms for review, and your agency can send you preview links for your approval.
If there are small corrective changes to the ad, this is the time period when they should be made. These are usually copy or image tweaks. Larger changes, like new images, demographic targeting, and messaging, can completely throw off the timeline at this point.
2.5 Weeks Out
Ads should be fully approved by this point. No further creative changes should be implemented. This is when your agency is finishing the final steps of setup, including ad duplication for testing, landing page tests, etc.
2 Weeks Out
This is the latest we recommend starting promotion of the event. This is not only considered proper etiquette for most informal events but also gives your event time to mature and develop some organic traffic online that pairs well with the paid promoted traffic.
13 Days Out
After the campaign launch, your agency should be checking for any implementation issues and standout errors, such as a lack of traffic on one of your ad variants. An experienced agency like Mediaura should be able to correct these with a bit of troubleshooting.
10 Days Out
This is when your agency should be checking in on ad performance. We’re looking for standout “winners” in ad variants, checking in on your budget and making sure that the ad is being shown to an interested audience.
1 Week Out
At this point, your ads should be leaving the learning phase. Your audience targeting should be at its strongest point as you head into the last week before your event.
Day 0 – The Event
You’ve done it! It’s time to enjoy your hard work… just make sure your event promotion is scheduled to stop first.
3 Days Post
After the excitement of the event, there is still work to be done. This is the time to evaluate whether your turnout aligned with your ad performance. You and your agency should use time to figure out what can be improved for next time.
Please note that this guide to promoting your event online is the bare minimum. The more time we can promote an event, the better chance we have of the algorithm growing your audience.
If you have an event to promote online, contact Mediaura as soon as possible to help your event be a success.
