How to: Effectively promote your venue or event

From pantos to New Years Eve revelry, the start of December marks the beginning of one of the busiest times of year for venues and promoters – and n0tice.com can help.

If you’re looking to spread the word about an event this winter here’s our guide to getting it seen.

One-off or regular?
n0tice.com provides three opportunities – users can create their own noticeboard (if you’ve a lot of events to promote this is probably the best option), add an event to someone else’s noticeboard (great for ensuring exposure to an existing group) or simply add an event outside of the noticeboard structure as an individual. Whichever you choose, posting the event in n0tice.com will be seen by all users in your locality.

Creating a noticeboard
Having your own noticeboard gives you the advantage of being in control of the look and feel of your presence on n0tice.com, with a bespoke URL that you can cross-promote online, on flyers and in your social space. Perfect for venues with a diary of events plus the hard-pressed comms team/person will love the fact they can publish their press releases, photo calls and ticket offers on the noticeboard as well.

Take a look at  the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon http://wyverntheatre.n0tice.com to see how they’ve just got started and have used the space to post a promotion.

(Cinderella, with Keith Chegwin. Now you know Christmas is coming!) plus the noticeboard shows the twitterstream for the venue @wyverntheatre.

To create your own noticeboard – click on the ‘noticeboards’ button at the top of the site and follow the instructions to create and personalise your space.

Adding to an existing noticeboard
Maybe there’s a noticeboard in your locality which is attracting attention and you’d like your event to be featured there.

That’s simple – take a look at the right-hand side of the page you’d like to add to and you’ll see a button to ‘post new event’. This will open into a very simple form to complete.

You can find the noticeboards in your area by simply doing a location search – noticeboards are identified in the list of postings with a blue square over the name of the board in the line which starts ‘posted by’. If you’d like to contact the noticeboard owner to discuss what you want to do, or just say hi, click on their name and click the ‘send a message’ button.

Additionally if you’re promoting a music event, how about getting in front of the army of readers and reviewers which is Guardian Music by dropping the details to their new noticeboard. Take a look here http://guardianmusic.n0tice.com and read more about their plans for this noticeboard here.

Posting as an individual
When you land on the homepage after you’ve logged in you’ll see some offers and thene events on the right hand side. Simply click the ‘post new event’ button and drop your information there.

However you do it, here’s five tips to get your content noticed:
1. Treat the event name like a headline – keep it simple. This might be the only piece of information the user reads so you want to make sure the nature of the event is clear and appealing.
2. Link straight to the booking facility where possible – take people straight to your box office, eventbrite or lanyard entry so they cam complete the transaction in one visit.
3. Make the tags interesting and useful so that people could discover your content by searching via tags.
4.  Use the description box to include any useful venue information such as parking or disability access – saves the user have to carry out additional searches to find out whether they want to go along.
5. Tell everyone! There’s buttons on n0tice.com to tweet, add to google+ and like on Facebook. There’s even a QR code generated if you want to get whizzy with your sticker or poster campaign.