Bringing Brand Events to Life: 5 Social Media Tips for Your Small Business

When you’re a small business targeting a local audience, events play a crucial role in how your brand and the public interact with each other. These public experiences can give businesses a chance to meet other industry players, customers, and potential customers.

However, if you’re a small business with limited resources, reaching your audience and creating the marketing collateral, like invitations, social media graphics, flyers, and signage can be difficult. That’s where a good social media strategy and access to helpful tools can make all the difference. One of those tools is Adobe Spark with premium features — a powerful application used to create impactful social graphics, web stories, and animated videos — included in a Adobe Creative Cloud for teams membership and offered as a standalone application. With it, and our next level social tips, small businesses can create beautiful graphics to start leveraging brand events online.

1. Make Your Event Invite POP

Amy Copperman, Editorial Content Lead and Community Manager for Adobe Spark says, “An event invitation can sometimes be the first interaction a customer has with your brand, so it’s important to make an impression that entices and stays true to your company and your event. It should look and feel like your brand.”

Elements like your logo, brand colors, and fonts are important for carrying over this brand identity to your event and social media promotion. And a tool like Adobe Spark with premium features can take your brand elements and auto-generate on-brand templates, relieving some of the design heavy-lifting and freeing you up to focus on communicating your message, conveying the mood of your event, and letting your creativity shine.

Be creative with how you approach your invitation. Maybe you want to create an eye catching flyer for social media or send your guest list a personal video invitation with images or video clips from a previous party. As you develop your design, remember:

• More images, less text. On social media, images connect with audiences more than static text. Wisely choose the text you decide to overlay on your graphics. Focus on the crucial details of your event: the what, when, and most importantly, the where. You can always supplement information with a caption to provide more event details.
• Consider design hierarchy. Use design principles such as the rule of thirds and typography to bolster your designs and solidify hierarchy. Share your project with coworkers and other designers to make sure your information is coming across clearly.
• Move to the next level with video. The almost one-on-one connection you can attract with video is unique to the medium. It’s very difficult to replicate that connection through static words or graphics. Video makes your event come to life and build buzz as the big day approaches. Learn how to get started creating your videos here.
• Be authentic. No matter how you choose to advertise your event, think about authenticity as a crutch to reaching your audience. Genuine interaction, be it through text, graphics, or video is key to getting your audience excited for your event and creating an emotional connection. There is a lot of noise on social media — authentic posts and videos will stand out.

For inspiration, start with a few of these templates from Spark Post:

Concert Series

Save the Date

Workshop

Open Mic Series

2. Think About Distribution

Once your event invitations are perfected, you need to think about distribution. Would your audience appreciate a physical invitation, an ecard, or perhaps even a personal video message? Are you inviting a select few or blasting your social feeds? Is your intended audience more the Twitter or the Instagram crowd? All of these questions are factors to consider when determining how to reach your audience — and you may use a combination of distribution methods.

Whether it’s an Eventbrite invitation, a Facebook event, or a newsletter list, make sure you have the right size of graphic. Different platforms have different size restraints, and graphics appear differently on different viewing devices. Use a tool like Spark Post to easily resize your invitation graphics.

If your event is public, you also need to post reminders. Consider making a countdown to build buzz and keep it top of mind for guests.

3. Make Sure Your Event Is Social Media Friendly

When you throw an event, you’re investing in showing attendees a good or meaningful time. If you’re pulling it off, they’ll be inclined to pull out their phones and share the event with their followers. Make sure your brand is coming along for the ride. Showcase your social media handles or designate a hashtag for the event.

“You’ve got to make it fun and easy for attendees to talk about you on social media. Seriously, put your social handles or hashtags on signs and branded SWAG. Serve up Instagrammable moments. It will delight your attendees and you’ll see more ROI,” Copperman says.

4. During the Event — Share, Share, Share

You’re the best source for making sure an event supports your brand message. Designate a photographer to capture candids, share snapshots on your own branded social channels, and connect with attendees online to bring your event full circle and build your community.

“Whenever I organize live events for Adobe Spark, I make sure to designate a couple people to help me snap photos and share in real time or shortly after. It gives a personal face to our brand,” Copperman says. “I also keep an eye on our social channels to monitor what guests are saying about the brand and look for opportunities to connect with them, thank them for coming, or share their photos. It reminds our followers that there are real people on the other side of the newsfeed.”

5. Don’t Forget the Follow-Up

The follow-up is maybe the most important part of making sure all of your designs and social media efforts turn into business results. It’s the opportunity to convert attendees into customers, get them to take a desired action, or simply thank them for attending and leave them with positive feelings.

“Everyone loves to relive a good time with photos and video. Even a simple graphic thanking guests can go a long way in continuing the conversation after the event,” Copperman says.

Try creating a beautiful photo story with Spark Page or Spark Video. Simply add your photos or videos to a project and Adobe Spark will make it look pro with automatic responsive design and beautiful animation.

Ready to begin creating engaging visuals and video for your event? Visit Adobe Spark to learn more, and access premium features with a Creative Cloud for teams membership.