3 Tips to Better Event Flyers

June 10, 2019
By Guest Author

A well-designed event flyer is critical to your event’s success. You have to capture attention, provide all the necessary details, and visually show what your event is.

Venngage, a tool that allows people to easily create flyers and infographics wrote this guest post to help event organizers create better event flyers. Read it and tweet it.

Buffer, a tool for content promotion analyzed their +400K Tweets, 60K Followers, and +300K Likes, and the results prove the effectiveness of images.

The Case for Images

Buffer noticed that Tweets with images received 18% more clicks,89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets than those without images.

So we know that visual content is important to
your event promotion strategy. But how do you design a captivating flyer with little time and budget?

1. Embrace Graphics & Illustrations

A visual content trend taking over event flyers is use-of custom graphics and unique illustrations.

For example, this sales event flyer uses bold and bright colors to draw attention:

(Explore This Flyer)

Unique graphics can pique their audience’s curiosity and draw the eye in.

It’s important to note that you aren’t limited to
bright colors. You can mix vivid colors with flatters ones. Originality helps.

Check this event flyer for an example:

(Explore this Flyer)

The chess pieces and hearts convey the
Valentine’s theme, at a glance.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget a URL to your event page and a call to action to register or buy tickets.

2. Reinforces Your Brand with Creative Fonts

Mixing different font styles and sizes is another way to create an eye-catching design. The hard part is there are unspoken rules when to use specific typefaces and which of them work well together.

Check out this example—having a different font at the bottom and the top draws attention to the title.

(Explore this Flyer)

3. Keep the design simple

Tempting as it is to include every single event detail on your poster, it’s better to keep it simple and put all of the extra details on your event page. Strive for legible text that can be read and understood in a few seconds. These flyers are simple and have the title, date, time, address and activities, arranged in a way that’s understood at a glance.

(Explore this Flyer)

(Explore this Flyer)

(Explore this Flyer)

I hope you’re excited, feeling inspired, and thinking more strategically about designing your next event flyer. Consider using Venngage to help with your design and then blast your flyer on social media and paper the town.

Author: John Kyeremeh, Growth Marketer at Venngage

Event Tips >

How to Write Simply Amazing Social Media Posts for Events

August 17, 2016
By Amanda Halm

Social media. Everyone is doing it, but a lot of people are doing it wrong.

Well-written, engaging (simply amazing) social media posts can boost the visibility and attendance of your event, but poorly written, over-tagged, spammy updates can lead to potential attendees unfollowing and unfriending.

Be a Friend
Build a following before your event. Just like with life, you have to be a friend to make friends. Like, share, comment on your friends’ and followers’ content—keep it lighthearted, fun, positive. Or if it matches your voice, be a bit irreverent and witty.

Take a look at the profiles of your attendees or commenters. What are their interests, hobbies, passions? If a lot of your attendees snowboard, and it happens to snow, post something like this: It’s official, snow is falling. Have a grand time on the mountain.

Hashtag That
Create a short hashtag that your attendees can use to talk about your event. If it’s a large conference, use several hashtags and promote them on your event signage and event page.

Use no more than two hashtags per tweet. With Instagram, you can get away with many more.

Hashtags encourage and organize conversations. If your attendees think something needs to be improved (for example, if there is a bad parking situation or you’re running out of water), they’ll often begin chattering about it using the hashtag. Delegate social media monitoring to at least one person. That way, if something needs to be fixed, you’ll catch it.

Carefully research hashtags before you put them out there. Check out who else is using the hashtag and for what purpose. Never use sensitive hashtags to promote your event.

Use handles and tags to mention your performers or the venue.

Make It Pretty

It’s poor etiquette to delete Twitter posts, so make sure that what you have is spelled correctly and polished.

You can edit Instagram captions and Facebook posts after they go live, but triple check all of the handles and hashtags before you tap publish. Avoid sloppy updates that use “ur” for your or “4” for “for.” Write updates in a word processing program first to smooth out your content.

Use a tool such as Grammarly to check your grammar—Grammarly is a browser plug-in that “green lines” grammar errors— ones that even an eagle-eyed editor would miss.

Use Tweetdeck or a similar tool to schedule out posts, so that you can make sure you have the right handles and hashtags. But proceed with caution—when tragedy in the news strikes, it takes social media by storm and can make your previously scheduled tweets seem insensitive.

Short, short, short. Yes, it’s tempting to include all the information about your event into one little tweet (along with five exclamation points), but shorter works better. Two things to include are links to where to buy tickets and the event hashtag.

Did we mention there would be pizza? RSVP for a slice of the action: [event link]

The ideal character count for tweets is 71-100, according to this AdWeek infographic, although Twitter allows 140.

Even though it’s convenient and faster to link your Instagram to your Facebook and Twitter, it’s best to write individual posts for each account.

Include images or links to videos. Create a highlight reel of your past events or a photo montage of your performers.

Tie It Together
People love facts and trivia. Tie your event in with fun facts.

Can you guess the most widely produced wine in the world? Hint: it’s going to be at tomorrow’s wine festival: [event link]

If something loosely related to theme of your event happened in the news, re-post it.

Let your performers takeover your social media as part of a planned influence marketing campaign.

Interact with your audience. Respond to comments and questions, but avoid angrily responding to random haters. You can damage your reputation by acting impulsively or defensively. If something goes wrong, step away from the screen and come up with a plan of action before you post.

There’s no need to be humble. Share all of the press you get. Use the publication’s handle so they get some love.

Does the venue have more going on than the performance, such as drink or food specials, VIP rooms, pool tables/video games? Share it.

Pro tip: Need free guidance or social media love? Ask our expert promotion team. Email promo[at]brownpapertickets[dot]com.

Event Tips >

Burlesque Ticketing 101

September 26, 2014
By Jimmy Berg

Brown Paper Tickets supports event organizers, producers and performers with free advice, services and ticketing tools. We ticket thousands of burlesque events every year. In fact, more burlesque events than any other ticketing platform. We’re crazy about burlesque.

As Burlesque Representative, I assist performers and producers in setting up and promoting their shows. Here are seven pieces of advice I commonly give when I talk about burlesque ticketing:

1. Use Your Own Credit Card Processor

Budgeting for your show can be a challenge. Often, burlesque producers operate on a shoestring budget and desperately need the money from ticket sales to pay out-of-town performers, venue fees, promotional costs, etc. If having cash in hand the night of your show is an issue, I stress that with Brown Paper Tickets, you can use a third-party processor, like PayPal (probably the most popular) and we’ll give you 2.5% of our 3.5% processing fee paid by the ticket buyer back to you, the producer. This means you get the full face value of your tickets as they’re sold. Plus, you get a little bit extra to help offset the fees your third-party processor charges.

2. Use Brown Paper Tickets’ Promotion Help

With all you’ve got going on around show time, promotions is one of those things that might slip. Don’t let it. We take a close look at your promotional plan and suggest ways you can improve it. We’ll help you build curated media lists for your area. We’ll send out tweets for you. We’ll edit and refine your press releases so that they are more effective in getting media placements, even coach you on TV or radio appearances. It all depends on your needs. And we won’t insult you by offering placement in mass e-mails, which most people delete immediately. With us, you’ll have a dedicated team of event specialists to get the most out of your promotional campaign. I suggest that you contact us at least six to eight weeks prior to your event to get the best results from your campaign.

3. Offer Limited-Time Price Reductions

Many producers don’t like offering discounted tickets as they feel it will cut into their total take. But I’ve found that limited-time price reductions create a sense of urgency and you’ll pull in folks who may not have considered attending otherwise. It’s the whole “It’s on sale! I HAVE to buy it.” philosophy. The best times to offer discounts are either right when you announce ticket sales (early bird discounts) or on a significant day. For example: “It’s Gypsy Rose Lee’s birthday and we’re offering a special discount to all burlesque fans in honor of her memory.” Something along those lines. Trust me, you’ll see a spike in sales.

4. Offer Special Discounts to Your Mailing List

Show your devotees a little extra love by offering the first opportunity to purchase tickets to your shows. While you’re at it, give them a special perk like a glass of champagne, discounted VIP seating, maybe some merch. Whatever you can do to show your fans how much you appreciate their support will only endear you to them more and ensure their loyalty over time. Loyal fans are the best advertisement a burlesque performer could have, so throw a little money their way. Trust me, next time they’ll bring their friends.

5. Bundle Tickets with Merchandise

Speaking of bundling merchandise, it’s easy to offer a special price that includes some form of merchandise with their tickets. This will help you move merch and expand exposure to your brand while also saving you from having to sling merch after the show. Some merch ideas: branded drink tokens, signed posters, branded panties, t-shirts or even flasks. Merch is a great way to get your brand out in the world and if done well, can become an extra revenue stream. Just inform your door person that ticket buyers will receive something extra at the door, based on price points.

6. Offer Group Packages

Over the years, burlesque events have become increasingly popular with bachelorette parties. Consider the bachelorette angle when marketing your event. One way to encourage bachelorettes or other groups to come to your shows is to offer a group package. Think birthdays, tourist groups or bachelorette parties. Even better, develop a relationship with local wedding planners or concierges. Consider offering a percentage of the packages they sell so that they have incentive to encourage their clients to attend your events. These relationships can become super valuable and get you high-paying gigs outside the burlesque circuit, like corporate events or private parties.

7. Customize Your Producer Profiles

If you organize multiple events, let your fans see all your shows on your producer profile. Customize the page to match your branding or even better, have our tech team create a skin for your profile page that matches the look and feel of your website. Then your producer page can basically replace the calendar on your website and folks never have to leave your site to see all your shows and get tickets. If you want more information on how to create a customized producer profile, contact our Client Services department and they can get that started for you.

Any burlesque questions or need help? Please contact me directly at jimmy[at]brownpapertickets.com.

Arts >

3 Tips to Better Event Flyers

The Case for Images

1. Embrace Graphics & Illustrations

2. Reinforces Your Brand with Creative Fonts

3. Keep the design simple

How to Write Simply Amazing Social Media Posts for Events

Burlesque Ticketing 101

Topics

Tags