Event marketing is becoming one of the drivers behind many companies overarching marketing plans. From user conferences like Inbound or DreamForce, to internal corporate events designed to bring employees together to learn best-practices and get inspired.

Among the world’s marketing driven companies, face-to-face interaction has not been replaced by digital marketing initiatives, rather, digital marketing initiatives are used to support live events.

Despite this trend in the events industry, many planners still feel a bit uncomfortable when it comes to working on event marketing strategies, be it alone or in collaboration with a marketing team.

So to help event planners, and marketers alike, here are three keys to keep in mind in order to properly market an event.

Build Communities

This is particularly important for events and conferences where attendees must buy a ticket or register to attend. Event organisers will find it much easier to increase event registrations if there is an already established community of enthusiasts to draw upon.

For example, Hubspot’s annual user conference, called Inbound, is much easier to market thanks to their accompanying forum, Inbound.org. Each year, event marketers can tap into this self-selecting audience of enthusiasts who are likely to want to attend that year’s conference.

Event marketers can create their own communities using platforms like LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Communities, or existing forums on platforms like Reddit to begin a conversation with already segmented communities.

Utilise Social Media Ads

Event planners have a number of paid channels they can pursue when marketing an event, but a new and growing channel is paid social media ads. Recently Facebook has made it easier for events to generate interest thanks to a special ad type called “event response” ads.

Those interested in attending the event can click the “Interested” CTA in the right corner and they’ll receive more information about the event as the start of the conference approaches.

Event response adds help to increase the reach of an event by notifying friends of those interested about the event through notifications.

An example of the Facebook notifications friends see when others express interest in an event.

Harness The Power Of Evangelists

Similar to how event communities can make selling event registrations easier, event evangelists make generating event buzz considerably easier to do.

You may have considered tapping into evangelist in order to develop a corporate brand, but by harnessing the power of people like your event speakers, you can help to position your event as a truly must-attend conference.

For example, prior to this year’s Digital Marketing Show one of the event speakers, Mark Masters, shared a sneak peak into his upcoming presentation with his followers. His Tweet helped to increase the reach of the Digital Marketing Show and Master’s had an opportunity to position himself as a “thought leader” in front of his followers.

Encouraging event speakers to promote your event with their followers is a great method of harnessing the power of evangelists to increase event awareness. In most cases, the speaker’s followers should be interested in hearing the person they’re following speak in person. So really, your event speakers can help to introduce a highly qualified audience to your event or conference.

Community building, making use of paid social media ads, and harnessing the power of event evangelists are all proven ways to increase event buzz and sell more tickets or registrations.

The key to successfully executing these three event marketing initiatives is to first and foremost understand your target audience of event attendees. With this understanding, you can then go ahead and engage this group through communities, social ads and evangelists.

 

By David Epstein, Content Marketing Manager at Bizzabo. 

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