Top tips you need to know, to get bums on seats!

Promoting a large event can sometimes feel like a mammoth task, but with the right tools and strategy, you’ll be guaranteed for success. In this post, our creative team have shared valuable, experience and knowledge led event marketing strategies and tools, you can use to create that important buzz around your next event.

Pre-event marketing

Before you start promoting your event, it’s important to make sure you know what your goals and objectives are – Every event will be coordinated for a purpose – What’s yours?

For some, it may be driving ticket sales for financial benefit. For others, it may be creating a buzz around a brand or product. For many, it will be both. Great event marketing needs goals to be set in advance. Make sure they’re clear across every team involved in promoting the event.

The next thing you’ll want to think about it what you want to measure and how you’ll do so. The only way to know if your approach is working is to measure performance and make changes accordingly.

This could be via click-through rates via emails, to social media impressions, engagement, paid ad performance, and more.

Finally, you need to know who your promotional efforts are targeting. Aside from existing customers, you may also want to invite future prospects and influencers.

Start to list all the different types of people who would be interested in your message. Then you can start to build up a picture of these customers. Ask yourself relevant questions about these people - Where do they live? Are they married? What places do they visit? What are their hobbies? Define them in as many relevant ways as possible – You could even give each profile type a name to make it personal. This way, you won’t waste resources on the wrong audience.

Event Marketing Plan

Once your goals and measurement tools are in place, it’s time to kick off your event marketing plan! The best way to do this is with a 360 holistic approach. This means promoting your event using various marketing disciplines:

1. Email Marketing:

Develop your communications plan for emails well in advance. Different types of emails will call for different audiences. Reminder emails to those who have already RSVP’d won’t achieve much - On the other hand, people you are still selling tickets to will require frequent updates to keep hold of that buzz. If you establish your email plan and messaging strategy ahead of time, you’ll be better set up for success in the long run.

2. Social Media:

Utilising Social media platforms with a well thought through campaign will raise the profile of your event and sustain interest across platforms during and after the event, to amplify your reach to a wide audience on the 3 key players – Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

Instagram also lends itself very well to telling visual stories to your followers – This could be of any visual focus points at your event, from its delivery to installation, through to it being admired by your event crowd.

To keep singular focus, it is worth setting up social media platforms specifically for your event. This also means that you can better monitor behaviours towards your event, as well as collect valuable feedback.

Make sure you set a dedicated hashtag for your event for all your social media promotion, checking first to ensure it’s not already in use.

Create and use engaging visuals, videos and animations to draw attention to your posts and tweets promoting the event. Be sure to pin any post/tweet that acts as a ‘call to action’, to register attendees onto your event as well.

You can also take advantage of promoted tweets and paid ads to extend your reach and engagement.

3. PR:

It’s easy to get too focused on your digital promotion that you forget time-tested traditional methods, like PR. Leverage your PR team to drive awareness to your event via media alerts and event listings in various business journals and newsletters. If you haven’t the team or the time – Outsource PR services – The exposure will be worth it!

4. Branded Website:

A compelling website for your event is a crucial component of event marketing. In fact, it should be the home base for all related information. Whether you host it on your existing website or build something new, the goal should still be the same. This should be where you’re driving all your promotional work, so make sure your event site includes all the necessary information to drive ticket purchases. This includes, but is not limited to, a scheduled agenda, speakers, hotel and transport information and all other activities. Don’t forget your social share buttons to help spread the excitement far and wide!

5. Leverage your existing marketing activities:

It’s important to not forget about leveraging your existing marketing activities to promote your event. There is no need to reinvent the wheel – what is important is that you work to align your activities to aid in promotion.

Add slides or event information to webinars. This way, you’re guaranteed a relevant audience who will be likely to be interested in other activities your company offers.

If you keep a blog, cater a few posts to help promote the event. Try interviewing a handful of speakers to spotlight their involvement in your event for example.

If you’re involved in, or attending other events during your promotion period, share information about your own event and encourage people to get involved - Allow for sneak peeks.

If you send out a regular newsletter, be sure to highlight your event as often as possible.

Ask your partners to help promote your event – This could be by simply sharing social media posts.

Have an email signature? Create a custom banner for the bottom of the email signatures for you, and your staff, to aid in the promotion of the event.

Promotion during the event

So the big day is here, and your event marketing has worked – Well done! You’ve got a venue full of eager attendees, but your work doesn’t stop here.

It’s crucial you continue promoting the event throughout its duration if you want to maintain that buzz.

Keep it live, keep it relevant.

For as many people you have attending your event, your likely to have just as many who couldn’t make it, but are still interested, and it’s important to keep them engaged. It’s likely if you engage them now, they’ll be more inclined to attend next time.

There are a number of ways to do this…

1. Live post/tweet:

Have people dedicated to tweeting and posting the goings on of the event on a continual basis. They should act as the eyes and ears on the ground and report back using social media. Use pictures and live videos of the event to amplify your presence even further and engage your audience by encouraging them to share on their social channels using the dedicated hashtag - Here's a thought… Why not award the top tweeters at your event with prizes?

2. Live stream:

Take it another step further. Live streaming the most compelling (or all) content will give people who couldn’t attend, the chance to be involved and take away valuable insights. They’ll remember this experience when thinking about attending your next event. Use that to your advantage.

Post-event marketing

The event might be over but your work isn’t done, yet. It’s important to take all of your promotional efforts and close out the event in a way that can be used for future events.

You’ve likely collected a tone of photos, videos, feedback, testimonials and more during your event. These are all valuable to compile into a promotional tool for your future endeavours.

Be sure to take stock of what you have and find ways to market it.

To Conclude!

Promoting a large event is a hefty task, crossing multiple disciplines and requiring a good amount of foresight and strategic thinking.

But if you follow the steps above, you’ll be quite a few leaps closer to a hugely successful event.

Not sure where to start?... We can help!

Email us at [email protected] or call us on 029 2143 2171 to make sure your event marketing plan has all corners covered for maximum ROI. We have the knowledge, experience, and equipment to help.