Coachella, Woodstock, Live Aid, Burningman, Tomorrowland, Superbowl, Formula One!
Why are we, an event management app, talking about concerts and sporting events? Even if you aren’t into music or the F-1, you have likely heard of these mass-scale events. You are familiar with their target audience (even if you aren’t one of them). You also have seen enough posts on social media to know who’s headlining the festival this year.
Wait, “Wasn’t I here looking for ways to promote my event”.
And learn you will by looking at the strategies that make such iconic events memorable. No, you don’t need Beyonce or Taylor Swift crooning at your event to meet your event KPIs.
What you do need are the pointers in this article. Read on or skip to your relevant section.
Event Promotion | Walking Backwards | Are You Tracking These Event Success Metrics?
You design your event goals to meet your larger brand goals. To do this you need to track event metrics, measure them against KPIs, and track growth y-o-y (or depending on the event schedule).
If you are starting out, then track these common parameters to gauge the success of your event promotion.
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Guest attendance
Footfalls don’t always translate into leads. Yet, higher footfalls offer a higher probability of conversions. A high attendee turnout also offers ‘hidden promotions’ for your event. Here’s one way. 66.04% of the global population is now on social media. Your event may see 20,000 attendees of which 60% actively use social media. This 60% are your hidden promoters.
This subset will tag you, your sponsors, exhibitors, their colleagues, and even friends on their posts about your event. That is organic marketing at its finest. You can retarget these attendees for future events too.
Live Stream Count
Your event will likely have YouTube/video streams for virtual attendees. Take this count, gather attendee data, and identify their global presence. This identification gives you a platform for your global outreach measures. For physical sessions too you can track session attendance to gauge interest levels for certain events and speakers.
Attendee Satisfaction
This is assumed to be a qualitative metric but it can be quantified with Eventify. A simple, low-cost method is to add a ‘feedback form’ with relevant fields. (Pro tip: don’t overdo the fields, it’s a deterrent). You can gather this feedback, create a median satisfaction metric, and measure your average against that.
Another offset of this is to calculate the Net Promoter Score. This formula helps you calculate the number of people who will recommend your event and those who aren’t likely to. These scores let you know what solutions to incorporate for future events.
Leads Generated
Your success as the event host/organizer rests on the success of your exhibitors and sponsors. A well-promoted and marketed event that attracts your target group is proportional to higher leads. Interested attendees then become leads, who when engaged well are converted to customers by your sponsors and exhibitors. Measuring this conversion via an event management software tells you if the target audience was engaged well or not.
Tracking metrics like these offer a yardstick using which you can know if your event promotion worked or requires more tweaks for the future. If you need detailed analytics on your event then check our analytics features equipped with multiple dashboards. These help you track, manage, and analyze your event promotion.
How To Promote An Event? | Laying The Foundation
We told you which metrics to measure at the end of your event. It’s now time to walk towards the first step of event promotion - laying the foundation. Think of this as your event completion checklist. Investing large sums in un-stratified activities is futile. The below blueprint is your hack to strategically lay a strong and stable foundation for promoting your event.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
In marketing terms, this is your buyer persona. This is a virtual profile you create of your ideal attendee - one who has the relevant age, gender, academic, financial, geographical, financial, and professional parameters that meet your event solution. These parameters create the ideal persona. 44% of marketers find it beneficial to work with the buyer persona strategy.
Let’s gauge this with an example. You are organizing an event about ‘tech innovations in the cyber security space’. For such an event your target audience will be the technical heads and their teams from cyber security firms. Since you are discussing innovations in the field, people with these roles will better understand your agenda.
In addition, sales representatives from these firms will also need to be present. In short, you need to target both decision-makers and influencers from cybersecurity firms. You can learn more about identifying your target audience and creating a buyer persona with free tools like Hubspots’ buyer persona docket. If you hosted similar events in the past then look at your mobile event app analytics to understand how the event was received, which offerings (gamifications, polls, feedback, sessions, and speakers) got the most eyeballs, and create your target audience accordingly.
"Get clear on who your ideal attendee is. Then, target your marketing efforts specifically to them." - Amy Porterfield, Online Marketing Made Easy
2. Identify Your Event Goal
Let's take the above example. What are your expectations of the Cyber Security Event? Are you looking for increased visibility for exhibitors, higher returns for sponsors, increased attendance, higher engagement, or sales of new devices? If you said yes to all, then it’s best to categorize these into one primary goal and multiple secondary goals. Your primary goal can be increased attendance while a secondary goal can be higher sales of wi-fi enabled home security devices. Work with your event goal. It’s your anchor to success.
3. Don’t Be A Lone Wolf
Promoting an event cannot be done in isolation. Expand your radius of engagement and promotion by collaborating with sponsors and exhibitors. Chart out a profitable and lucrative trade-off plan with your sponsors and exhibitors. For instance, you can offer discounted booth spaces to exhibitors and ask them to promote your event in their circles. Your sponsor for a car expo can be a popular car servicing chain. You can offer them a complimentary session and get visibility from your target audience.
4. Invest in Design
A McKinsey report explores how design-driven companies get over 32% more revenue growth over 5 years. Creating vibrant, slick, and quirky collaterals is a guaranteed way of grabbing eyeballs. If you have pictures from your previous events then add them into a fun video and post it on your social handles. You can hire a designer or use free design tools like Canva and Be Funky to create stunning visuals at low costs.
5. Create A Marketing Funnel
Your event promotion strategy will have multiple levels of outreach. Pre-event efforts may include sending introductory emails and engaging with your target audience via landing pages and social media channels. The curiosity you generate with a window peek into your event is the doorway to higher attendance. Yet it’s hard to retain this curiosity.
You can achieve this by creating a marketing funnel with action points based on engagement. For instance, if a potential attendee came to your ‘book ticket’ page but left the site, you can trigger a personalized notification to ensure ticket booking. This consistent engagement from your end using CRM tools or emailer tools like Mailchimp, ensures higher recall value.
Event Promotion Ideas | 10 Creative Ways To Promote An Event in 2024
1. Go Local
For event promotion ideas look around you, quite literally. Identify where your target audience is most likely to be! At a coffee shop grabbing a bite before heading to the next meeting? Or the subway station - waiting for the 9:30’ to take them home? Use these strategic areas, get the necessary permissions, and place QR codes that grab attention. Once scanned these codes will take your audience to your events landing page.
Pro-tip: Don’t forget to place the CTA right above the first scroll for higher click-through.
If your event’s location is a suburban town, then collaborate with local cafes, hotels, and provisional stores to plant flyers at strategic points in their stores. This brings visibility to your event. For instance, if your event is centered on “After Graduation: The Road To Employment In Our Economy” then you can leverage college towns. These towns are home to students from across the globe. These students throng local libraries, cafes, and hotels - making it the perfect spot for event promotion.
2. Promote Speakers to Promote Your Event
A music festival has many perks - great venue, drool-worthy food, hip tattoo artists, and…. Still waiting for the ‘and’ aren’t you? These elements alone don’t make a festival. The artists do. Similarly, your event's USP is the people who have the knowledge and expertise to represent the industry. Your speaker lineup is an organic and low-cost promotional tool. Your audience wants to know who is speaking and if they are available for meet and greets. They want to engage, take pictures, and spend a few minutes with their mentors who have made it big. Tap into this speaker-dom by aggressively promoting your speakers.
Chart a plan for speakers as well to promote their presence at your event. Pro-tip: Make your speaker panel diverse by including women, BIPOC, and other subaltern groups. This will help you reach out to more sensitized members and peers associating with the same community. Ask speakers to also promote your event with countdowns, reels, and story mentions.
3. Organize Fun Networking Events & Happy Hours
Here's a bitter pill to swallow, no one is interested in your event! Hey, don’t leave just yet.
The truth is no one is interested in your event but rather in what benefit your event holds for them. If you want to sell out tickets to your event then invest in your pre-event strategy too. Organize fun sessions as a preview of your event.
These can include happy hours, 90's movie nights, free passes to a golf workshop, or a karaoke night. Invite a small set of attendees, speakers, and exhibitors to these events. The networking pool and its potential will encourage more people to show up on the day of your event.
Pro-tip: Refrain from hosting fully remote networking events. Since 95% of professionals think face-to-face communication is vital for long-term business.
4. Paid Advertising
Don’t get tempted to skip this point because we said ‘Paid’. Paid doesn’t mean expensive. You can run Facebook ads with your target data set. These ads usually range per click and offer high impressions with an average CPC (cost per click) of 0.85$ across industries. The returns are usually higher with an average 8.25% conversion rate across industries.
You can run these ads in-house by hiring a digital marketer or by self-learning this comprehensive Facebook ads course. Start with one social channel, before you move to LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Snapchat. You can leverage the data set by running a retargeting campaign for visitors who visit your landing page.
P-S: Create a comprehensive, clear, and interesting landing page for your event. A good landing page is proven to have the best sign-up rates.
"Social media is a megaphone, but content is the king." - Gary Vaynerchuk, VaynerMedia
5. Optimize For Search
Events near me’, ‘[industry] events near me,’,’networking events near me’. These are some common search terms on popular search platforms like google, bing and Yandex. But what does optimizing for search mean? It means answering the questions your target audience is asking. You can do this by including FAQs, reviews, and keywords in your landing page. You can achieve this with ubersuggest, google keyword planner, google trends, and analyze competitor sites with SEMrush and Moz. This optimization coupled with paid advertising will boost your organic marketing.
6.Get Social
2 Billion People!
That’s the active user base on Instagram. It’s where people, the youth specifically, go to share their lives and partake in those of others. It’s where your potential attendees are, and so are your sponsors and exhibitors..and who knows even their pets! That’s the reach you are looking at. Tap into this database by upping your instagram presence.
Create reels about your event with popular songs, tap into relevant hashtags and join the trend bandwagon. Use these structures and give your own twist. For example, you can use the iconic “Work” song by Rihanna as BGM for a behind the scenes montage of your event. Your audience gets a peek into the humane side of your event with a popular culture reference for good measure.
7. Associate With A Cause
We won’t make light of this situation and know you won’t too. If you feel deeply about a cause, then collaborate with NGO or non-profits with the same ideals. This collaboration can be incorporated in your event promotion strategy. How? For instance, if your event is FMCG driven, then donate a percent of the ticket sales to a charitable organization working to improve nutrition in adolescents.
You can promote these causes on your social media,and fulfill your CSR efforts whilst reaching out to sensitized youth. Your brand and the cause both get the traction they need.
8. Complementary Merchandise
If you got it, then let them flaunt it. We are talking about the power of promotional products. 73% of people are likely to do business with a brand that gives them a branded freebie. You can emboss caps, T-shirts, stationery, notebooks, office supplies and more with your brand logo. Then exhibit these, a few days before your event, at promotional kiosks. The merchandise can be picked by your target audience with a simple QR scan. The data can then be used for retargeting ads. In addition, run giveaway campaigns on social media where you barter your products for likes and shares. Confused on what merchandise to choose? A survey cites these items as the most popular - he most popular promotional products today are apparel (28%) drinkware (8.4%), writing utensils (6.6%), bags and wallets (6.3%) and technology (5.6%).
9. Tap Into The Influencer Market
Influencers are bridges of trust and relatability. A bridge that spans the gap between your event and your audience. This is perhaps why 69% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations. Begin with identifying influencers in your field, then invite them to your podcasts, as speakers for event sessions or even do a short interview with them for your channel. A popular face from the industry is likely to bring you higher ticket sales than a generic event brochure. This is also why 36% of brands believe influencer-generated content does better than branded posts. Tap into this flourishing market to promote your event in a creative way.
10. Newsletters
No one trusts a salesman and in the digital age, no one trusts an outright attempt to sell. Newsletters seamlessly overcome this obstacle for you. How? You can write about your brand's expertise, share latest trends about the industry, discuss innovations and promote your event. It’s informative and ‘non-salesy’. You can also send reminders for the event in your newsletter with a countdown timer and a ‘Register’ button. Also like 31% of marketers, you too can use email newsletters as a top channel to nurture leads
Achieved Successful Event Promotion? Streamline This Success With Eventify.
You used these pointers to successfully promote your event. You now have the ticket sales you envisioned and the desired footfalls. What you need next is a streamlined approach to managing your attendees, sponsors and exhibitors. The large crowds, multiple sessions, myriad schedules coupled with expansive locations can lead to chaos - if not managed correctly. That management is what Eventify offers with its suite of features curated to execute all phases of your event. Schedule a demo with us to best understand how our event management app can help manage your event promotions and execution.
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