5 tips for planning your special event marketing

I’ve often helped financial services marketers create materials for their special promotions or events. Using insights from those projects, I have some suggestions that serve as guidelines to help you with any marketing events you might plan someday.

These suggestions apply to events like the typical grand opening or single-branch promotions that help boost a branch’s profile, but also fit perfectly with an institution’s branch-wide event marketing campaigns.

1. Organize Early

Yes, start early is everyone’s advice for everything and it sounds like a no-brainer. Yet I’ve attended creative conference calls with marketers who were ready to jump into the preparation for the marketing materials and yet they couldn’t answer simple questions like, “What are the event dates?”

I’m not exaggerating. Many times I’ve heard marketers say they’re still working on the dates. Sometimes the excuse is reasonable. If you’re building a new branch office, the opening depends on when the construction is finished. Weather and dozens of other factors affect completion. But the same unknown date problem has happened with events at existing branches or for the entire marketing footprint.

Obviously, to promote your event you need to tell people when it takes place. Get the times and dates, and as much as possible, set early.