Let’s talk promotional events. If you’re hosting promotional events, you know how important it is to sell all of your tickets. But are you covering all the bases in your event promotion plan to guarantee the success of your next event? With countless marketing strategies available, it can be challenging to determine the most effective ways to promote your events successfully.
Numerous entrepreneurs, influencers, and companies often overlook the importance of a well-defined event strategy, which is a significant mistake. The key to hosting highly successful promotional events lies in crafting a comprehensive plan that encompasses smaller, targeted initiatives. Today, we will delve into this crucial aspect.
What is Event Promotion?
Event promotion uses different marketing strategies and channels to get the word out about your event and ultimately drive event registration and achieve your event’s goals. This can range from digital (email, SEO or social media) to print mediums (such as flyers, branded apparel, direct mail, or promotional products).
Are event marketing and event promotion the same thing?
A lot of people get event marketing and event promotion mixed up, so it’s important to have a clear definition for both. Event marketing involves event branding, advertising, analytics, success metrics, and other related aspects. It is a comprehensive effort that aims to achieve business goals for a product, brand, or service using events.
To promote your event effectively, it’s best to use coordinated campaigns that utilize different marketing channels in an omnichannel strategy. Understand your audience and use the channels that work best for them, rather than feeling compelled to use all channels available. You definitely want to be consistent with your event brand and focus on quality over quantity.
To ensure seamless integration of your event marketing and promotion strategies, it is crucial that they align effortlessly with your overall marketing campaign. Just like omni-channel marketing, an integrated marketing campaign should always start by identifying your target audience. Once you have a clear understanding of whom you are targeting, you can then proceed to determine the specific marketing channels through which you can effectively engage with your audience.
Step 1: Identifying Your Promotion Goals
The first step in building your event promotion plan is identifying the event goals you want to achieve.
Let’s use a quick example, if you’re using an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy to target specific accounts, you may want to target registrations for specific ticket types. Doing so would require you to build promotions for those tickets and personas for those that will be attending the event. In such a scenario, here are some metrics tied to ticket/attendee persona goals:
- How many registrations do you have?
- How many paid registrations do you have?
- How many registrants were discounted?
- How many registrants were free?
When aligning your promotional outreach with other teams across your organization, consider creating goals for how many registrants are attributed to specific teams. For example, you may want to track the following:
- Number of registrants from customer success
- Number of registrants from sales
- Number of registrants from marketing
- Number of registrants form executive leadership
Defining your event goals and KPIs will help you build and optimize an attendee registration journey that brings the right people to your event.
Step 2: Make Sure Sales and Marketing Teams Are The Same Page
Event promotions will always be a team sport; ensuring your sales and marketing organizations are on the same page is key to filling the room with your target audience. Collaboration and communication are pivotal to achieve sales and marketing alignment. Here’s a few tactics below to help bring your teams together to achieve a successful event.
1. Coordinate Teams Around an ABM Strategy
Before planning your event, work with your sales and marketing leadership to craft your account-based marketing (ABM) and events strategy. HubSpot has a really solid resource for this: ABM is a growth strategy in which sales and marketing “collaborate to create personalized buying experiences for a mutually-identified set of high-value accounts.”
You’ll want to discuss the following with your sales and marketing teams:
- Who are our target accounts and organizations (ICP)?
- Who are our target buyer personas?
- What is our event messaging and positioning?
- What channels are best for optimizing our ABM strategy?
Once you have the foundation of your ABM strategy in place, be sure to provide your teams with the relevant go-to-market materials to achieve success.
2. Getting Support From Your Executive Team
When all is said and done, you need support from your executive team. Be sure to articulate to your leadership how your event supports the larger business goals and drives revenue. This will help them understand why they should prioritize your event as a business objective.
Build a high-level overview or detailed presentation that clearly defines your event vision and the impact that events will have on your customers, brand, company values, and ultimately, revenue.
3. Develop Clear Communications and Instructions
Once the teams are aligned on the value of your event, you can develop clear and consistent lines of communications. Schedule weekly check-in calls and email updates to keep stakeholders up-to-date on event targets, next steps, and areas of opportunity.
You can create designated channels for each event using collaboration tools like Slack. For an ABM strategy, each channel allows you to highlight teams and individuals that helped attract target accounts and contacts. You should also connect your event ticketing software to Slack to automatically update a dedicated channel of new registrations so your GTM teams can keep on top of key accounts.
4. Incentivize Teams To Drive Registrations
Historically, marketing has been a one-to-many approach. However, arming different teams with event collateral and templates will amplify your reach and help you attract groups of people and target accounts you may not have had access to.
For example, create unique UTM links for each of your GTM team members, keep track of who is bringing in the most registrations, and offer a reward for the top three registration totals. Provide your teams with social media, email, and other communication channels templates.
Or, try organizing different business units into separate teams. Build a leaderboard, create registration goals leading up to the event, and offer an award to the winning team or individuals. This introduces some friendly competition and gives everyone involved a sense of accomplishment.
Best Ways To Leverage Existing Channels for Event Promotions
If you already know what’s working, why change? When it comes to event promotions, there’s a number of key benefits for using existing marketing channels to promote your upcoming event.
- Leverage the same channels you use now for your promotional event.
- Make sure you’re using the resources you already own.
- Using the same channels consistently strengthens your brand.
- You already know which channels are reaching the right contacts.
With that being said, let’s take a look at some common channels that you can leverage for your next event.
1. Use Blog Articles, Podcasts, Video, and More
Content, content, content! If your company has a blog or video podcast series, you can leverage those channels to promote your upcoming events to your target audience. When you’re on video, make sure you’re wearing your promotional apparel and have your promotional products in view of the audience.
Both blogs and video platforms allow you to create CTAs, so make sure you’re using them. CTA stands for call-to-action, this is where you try to get a prospect or lead to take further action. You can add CTAs anywhere you want, headers and sidebars are the most effective for your website. Few people see the footer, so focus your attention on the main top of pages.
If you’re running podcast, make sure you give the event a shout-out at the end. In fact, you can dedicate a whole podcast to your event.
Remember that video is a powerful tool for your content marketing strategy. Shoot a “behind the scenes” event series to show readers the meticulous planning that goes into the event and post the series on your blog. Using video content to promote your event will create a more engaging experience for readers to learn about the event.
2. Promote Events in Your Email Signature
We see many companies and brands underutilize email, don’t make the same mistake. Using email signatures to advertise your upcoming event is a great tactic to implement. You can potentially reach a lot of people. In your signature, place a link to the registration page, a small image to promote the event, and some information about the event if you have room.
Think about what’s most important and get it added to your email signature.
3. Share the Event with your Email List
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to turn prospects into clients. If you do have an email list, make sure you’re sharing your event with your subscribers. If you do newsletters, be sure to share the event inside your publication.
Promoting your event through a newsletter is still a good way to drive awareness while delivering valuable content to your subscribers. If you’re creating engaging content, you may already have those content assets available to share. If not, take some time to work on your email sequence content.
4. Strengthen Your Event Website’s SEO
There’s a lot of benefits to SEO, search engine optimization can help you rank keywords in Google and drive in organic traffic via Google and other search engines. Once you’ve built your event website, be sure you’ve optimized it for the right and most relevant keywords. Using the right keywords is essential to seeing success with search engine optimization.
Content is still king in SEO, so make sure you’re creating amazing content for your users. That should be your top priority for on-site SEO.
For off-site SEO, it’s all about backlinks. However, if you’re creating great content, your content will naturally attract attention and link inquiries.
5. Mobilize Influential Attendees and Speakers
It doesn’t matter if you’ve already held an event in the past or you’ve managed to gain new registrations for your next event, your attendees should always be viewed as “invaluable assets.” In the marketing community you don’t hear this a lot, but advocacy marketing is becoming a vital element in marketing campaigns these days. This marketing strategy involves building mutually beneficial relationships with customers who can help you promote your brand, services, product, or events.
Encourage past attendees, speakers, and sponsors to spread the word about your event by providing them with unique promo codes to share with their network. You can even gamify your advocacy marketing strategy and reward those who bring in the most registrants with a gift card or another incentive.
For speakers and sponsors, create co-marketing collateral with your logo and their image or logo to maximize their marketing efforts.
6. Using Traditional Marketing
While the world is definitely digital these days, you can still use traditional marketing strategies to promote your event. Make sure you’re using outdoor signs, you can use banners signs, vinyl signs, or a monument sign if this is a regularly occurring event.
You can also use radio, newspapers, magazines, and television. While less users are consuming these avenues, they still reach millions of people every day.
How To Create Promotional Content From Previous Events
We always recommend recording everything you do, especially when it comes to events.
Having video of your past events can you a ton of time by allowing you to repurpose event content for your next event. You can use existing video footage, images, and attendee reviews for pre-event content marketing and update old collateral, email templates, and email signatures to drive event registrations.
- Promotional Videos: Nothing is more powerful than video content. Videos are powerful and one of the best content types to use in your event promotions. Rather than simply telling people that your event will be great, demonstrate it to them. Create an enticing promotional “sizzle” reel showcasing footage from previous events, allowing prospective attendees to envision themselves at this year’s gathering. This captivating video can then be prominently featured across email, social media, and your event website. To maximize viewership, aim to keep the video under one minute in length.
- Video Testimonials: Video testimonials feature attendees speaking directly to the camera about how much they loved your event last year. Try to grab footage of past speakers who would also speak highly of your event or folks from you event team hyping up the event.
- Past Event Photos: Pictures are worth a thousand words, so make sure you’re showcasing the energy, activations, and experiences that potential attendees can expect at your upcoming event. There’s a wide range of ways to leverage past event photos. You can even use these photos to build excitement among people already registered for your event.
- Current And Past Speakers: Big names will always entice people to attend events, and the reputation and experience they bring helps lend credibility to your brand and event. Highlight speakers you’ve had at past events to show common themes and establish excitement for your upcoming event while also sharing highlights from current speakers.
- Positive Reviews: Showcasing positive feedback from previous events proves your event is worth attending. Place them in a visible section of the event website and let the reviews do the work for you. People tend to trust reviews more than a company’s claims, so you can use that to your advantage and show potential registrants how much past event-goers loved your event.
Event Promotions: How To Successfully Promote Your Events
No matter your event type, there are plenty of ways to create an effective event promotion strategy. Here are the main things to remember:
- Define the goals of your event promotions to build the right promotional strategy.
- Align your sales and marketing teams to increase organizational engagement and buy-in.
- Leverage your existing marketing channels for highly effective promotional events.
- Repurpose content from previous events to help promote your upcoming events.
- Segment your audiences to create more targeted and effective messaging.
- Join the conversation on social. Use different channels and promotional strategies to increase engagement on all your social media outlets.
- Contact sponsors, speakers, and other team members for joint promotional ideas to ensure you take full advantage of their wide networks.
Use these tips and takeaways to create a promotional strategy that is right for your event. With the right resources and knowledge, event promotions becomes less of a daunting task and more of an achievable challenge.
