There seem to be a million ways of doing event marketing. Event marketing can take many forms depending on the role you play in your company. What’s undeniable? Promotion is crucial when it comes to events. Event marketing can be done at scale and across all events by using technology, data and analytics. This guide will help you understand what event marketing is and how to make it a winning strategy. It also explains how to implement that strategy to improve your event program. This guide will give you a quick overview of all the information:
- Event Marketing
- Event Marketing Process
- Event Planning
- Your event We is critical
- Types Websites
- Event Email Marketing
- The Top 5 Email Marketing Tips For Events
- Using Social Media
- Paid digital promotion
- Event ROI
- Event Marketing Software
What is Event Marketing?
Events account for a significant portion of many companies’ marketing budgets. Many companies spend anywhere from 20 percent to 50% of their marketing budgets on brand experiences. The majority of that money goes to events. Events are often considered the best channel for their marketing strategy after a website. This is due to the power of virtual and in-person experiences, as well as the opportunity to make one-on-one connections. Event marketing is crucial. Events are powerful, whether you promote your events or use them as part of your event marketing strategy.
Different types of event marketing
Event marketing can be described in many ways. It can refer to the promotion plan for an event or the strategic use events make to market. Your strategy and planning process for event marketing will be more complex if you have to plan a series of events that support your marketing plan. Others may find it a promotional plan that is specific to a particular event. This can be broken down into more manageable plans.
- Email Marketing
- Event-based strategy
- Website for the event
- Advertising
- Marketing via social media
- Search Engine Optimization
Event Marketing
Events can be expensive. This is why it is so important to plan your event strategy. Budget, goals and other factors will influence the events you plan and how you promote them. Recognizing that an event can help you achieve your goals is the first step in event marketing. Events can increase sales, improve morale, and promote a product. The goal of an event is the most important aspect of event marketing. You can determine the goal of your event and plan promotions and objectives that are based on it. The event marketing process is tied to event strategies. Timing is a key factor in event marketing. Be aware of industry and environment. Marketing your event during COVID-19 may be different than usual.
Event Marketing Plan
Promotion, promotion, and promotion
A killer promotion plan is essential for your event. It can be difficult to know where to begin. When event planning starts, your marketing plan should be in place. Both go hand-in-hand. Without a great promotion strategy, nobody will find out about your event. How do you make it happen? Below is a template for event marketing that you can use to get you started.
Get to Know Your Event
Understanding your event’s purpose and goals is the first step to event planning. The next step is to understand your event and its purpose. From there you can concentrate on details like the event name, theme, tagline and color scheme. This will be your blueprint for event marketing.
Get to know the basics of your event
- Event Name
- Event Purpose
- Event Type (In-person or Virtual)
- Theme
- Tagline
- Color Scheme
Your event website is critical
Event websites are essential for most events. You can’t decide if your event needs a registration or marketing website. The event website is the first contact you make with potential attendees. It should contain important information that will convince potential attendees to sign up. You can personalize your event planning with event technology. A branded registration website for event registration can be created that allows you to identify the visitors to your site. You can modify the registration process according to attendee type. You can create dynamic pricing and registration paths using more advanced software.
Different types of websites
First, which type of website are you building? There are two main types of event websites: registration websites and marketing websites. There are many websites out there, but these are the ones you should choose when creating a website about an event.
Register on the Registration Website
How complicated is your event? This website is best for a 1-day seminar. Registering websites are ideal for events that are short in duration, held at one place or virtually and require little explanation. The registration page will typically contain one page of information with a call-to-action that allows the user to sign up.
Marketing Website
For more complicated events, a marketing website is ideal. This type of event is often multi-day, takes place in different locations, virtually, and requires multiple registration paths. It may also require more than one website to explain. You can set up multiple pages on your marketing website to provide attendees with all the information they require. These events are more expensive for attendees, so the marketing website must explain why they are worth the time and money.
Your Event Website Must Include:
- Time and date
- Localization
- Cost
- Get involved
- URL
- FAQs
- Rich content
Make sure your email marketing plan doesn’t irritate potential attendees
Email marketing strategy is an integral part of any promotion. You should quickly find an email marketing tool if you don’t already have one. These tools make it much easier to automate and design emails. Don’t go overboard when planning. You can get opens if your subject line is interesting and catchy. However, if you spam people, they will unsubscribe.
Event Email Marketing
You can get the right event marketing to ensure that you reach the most people for your event. But, your efforts should not stop there. Your goal is to create buzz about your event and get registrants talking and engaging before, during and after the conference. Email marketing is huge in event promotion: More than 75% B2C companies use it as their number one tool. Half of all email marketers are not successful (yes, even half!). 50% of email marketers (yes, half!) struggle to get potential attendees to reply to their emails [Hubspot]. Email marketing has proven to be effective. Your leadership team knows how important it is. How can you use email marketing to increase attendance at your event?
Top 5 Email Marketing Tips For Events
Online email marketing software makes it easy to manage, segment, update, and review your contact lists. Registering will be significantly boosted by targeted campaigns.
To comply with CANSPAM and privacy regulations, allow your recipients to choose to opt out
To ensure brand consistency, make sure your emails are consistent with the event website.
Pre-scheduling and automating updates are two ways to maximize registration. Don’t forget to send thank you/confirmation emails.
To analyze click-thru and open rates, review reporting (your marketing software can help you do it easily) is a great way to find additional marketing opportunities.
Bonus Tip – Track, test, and tweak your emails in order to make the most of your campaigns. You can make a huge impact on your event marketing with the right software tools.
You Can’t Avoid Using Social Media
Social media is a great tool for free promotion. You should promote your event on every platform if you are a strong presence. If your audience is more inclined to use Instagram, you don’t have to promote your event across all platforms.
Which Countries Will You Promote?
Social Media Basics
- Hashtag
- How often will you post in a week?
- Are there any speakers or vendors who would like to tag?
Fun fact: On average, a smartphone user glances at their phone 300+ times per day. This is a lot of social networking use. It’s easy to promote your event using social media. Here are five ways to use social media to promote an event.
These five social media tactics can help you promote your next event
Hashtags
Make an event hashtag and keep it going. Hashtags allow you to track your event across all social media platforms. Encourage your attendees and co-planners to use the same hashtag for every post. Make your hashtag relevant, simple, concise, and easy to remember. You can eliminate the need to remind your attendees of what your hashtag is by having a catchy one. It is a good idea to make the hashtag the event’s name.
Contests
Contests can be a great way to get people tweeting, posting on Facebook, and Instagramming. Use your imagination to find the contest that best fits your event. You could use your event hashtag to create a contest to see who has the most followers on social media before your event. The winner may be awarded a grand prize at the event. Another option is to have a photo contest to determine who gets the most comments or likes on a pre-event image.
Consistent posting
It’s simple. Post often. Keep your followers in mind and stay relevant. Your followers are the most important thing about social media. They want to see what you have to offer. You can expect to lose followers if you don’t post often or post incongruous content. This can be avoided by posting creative, personable content. Tell your followers what you want.
Interaction with followers
Interaction with your customers is essential. You want your customers to feel comfortable with you, so you need to be personable. You should engage with your attendees before you even start an event. Follow your hashtag once you have promoted it. You can search for it on any of your social media platforms. Then, start responding to people who use it. You can use your hashtag to track people who have questions, concerns, or praises. You can respond right away. It’s easy to solve problems quickly with social media. You might get a tweet from an attendee who finds a problem in the online registration process for your event. You could lose an attendee if you don’t keep up with your social media accounts.
Paid Digital Promotion
While it is easy to promote your event using mainly free methods, paid promotion can still be very effective. The amount of money available to you will determine how effective your promotion. Paid ads may be an option if your event is large in budget and targets a larger audience.
These are some basic questions
- How much do you have to spend?
- What number of impressions do your hopes to make?
- Print, digital, commercials?
- You might also consider other methods of promotion, such as direct mail, calls, and so forth. ?
Additional Promotion
Blog posts, influencers, word-of-mouth, and blog posts are all great ways to promote your event. There are many ways to promote your event. All it comes down to the event. You might be able to come up with something amazing if you do some research.
Don’t forget about sponsors
You need to market to potential sponsors as well as attendees. They’ll help you get more interest and defray costs. Clear sponsorship packages should be easy to communicate, but be flexible. A good sponsor can be almost any sponsor.
Marketing success at events
How do event marketers define success? Eventalways recently conducted a study that found the key metrics to event marketing success include financial results, event attendance and lead generation. These metrics are all in line with the company’s overall goals. The event marketing objectives guide strategy and establish a baseline for determining event ROI.
Alignment with company goals
Event purpose should be linked to company goals. Every event should demonstrate what it has done towards this goal. However, each event will have its own goals. Event marketers must align their activities with the marketing department’s overall objectives.
Event Attendance
The event’s success can be gauged by the number of attendees. A trickle-down effect is created by higher attendee numbers, which can lead to more leads and more event buzz.
Media Impact
Media metric includes social media traffic and new followers, clicks and website visitors, viewership for broadcast events like sports and entertainment and press coverage.
Surveys after an event
These surveys provide a quick and accurate way to gauge the satisfaction and experiences of attendees at events. Other useful areas include likelihood to buy.
Revenue generation and lead generation
Events attendees are a buying signal. Event marketers can track the financial impact of their programs by tracking attendees at events and integrating their behaviors back into their CRM systems.
Past Event Learnings
Event marketers want to learn from past attendees in order to improve and refine their marketing strategies for future events. Budget-setting for future events can be made easier by the ROI of an event.
Event ROI
You need to look at both the benefits and costs of hosting an event in order to calculate event ROI. It’s not enough to simply add up the event’s direct costs and the revenue it generates. You need to fully understand the costs and benefits of running an event. We have identified the eight key drivers of event ROI to help you understand this calculation.
Event Costs
Events can take up 25% of a company’s B2B marketing budget. Internal meetings can add an additional 3-5%. It is important to examine the costs involved in making events happen at a more detailed level. It is important to examine three costs.
Direct Costs
These are the most common costs for event planners. These are the expenses of hosting an event. Direct costs can include travel costs, venue costs, food, beverage, entertainment, rental equipment, and rent equipment. You should be able to reconcile your budgets and keep track of direct costs.
Indirect Costs
The indirect costs provide a better view of the investment required to host an event. These include overhead and salaries of event teams as well as shared expenses. Accounting processes such as activity-based pricing allow for indirect costs to be calculated. This assigns costs to products, services and events. Your finance team can help you understand the indirect costs of your event.
Opportunity Costs
Event organizers have an opportunity cost. Your company chooses to invest its resources in an event, rather than digital marketing or any other activity. These other sources of value are called opportunity costs. This cost can be understood by comparing the benefits of other activities to yours.
Recognizing the Benefits
Events can have a significant impact on the bottom line and top line of an organisation. Similar to expenses it is important to understand how to measure different benefits.
Direct Revenue
Direct revenue refers to the income directly earned by hosting an event. These include ticket sales, sponsorship dollars and registration fees. The event’s size and scope will affect the amount of direct revenue. This is what you’re hoping to calculate today in order to demonstrate the event’s value.
Attributed Revenue
Events are a great way for organizations to market and promote products. This will help drive future revenue. Product demos on-site and conversations about account planning can help to fill the pipeline, increase sales and renew customers. The dollars generated by these new business opportunities can be attributed as attributed revenue.
Brand Equity
Brand equity is one example of an intangible benefit that cannot be quantified with hard dollars. Although brand equity does not provide immediate financial rewards, attendance at events can have an impact on brand attitudes. People like to do business with well-respected and respected companies. The long-term profit contribution of a customer can be boosted by brand equity. You want your events to have a positive effect on attendees and build brand equity.
Knowledge Exchange
Knowledge exchange refers to the acceleration of learning that takes place during events. The interaction between prospects, customers and companies can improve product development, enhance learning, fine-tune marketing and speed sales receptivity. Events should foster knowledge sharing, which will lead to brand equity and attributed revenues.
Event Technology and Online Event Marketing Software
Event marketing software makes it easier. Integration with other systems will be easier if your marketing tool is more robust. Look for tools that allow you to create automated and customized emails. This will reduce the time spent on manual emails and free you up to focus your efforts on more important issues, such as driving registration. Event Management Software will give you the information you need to demonstrate the success of your event marketing plan. A comprehensive event management platform is the best way to implement these technologies.
One Event Management Platform
It will be much easier for you and your staff to use technology with one platform. You’ll also have better insight into your event and processes if all data is stored and collected in one place with event management software. It’s easier to understand your data and make future decisions when all the data is in one place.
Best practices in event marketing
- Learn about the budget and goals of the event
- Make a plan for meeting your event goals
- You can set goals to measure your success
- Promote important events in advance and schedule promotion
- To increase attendance, use discounts and sponsorships
- Event marketing software can be used to reduce time spent on manual tasks
Virtual Event Marketing
Virtual events marketing is a different kind of marketing than traditional event marketing. The good news about virtual events? It removes or reduces the barriers to entry for those who are unable to attend an in-person event. The cost of travel is often lower and there is no need to travel. These barriers are removed and your virtual event can attract more people than an in-person event. You must make sure you’re marketing your event effectively so that your attendees are aware that it is happening. These events still require social promotion. It is important to partner with sponsors and partners in order to increase your reach. Your registration website should provide information and showcase your brand. You need the right technology to market virtual events. Make sure you have a virtual platform before you attempt hybrid or virtual events. One solution is the Virtual Attendee hub. This allows you to create an entirely branded experience virtually.
Event marketing is an essential part of event planning
Events are a key driver of organizational success. They can be in-person, online, hybrid or virtual. They empower connections and educate attendees. Event marketing is crucial to convince attendees and increase registrations. Event management software makes it easier. Promotion is the only way to let people know about an event. Promotion is now easier than ever thanks to event technology. Plan your event and create a marketing plan.