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The planning and efforts you put into organising an event will be fruitful only if attendees turn up. So, you should promote it in different ways and through different channels. You need to put in creativity and effort, especially if you aren’t a well-established brand. This blog discusses 10 of the best event marketing strategies in 2022 for your upcoming event.
But before that, let’s get into the basics.
What are Event Marketing Strategies?
Event marketing involves creating a buzz about an upcoming event, which may be hosted in-person (conferences, seminars, workshops, trade shows, donation camps, meet-n-greet day, etc.) or online (virtual events, live streaming events, webinars, classes, etc.). That is, it is all about letting people know that you are conducting an event and inviting them to participate in it. Event marketing strategies are those strategies employed for marketing an event.
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Why are Event Marketing Strategies Important?
According to 31% of marketers, event marketing is the most efficient marketing technique. Stats also confirm that 84% of event attendees have a more brand affinity towards the promoted brand, company, product, or service post the event. 87% of C-Suite executives agree that live events are powerful, and plan on investing more in them in the future. That is why you need to know the best event marketing strategies.
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10 Best Event Marketing Strategies
1. Create Content to Promote Your Event
The foremost requirement for your event marketing is creating your content. It should include details like what your event is about, when and where it will be hosted, who’ll deliver the speech, how much the ticket costs, and how attendees will benefit from attending it. This way, your content will offer value rather than seeming purely self-promotional.
Apart from this basic event info content, you can also create content for posts on your blog, content for your event’s landing page, etc.; visual marketing content for social media; a press release for local media; and advertisements for ad platforms. Once you’ve come up with your content, you can broadcast it across different channels.
2. Email it
Email marketing is the most popular event marketing strategy for 70% of companies that regularly host events. You can start promoting your event through email two to three months before the event. Send out your official invitation to your email list. An efficient invitation should have all the info discussed earlier briefly and concisely. It should be personalised too. You may employ automation for this.
After that, you should occasionally send out reminders of the event, without overdoing it. We suggest including an explicit reminder in your weekly newsletter. You may also add your event content to your email signature. Just make sure that the message is compelling enough and invokes curiosity in your audience.
3. Partner with influencers
A survey shows that 70% of today’s generation go as per the recommendations of influencers or peers to make purchasing decisions. Such is the power of word-of-mouth marketing. And it holds for attending events as well. So, connect with someone who has become an influencer or someone with a strong presence in your niche on social media.
For instance, if you are conducting an event to encourage blood donation, the influencers could talk about the benefits of blood donation both for the donor and the recipient and then go about announcing the event.
4. Go live
Live streaming is a new trend in event marketing. Yes, get to social media again to spread the word about your event. You can directly converse with your target audience through a live stream and invite them to your event.
Take full advantage of the opportunity by giving your audience an idea about what they can expect from attending it. Make the pitch compelling enough so that they wouldn’t want to miss taking part in it.
5. Spark FOMO
FOMO stands for “Fear Of Missing Out”. Spark this feeling among your audience. Employ visual content to let them know that they will be losers if they don’t participate in your event. For, it is the human tendency to get more involved or interested in something when they feel that they will miss out on something valuable if they don’t.
That is why successful marketers use the phrase “You don’t want to miss this event” as their marketing email’s subject line, blog posts, and social media campaigns. This piques the reader’s curiosity to know what lies within. You can get to know more about tapping into such potential of human psychology by reading this blog.
6. Encourage User-Generated Content
User-Generated Content (UGC) can take different forms such as reviews, testimonials, etc. provided by your past event’s attendees. This will build social proof, spread the word about your forthcoming event, and thus, reach more people.
A great way to obtain UGC on social media is to create a hashtag and motivate users to employ it. You can also create social buzz by holding a competition. For instance, announcing free tickets to those whose posts get the most shares or likes.
7. Look-alike audiences
Social media platforms have technologies that enable you to choose audiences who have attended events like yours in the past. Using these, you can target those exact people. Here is a list of such automated tools and algorithms.
- Facebook audiences
- Saved audiences
- Custom audiences
- Lookalike audiences
8. Attendee referrals
With word-of-mouth marketing being one of the most powerful marketing techniques available, this is another event marketing strategy that you should employ. Several events hosting organisations have successfully done it.
Just reach out to your list of current attendees and request them to promote your event. You can use a referral email template for this purpose. Do approach them with an attractive reward such as an exclusive discount or perk to share the info about your event with their circle.
9. Use paid advertising
Paid ads on Google, Facebook, and other platforms can widen your reach and drive the sales of tickets. Go for remarketing paid ads as they are good at refreshing prospective participants about the upcoming event. These can impart a feeling of shortage with “limited seats” or “limited time” ads.
Such ad remarketing can help promote the event to those people who viewed your event, click the interesting icon, and friends and followers of those who responded to the event.
10. Guarantee a great time (and deliver it!)
Use promotional images, video, user-generated content, etc. across different channels to tell people that you have taken efforts to make the event a memorable, rewarding, and fun-filled one. Let them know that they will have a great time at your event. This will act just like a movie trailer to excite your audience and get them talking about it.
Conclusion
Marketing your event is as important as planning for and conducting it. Now that you have our best event marketing strategies at hand, do use them to get the maximum number of attendees. You may gain more ideas on getting the word out about your post-COVID event by reading more blogs on this site.
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Author Bio:
Shivani Goyal
Shivani is a content writer at InviteReferrals, which provides referral marketing software that allows businesses to attract new customers from existing customers through referral campaigns.