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Recall the last time you attended an event- maybe a concert, a workshop, an educational seminar, or a ceremony. The nature of all these events is different but they all serve a common purpose- to engage, entertain, and satisfy the attendees.
As an event planner, the most crucial responsibility is marketing the event in a way that compels the audience to come back to you. According to Aventri, approximately 30% of marketers agree that event marketing is the utmost substantial channel. Whether you are planning a small birthday party or a large corporate event, exemplary marketing skills are what generate the buzz and set the event apart from the rest. I have analyzed that if marketing strategies are not persuasive, they can instigate a lack of people attending the event and cause a loss of interest.
6 Event Planner Marketing Strategies
In this blog, I will delve into the six pre-eminent marketing ideas for event planners to serve a delightful experience to your attendees and sustain the business in the long run.
1. Marketing via Social Media
Over the years, social media has predominantly been the best medium for marketing. Around 41% of people purchase impulsive things on social media because of eye-catching and aesthetic business pages. While these statistics are true, I believe that understanding in-depth strategies of social media helps in getting more attendees. This includes:
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Creating Customised Hashtags
Creating customized hashtags is pivotal for setting a specific theme for your event but to ensure that you are using the right hashtags, it is essential to observe the competitors' hashtags first. While I have seen that hashtags do increase reach, the important thing to notice here, however, is to use limited hashtags and the ones with less than 1000+ usage otherwise the post comes across as spammy, overly promotional, or does get enough visibility. A combination of high-traffic hashtags specific to your niche is what generates the best visibility for your event.
Promotion using Challenges, Campaigns, and Sponsered Post
What I have witnessed is that campaigns such as mystery box campaigns, pop-up mini-events, personalized videos, and challenges are paramount ways to market. ‘Gamification’ is another wheel-heeled method in event marketing that includes polls, virtual hunts, and puzzles with an incentive to challenge participants to receive exciting rewards. In the case of a sponsored post, make sure to use more localized content so that social media uses ‘geotargeting’ to circulate your post in your region. This way, you are marketing your event and keeping the buzz alive in a subtle way. The right blend of testing, optimization, and diversity is what brings the leads eventually.
2. Showing Online Presence
Audience engagement speaks volumes of event marketing as it leads to awareness for months and years- leading it to one of the most powerful and leading brands. The event planners need to make a customized community that provides content, allows networking, fosters impeccable communication, and enhances the sense of coordination that can be done by
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Polls, Q&As, and Live Streaming
Choosing questions for Instagram polls should be well-planned and align with the event motive. Here are some effective questions to elevate audience stimulation.
- Why did you join this event?
- Networking
- Learning
- Meeting with friends
- To get free food
Meme marketing is another fun way that people resonate with and would love to engage. For instance, Netflix keeps posting memes of the most popular shows to stay in the limelight. Just like that, live streaming is a well-established practice to collaborate with experts in your niche and imply the market strategy of ‘storytelling’. This compels the audience to like, comment, and share, and thus increase the reach like none other.
Brand Websites and Landing Pages
You might be wondering why you need a website or landing page for your event. That is because it is an excellent resource to get more registrations and get to know in-depth event details. These pages with right event registration software serve as central information hubs and are equipped with all the necessary details in one page. One helpful tip I would like to put is to allot a section on your website where the attendees can submit their photos, videos, reviews, and feedback on the event for a more personalized touch.
3. Communicative Resources for Attendees
A successful event is measured through the number of attendees attending, their interest, and most importantly their satisfaction. Not to mention that by actively coordinating with the attendees, you can create a personalized event that values its customers. To ensure that your customers make the most out of the event, you can incorporate the following techniques
Event Guidebook
A quick event guidebook serves as a benchmark of providing ease to the attendees as attendees can navigate the whole timeline of the event. I would urge you to fixate on speaker profiles. You must think about incorporating good graphics and depicting their full-fledged profile information about bio, niche, topic areas, education, and contact information. Not to mention, good speakers do bring a huge audience.
QR Codes for Quick Access
QR codes are a feasible option to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds. For registration, the organizers can generate customized QR codes for each attendee that will be equipped with their information, contact number, and event registration details followed by a digital pass, sent to the portals. Another way is to scan QR codes on event day and avoid the need for physical tickets, making the process seamless and eliminating the risk of manual errors or duplicate check-ins.
Email Communication
Better communication with the attendees comes up with a better promotion, better engagement, and eventually a huge audience. The example can be seen by how Hubspot uses email communication as a resourceful weapon to actively market what resonates with the interest of people. In case of conferences, webinars, and educational workshops, details about speaker profiles, major announcements, and receipts should be shared promptly.
4. Payment and Ticketing System
For top-notch event marketing, the organizers should be open to all possible options in terms of payment and ticketing. Both onsite and online ticketing and payment systems should be adopted to offer clients the most easy experience. Here is how you can make the payment and registration system feasible for your participants:
Offering Early Bird Discount
The best way to event ticketing is to do it is to offer an early bird discount which is popular to draw potential attendees to purchase your ticket as soon as possible at the discounted price. The time-based discounts basically contribute in reduced ticket prices to catch the public eye and grant a win-win situation for both parties.
Payment Method and Registration Form
It is important that you provide different payment methods to the attendees such as bank transfer, credit card, and PayPal to make things feasible. You can use event registration solution for your ease. A long or hard-to-understand registration form may push a client to cancel the purchase and therefore a standard simple template that only has the most important information should be included.
5. Data Management and Analytics Tools
Data analytics and reporting tools analyze the performance of your posts and stories on social media. There are myriad tools that can be put to use to align with attendees' expectations well and design your event, keeping useful factors in mind.
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Automated Social Media Posting to Maintain Consistency
To enhance brand visibility, a consistent and steady flow of content can increase your follower base. It needs an in-depth understanding of the right posting time, social media algorithms, visuals, audio, and what not. Automation tools such as Sprout Social, Loomly, Content Studio, and others allow you to schedule your content for automatic posting and plan strategies to uplift your engagement.
Event Analytics and Reporting Tools
The reporting tools help you to understand the key matrices and overall performance of your event. These tools help in the preparation of Gantt charts, setting a timeline, task lists, calendars, attendee registrations, and payments to make the event process smooth and provide insight into what key indicators worked best. The top reporting tools Top 10, and Hubspot have had a foothold in the market for many years now.
6. Post-Event Engagement
The event does not end with the attendees leaving the venue but customer satisfaction should be the utmost priority. The survey feedback and rating help evaluate the performance for the present and upcoming thousand events and leave great room for improvement.
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Survey for Feedback and Ratings
To analyze the attendee's experience, it is significant to ask for feedback post-event. Some of the most important questions that you should include in your survey form should be
- Were you satisfied with the event?
- Which aspect of the event did you like the most and least?
- Would you like to participate in our upcoming events?
- How likely are you to tell a friend about this event?
Follow up emails
After the event, follow-up emails that ask attendees about surveys, feedback, and next event timelines are necessary. This helps build not merely customers but a community that will be interested in your events all year round.
Conclusion
Marketing in event planning is very subjective. Things that work for you might not work for others, depending on the nature, and therefore, this is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. It needs research, implementation, thinking out of the box, and sticking to your niche. The above enlisted six effective strategies are indeed the must-haves in your business and organization that can help you draw your potential clients, but for exceptional planning, the business needs an exemplary team and innovative ideas to reach heights.
I wish all the event marketers the best in their careers!
References
The Future of Event Marketing Infographics
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