If you have ever organised events, then you must know the nitty-gritties of it. A great amount of effort is required for coming up with the perfect event.
You have to start by devising a perfect strategy for organising an event, then arrange the décor, and food, the lights, the guest-lists and most crucially the marketing.
Without proper marketing you won’t be able to get the desirable results. You have to strategize how you can attract the maximum number of people for your event and you have to ensure that your attendees get the most out of the event once they arrive.
Herein comes the need of the event promotions. However, you must not get overwhelmed as there is a whole lot of things that are involved in event promotions.
If you strategize well, you can get all the desirable results while saving both your own effort and time.
You should use the following steps to devise a strategy that can help you to get desirable results from your marketing efforts. Just take a look.
- Begin with an Effective Event Page – The keystone of all your promotional endeavours should be the website or the event page. This should be the website or the page that is devoted to the event only. If you do not have the time or the skill to do it yourself, you can hire any web or digital marketing company who will do the needful for you. However, if you are doing it, you must make it exciting by incorporating some of the elements mentioned below-
- Speaker biographies and pictures
- A convincing description of the event
- An easy-to-notice “Register Now” button
- Videos that are Themed with Event
- Provide Discounts for Early Bird Entries – You must offer more reasons for event marketeers to stand out and encourage people for registering. This is where you can utilise the discounts for early bird entries. This kind of discount functions by enhancing the sales of tickets as the date of the event nears or closes in. It is not uncommon to have more than one of these. The rest of the marketing activity must be geared in a way to create a buzz and urgency focussing on the expiry of the discounts. This can help you to create a huge spike of ticket sales.
- Send the Emails Pre-Event – Email marketing can be the best choice for you if you have a list. You can ask the partners, speakers or friends for listing the event in their own emails. Here is a guide to help you to go ahead with this –
- Create a specific yet engaging and exciting subject line
- Send during the weekend when people get more hours and feel less stressed for spending time in your event
- Use the social proof and from a similar event previously, if you have positive feedback, you should ensure that the event is included in the method
- Use the video thumbnail of the main attraction
- You should send the email multiple times and mention the “early bird entry” in them
- Go for Partner Outreach – The event marketing partnerships can be quite crucial for the success of any event. That is why you need to reach out to the potential complementary media, collaborators, and brand partners before the launch of your official event. This way they can create the buzz easily. You should checkout the handy templates if you are not sure about how to reach them.
- Send News Release to the Industry and Media Websites and Use Social Media -You should start with the hyper-local media and they won’t permit you to post your announcements just the way you want frequently. You can find these by searching for Event Calendars in Google for your particular location. You should not ignore the trade and industry associations. As majority of them provide newsletters, you should make it a point to make the announcement early so that they are able to use it. You should get a local newspaper (professional looking), TV stations and radio. You should also not forget about the local blogs. Added to that, today, marketing is far from being effective if you don’t advertise about your event on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Snapchat – in short, the social media channels. You should try and include most of the channels that you can get from all the top social media platforms so that more and more people get to know about your event and you can have maximum number of attendees.
- Go for Attendee Referrals – This is something that most people miss frequently. Most organisers are more focussed on bringing in new attendees as they forget about their huge base of existing attendees that they already have. Word-of-mouth is one the most powerful mediums of marketing and you should utilise this for bringing in new attendees. You can provide discounts and freebies to your previous attendees for that.
The above are some of the ways you can create a workable and result-oriented event marketing strategy that ensure you have maximum turnout of attendees. Apart from that, you should also make sure that you embrace the intelligent deals like going for conference furniture hire so that you can create the best décor to live up to the expectations portrayed by your marketing efforts and are able to truly entice your attendees.
