Event promotion is the practice of using a variety of marketing strategies and channels to disseminate information about an event and ultimately encourage registration for the event. In contrast, event marketing is the process of driving business goals for a product, brand, or service through personal events.
Coordinated campaigns using multiple marketing channels are the most effective way to promote your event. Depending on the audience, there may be specific channels - such as LinkedIn, email, or website - that work best for communicating your message. When it comes to promoting events, it's quality not quantity that counts.
Event marketing and event promotion strategies should fit perfectly with an integrated marketing campaign. marketing, an integrated marketing campaign starts with identifying your target audience. Then you can determine which marketing channels to leverage and which messages will resonate with your audience.
Define your event promotion goals
The first step is to identify your specific event goals because your promotional strategy will largely depend on
For example, if you are using an account-based marketing strategy (ABM) to target specific accounts, you may want to target registrations for specific ticket types, which would require creating promotions for those tickets and corresponding participating people.
Participant person goals include:
- Total number of registrations
- Number of paid registrations
- Number of discounted subscribers
- Number of free subscribers
When aligning your promotional reach with other teams within your organization, take in Consider creating targets for the number of registrants assigned to specific teams.
For example, you might want to track:
- Number of registrants from successful customer.
- Number of registrants from sales.
- Number of registrants from marketing.
- Number of registrants from executive leadership.
Defining event goals and KPIs will help you build and optimize an attendee registration path that brings the right people to your event.
Align your sales and marketing teams
Event promotion is ultimately a team sport and alignment of sales and marketing organizations is key to successfully filling the room with the right leads to achieve alignment business, transversal skills such as collaboration and communication are fundamental. to help bring teams together for a common goal.
1. Align teams for your ABM strategy
Before planning your event, work with your sales and marketing leadership to create your marketing and events strategy.
You will want to discuss:
- Defining target customers and organizations.
- Creating target person.
- Creating news and positioning for an event.
Once you have the basics of ABM strategy, educate your sales and marketing teams. empower your teams to collaborate and attract the right people to your events.
2. Get an entry fee for executives
Ultimately, you will need support and investment from management. Be sure to explain to management how your event supports larger business goals and generates revenue. This will help them understand why they should prioritize the event as a business goal.
Build a general overview or detailed presentation that will clearly define your vision for the event and the impact the events will have on customers, brand, company values, and ultimately revenue.
3. Develop clear communication and instructions
As teams adjust to your event, you can develop clear lines of communication. Dedicated weekly updates in the form of town hall meetings or recurring emails are a great way to keep all stakeholders up-to-date on event goals, next steps and areas of opportunity.
If you use collaboration tools such as Slack, you can create designated channels for each event. For an ABM strategy, each of these channels allows you to highlight teams and individuals who have helped attract target accounts and contacts.
4. Sharing event collateral.
Historically, marketing has been a one-to-many approach, however, arming different teams with event collateral and messaging will broaden your reach and help you attract groups of people and target accounts you may not have access to.
For example, you can provide your teams with creative banners and copy that they can share on social media. You can also provide them with a short email template to send to prospects, friends, and industry contacts.
5. Design contests and spiffs to motivate the entire company.
There is something about a challenge that makes everyone motivated and excited. Once you have buy-in from your teams and have created promotional resources to use, you can launch a fun competition. This approach gives everyone an interest in making the event a success.
Try to organize several business units into separate teams. Build a leaderboard and create registration goals that precede the event and offer a reward to the team or individual winners. competition and gives everyone involved a sense of accomplishment.