Event Marketing Essentials!
Event Marketing should begin several months before an event, continue during the event and even when it’s concluded. Marketing is an essential component to events and ensures you have people in attendance and partners to help increase value, reach and credibility to ultimately give your event a purpose.
Here are the Event Generals essential event marketing tips:
Get a website! - Deadset, if you don’t have a plan to build a website for your event then you may as well quit now. While a website is essential, we are not suggesting you spend thousands on one. There are several cheap options to get the job done and give you a stunning, easy to use and engaging site. It’s what goes into your website that matters.
An SEO strategy that is holistic at large. Blogs, video, imagery, event information and an event purpose enables your target audience to find what they’re looking for and share with friends. It also provides a solid foundation to build sponsorship around by listing partner information, store useful data and so on.
Build a database - Attached to your website should be an email newsletter list. Email is probably the best way to communicate with your audience in mass and draws the most customer loyalty. It’s also another channel you can offer potential sponsors as a way for them to communicate to your audience on products and services that may add value to your customers lives.
A database can also become a great tool for future event promotion with several easy ways to keep your audience engaged and excited for your next event(s).
Create social media accounts - Just like a website, social media accounts are essential to your event. Facebook, Instagram at the very least. Twitter and Linkedin if you want to dive in deeper. If you are going down the social media path, we highly recommend hiring a social media guru. Event Generals can do this. The use of hashtags is a great way to create engagement online with your followers. Your followers can capture their own content, share it to their account and use your hashtag so others may see.
Ambassadors and Influencers - Are essential especially to new events just starting out. Using an influencer with a large social following to gain traction and credibility for your event is money well spent. Event Generals have seen several events use this strategy being put to great use with large music festivals, where DJ’s or bands use their own following to promote their gig. You don’t necessarily need to pay these influencers up front either. It’s not uncommon to give them a % of each ticket sales which incentivises them to post without your direction.
Define and deliver your message? - A case could be made for this point being at the top of this list. What is your message or what is the purpose of your event? Once you define this, it should feature throughout your marketing output.
Content is key/king - Without content, how do you tell your story. Video, imagery, blogs, interviews and so on are great ways to deliver what your event is about. Timeless content…that is content that doesn’t age is ideal. Google loves it and when people read an article you might have done 5 years ago, it won’t come across outdated. We recommend writing content with ‘education, engagement and inspiration’ at the forefront of your mind at all times. Avoid selling.
Frequency works - The old adage of “frequency works” dates back a century. The crux of what this term means is basically to jam your message, purpose and content down people’s throats until they commit. At the end of the day, you aren’t selling health insurance or bricks and sand. Events are fun, aspirational activities that people enjoy. Some people just need to be pushed more than others.
Blogs - Blogs are similar to timeless articles, but they are written to inform and go out of date. For example, an interview with a band about their performance at ‘xyz festival’ is informative and not necessarily timeless. Blogs can also be press release announcements maybe about a special guest who has been announced or a new sponsor has jumped on board to support your event. Whatever the story is, aim to write 2-3 blogs a month in the build up to your event.
Advertising - Even the smallest advertising budget can do wonders for promoting your event. Paid advertising like, PPC ads targeting keyword terms on search engines like Google and paid advertisements on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram can be a good way to increase awareness of your event but also attract ticket sales or registrations.
Social media advertising, in particular, enables you to target your ads to individual markets, and you can even retarget those who have visited your event website but haven’t bought a ticket yet. We call this “abandon cart” follow ups. You should also consider ‘free advertising’. Free advertising may come from an event partner or sponsor who you have exchanged to do a value in kind deal using each others networks to benefit your event on a mutual level.
Incentivise your audience - Not to be confused with ‘discounting’. Don’t devalue a product or service with discounts. Instead consider limited releases that rise in price incrementally. i.e. first release = cheapest price $80, 2nd release = $90 and third and final release = $100. You should also consider things like 2 for 2 offers or if a ticket is purchased they go in the draw to win a prize.
Request feedback - Constant feedback about every facet of your event is extremely important for continual improvement and to learn from mistakes. Surveys are a great way to receive mass feedback and another reason why having a mailing list is important. Another option worth considering is to ask your audience to rate you event out of 10, otherwise known as a Net promoter score. The average score out of 10 can be used to promote the event in the future.
So there you have it. Marketing and the essential ingredients to make it a success. If you have an existing event or an idea for an event OR you have a venue you want to run events from, please reach out to the Event Generals team below.