You wear many hats as an event manager. You are a project manager, creative, or budget specialist. However, if you want to plan extensive scale events, you need to add skills to your toolbelt as an event marketing professional. Marketing is the best way to spread the word about your event. A successful promotion strategy helps target the right audience and create a marketing ripple effect that boosts your reach and builds your attendee list.
More than 99% of respondents in the survey carried out on more than 2,000 enterprise organizations and small businesses responded that webinars represent a crucial element of a marketing plan. In addition, around 89% of respondents, webinars surpassed other channels in developing qualified leads, while 78% of respondents said webinars helped lower their cost per lead.
When were you at a sports tournament or music concert last time? Have you ever wondered how much planning and work event planners have to do to run the show seamlessly? The event’s behind-the-scenes activities involve a lot of things starting from coordinating, planning, and putting many things together.
However, all efforts are worthless if no one shows up at the event. However, low registration can affect everything starting from sponsorship, revenue, speakers, and more. Are you wondering how you can organize an event and drive more registration to your event? You might be thinking of sending emails, asking your friend to spread word of mouth, putting out a poster, etc. Well, there is more involved, and it might seem overwhelming, to begin with.
To help you out, we have made a comprehensive checklist, helping you to market your organized event and drive attendance. Incorporating all these tips can help you make the most of the time, effort, and money you spend on event marketing. But before that, let’s have a look at what is event marketing? Types of it, and top reasons that justify why you must invest in event marketing.
What is Event Marketing?
Event marketing simply means using a promotional strategy to promote the event you organize. It is a type of marketing that implies advertising a product, service, or brand by hosting an event online or offline. This type of marketing helps educate and develop profound relationships with attendees about your product, service, or other things.
Each event has a different content, audience, and culture. Hence, it deserves to be promoted in a new and unique way. To achieve the desired success, event managers need to stay aware of the event marketing game.
Why is Event Marketing Important?
The size of the events industry was valued at $1,135.4 billion in 2019 and is anticipated to jump to $1,552.9 billion by 2028, registering around 11.2% CAGR between 2021 and 2028. Events simply refer to public meetings of the populace art at a specific place and time.
The primary purpose of organizing the event is to entertain, increase business profitability, for a community cause, or any other purpose. The most popular events include promotion & fundraising, events, seminars, sports, trade shows, product launches, and conferences. The key stakeholders within the market are public organizations, NGOs, and corporate organizations.
Around 95% of marketers agree that live events offer attendees valuable opportunities to form in-person connections to boost their digital presence. Around 31% of marketers believe that event marketing is considered a perfect marketing channel. However, 87% of C-suite executives believe in the power of live events and plan on investing in them in the future.
What makes the difference between great and good experiences is your understanding of what is happening in the market. This guide shows the big shift that is happening offline and online, which corporate event organizers need to be aware of to market the events efficiently.
Event Marketing: How Does it Work?
Event marketing is one of the best options when it comes to achieving goals and can help you in many ways. The most obvious is when event organizers host some occasions. Different events allow you to build a strong relationship with prospects and customers, acquire leads, find new partners, and more.
One effective strategy is to attend events as a guest. A company representative can easily promote products and services; it also helps to strengthen a brand reputation by offering expertise in the area. Finally, events can help to increase brand awareness.
More than 95% of marketers choose event marketing to achieve goals. You need to know how people identify whether or not to attend the event and understand the audience’s behavior and process. There are a few aspects that play an essential part:
- Web search
- Reviews
- Price
- Recommendations
- Researching alternative options
- Compared to other events
- Earning a professional accreditation
Understanding different factors help you make a tip that helps you balance and plan an effective marketing strategy. Considering the touchpoints along the journey help to identify strengths, gaps, weakness, and more that enables you to improve your marketing and communication strategy.
Top Ways to Promote Your Event: Explore Every Here
Event marketing is a powerful tool, especially when it comes to advertising your event. It enables you to build and maintain strong relationships, create robust partnerships, acquire new customers, and nail business KPIs. If you want to squeeze each bit of value from the channel, take care of event promotion.
One of the perfect ways to ruin the event is by neglecting to promote it, which event marketing idea can help you with increased engagement and registration. Markletic report shows that marketers leverage the use of emails, websites, social media, and ads to drive registration to the organized event.
Not promoting the event means no visitors, and no visitors means your event will be dead. To decrease the odds of this outcome, make sure to adopt the ideas and strategies that help you get a worthy result.
Build a High-converting Landing Page
There are lots of ways to get registered, from social media chatbots to special websites, don’t overlook a simple yet effective landing page. More than 60% of marketers agree that websites are an effective channel for marketing their organized events. However, creating a landing page helps stir up interest in the event.
You can create a landing page with designing skills or no coding or zero budget; you can use a landing page creator. Check the list of landing page builders to make a better decision:
- Leadpages
- Unbounce
- Instapage
- Swipe Pages
- GetResponse
- Landingi
It’s time to adopt the most suitable practices and focus on a closer look at the “Call to Action Conference” page. The marketing conference helps get more conversions, but you need to be clear about how it can help you. However, the landing page helps you display all the essential details and attractive CTA buttons.
You can use a few gimmicks to drive registration. The host provides a link to the previous recap to fuel the reader’s appetite to participate, provides sign-up for updates to remain in touch, and adds a review to boost credibility.
Promote on Social Media
Social channel usage is the most popular online activity. More than 3.6 billion people will use social platforms worldwide in 2020; this number is projected to grow to near about 4.41 billion in 2025. Social networks have a great audience, and this number is growing consistently by around 9%.
Social media provides you with numerous opportunities and leaves a huge impact on your table. Once after creating your event using the Eventbrite clone, you can choose to promote it on social media. This platform provides plenty of ways to market your event, from creating pages to buying ads on blogs. You can increase your outreach with the help of cross-promotion; it helps you provide you with an engaged and fresh audience.
Take Advantage of FOMO
More than 56% of people are afraid of missing news, events, or other essential updates on social platforms. This makes the fear of missing out (FOMO) a great driving force for event marketing. Fuel the audience’s desire to attend the event with engaging materials like videos, images, and more.
You can use the Facebook page to introduce creative videos and conference guests and bust myths related to your event. Make sure to engage more audience with a preparation checklist, special treats, micro-contests, and more. All these efforts collectively make the audience crave to attend the conference.
Ending Note
An event marketing campaign helps you to get more attendees for your events. Hence, you need to plan your marketing budget. Understand what budget and resources will help you drive the strategy. There are numerous reasons why event marketing strategies work, such as knowing ways to get an impression, create awareness, and more.
Everything starts with an effective marketing plan. Right from the moment the event hosting idea is to the time the event takes place, the right event strategy is needed throughout your entire journey.
Event marketing is essential to make your event a huge success; unless you put in some marketing strategy, there are great chances the footfall will be meager. This holds equal importance for both offline as well as online events.
Author – Gaurav Kanabar is the Founder and CEO of Alphanso Tech; an India-based IT Consulting company that provides music streaming platform development and other app development services to individuals as per their specific demands. Besides this, the founder also loves to deliver an excellent niche helping readers to have deep insight into the topic.