Effective event marketing can make a world of difference to your overall brand strategy. Events build a buzz around your business and help you connect with new clients and leads.
Engaging events are great for growing your reach, too. Folks who follow you online will be excited about product launches, live music, and conferences that you’re hosting. They’ll naturally promote these engaging events on their social feeds and will bring more people into the fold.
However, you need to understand how to properly market different types of events before you book a guest speaker or sign up for a family fun day. This will ensure that your brand materials resonate with external stakeholders and will help you build a bigger audience.
1. Researching Your Audience
Before you commit major funds to an event, you need to research your audience thoroughly to ensure your proposed event is a good fit. No amount of marketing can convince folks to attend if they simply aren’t interested in the proposed offering.
Start by researching your competitors. Oftentimes, well-established businesses in your industry have already conducted thorough market research and put together events that they know will resonate with their audience. Save yourself hours of research by following high-performing competitors on social sites and noting down their upcoming events. Pay keen attention to details like:
- Proposed date and time of the event
- Entertainment and freebies on offer
- Price of attendance
- Frequency of advertisements posted
These details will get you started in the right direction when you’re ready to launch your own event.
You can conduct some qualitative and quantitative research of your own, too. Consider, for example, supplying current customers with feedback forms and surveys to find out about their preferences. This can make a world of difference if you’re considering booking a guest speaker or want to host a night of live music at your venue.
Knowing, for example, that your clientele prefers country to pop can help you book an entertainer who will build a buzz around your brand. At Growth Hackers, we helped an event-based brand from Austin, Texas validate audience demand through competitor benchmarking and customer surveys, which improved event attendance rates and reduced wasted ad spend.
2. Setting and Achieving Objectives
After you’ve conducted your audience research and brainstormed some potential events, you need to set some goals. Ideally, these marketing goals should align with wider company goals for the event. For example, if your business’s goal is to generate new leads using events, your marketing goals could be focused on building connections and growing your email list.
Well-established objectives can ensure that your event marketing achieves a positive ROI, too. It’s all too easy to get sucked into buying expensive advertising materials when you want an event to be successful and well-attended. However, you must bear in mind that leaflets, posters, and paid social media advertisements must generate more cash than they cost.
You can boost your ROI, increase your attendance, and build excitement around your event by optimizing your SEO strategy for events. These SEO tips are cost-effective and will help you achieve your event marketing objectives. Get started by:
- Targeting high-traffic, low-competition keywords
- Optimize on-page SEO with meta-tags and title tags
- Build a backlink strategy by contacting influencers and other brands
- Put out press releases that you know will connect with your target audience
These strategies are proven to have a great ROI and will naturally boost metrics like engagement and ticket sales. A robust approach to SEO for event marketing will help you learn more about your attendees and offer a personalized approach to marketing, too.
At Growth Hackers, we worked with a conference organizer in Dubai, UAE who was overspending on ads without clear goals, and after redefining objectives and implementing SEO-focused event marketing, they boosted attendance by 22% while significantly lowering cost per lead.
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3. Venue
Finding a venue for a big event can be a challenge. You’ll need to ensure they have the correct licenses to host your event and should be equipped to handle the influx of people that you’ve invited to your big day.
If you’re planning on hosting an event in the spring, summer, or fall, consider an outdoor venue. Outdoor venues are great for events, as outdoor gatherings come with health benefits like:
- Improved mood
- Increased productivity
- Reduced stress
If you decide to book an outdoor venue, keep a keen eye on the weather. Extreme heat, rain, or wind can scupper your plans quickly. As such, it’s always best to find a flexible venue that offers indoor seating as well as a patio or balcony area for socialization.
Marketing the venue correctly is key. Folks need to know how to get to the proposed venue and should be aware of key details like seating, food provisions, and opening times. You don’t necessarily need to foreground these details in your branded materials, but folks should be able to locate this information easily before they buy a ticket to your event. This will improve communication and help you convert more leads.
4. Branding
It’s important to remember that folks who attend your event want to have a good time and get something of value from the experience. They are not there to be bombarded with branded goods and slogans. As such, it’s best to take a subtle, soft-selling approach when building your brand presence at an event.
Start by ensuring that your team is outfitted properly. Coordinating your style for events reflects well on your company and will help your team feel confident when meeting with customers. As a marketing professional, you’re well within your rights to mandate a dress code category and can help folks who want to create a more professional look for the big event.
If you plan on hosting repeat events, order a few fliers for folks to pick up before they enter the venue. This can boost your early ticket sales, as the people who attend your events are considered highly qualified leads and are more likely to come again if they are aware of upcoming events.
At Growth Hackers, we positioned event branding like background music in a great venue, noticeable but never overpowering, helping a a trade show from Dublin, Ireland increase attendee satisfaction scores.
5. Data Analytics
Effective marketing in the digital age is all about collecting and leveraging data. As an event marketer, you can collect useful data before, during, and after the event. This will empower your decision-making process, reduce risk, and help you learn important lessons for next time.
Start by gathering as much data as possible when selling tickets. Gathering personal data, like age and location, ensures you understand who is attending your events. This can help you build a better buyer persona and tailor your marketing materials to specific groups. Just be sure to follow data-collection best practices to organize your information while avoiding hefty fines and legal fees.
During the event, allow folks to provide feedback. Simple questions, like “How did you hear about the event” can be extremely useful, as you’ll know how to better allocate resources in the future. Consider incentivizing participation by offering freebies to anyone who fills out a questionnaire or survey.
After the event wraps up, keep an eye on key metrics like sales, impressions, and social reach. Hopefully, your event will generate enough interest in your business to create growth across the board. If you notice that your social pages or web presence fails to grow after an event, consider reevaluating your branded materials to ensure that folks know how to reconnect with your business in the days and weeks that follow.
At Growth Hackers, we transformed an event marketing approach for one of our Singapore-based clients from scattered, untracked activity to a fully data-driven system across ticket sales, engagement, and post-event metrics, increasing ROI visibility and improving repeat attendance planning.
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6. Partnering With Other Brands
Building a buzz around your first event can be tricky if you’re a small business. You may not have the reach to sell a lot of tickets and could find it difficult to connect with your audience online. If this is the case, consider partnering with other brands to amplify your reach and connect with potential customers.
Remember to coordinate your marketing efforts with the entertainment you’ve booked, too. Bands, guest speakers, and workshop leaders should be able to promote branded materials on their social pages and websites. This can be a great way to leverage influencer marketing if you’re trying to market an event on a shoestring budget.
Consider reaching out to public relations organizations if you want to publish a press release for a major event. PR professionals have a large network to draw from and should be able to tell you exactly how many contacts your press release will be sent to. This is crucial if you need to market a well-attended event for an opening night or a product launch.
7. Post-Event Debrief
Your work as an event marketer isn’t over after the clean-up is finished and work returns to normal. You need to set aside some time to take stock of the event. This will improve your future event marketing strategies and help you understand the net effect of the event on the business.
When putting together your debrief, try to follow the “What Went Well” and “Even Better If” models (WWW/EBI). The WWW/EBI feedback model is a growth-oriented approach to giving and receiving feedback that increases ownership and builds momentum.
For example, if you noticed a bump in sales but no net gain of followers, you might write a WWW statement like, “The event effectively channeled attendees towards our sales funnel.” You could follow this up with an EBI statement like, “The event would have been even better if we’d promoted our Facebook business page to increase engagement online.”
The WWW/EBI gives you a clear direction for future improvement and ensures you don’t overlook the strengths of your current approach. It will keep morale high, too, as folks are more likely to be enthusiastic about future events if they understand the benefits of hosting musicians and throwing product-release parties.
Final Words on How to Tailor Marketing Events for Maximum Effectiveness
Tailoring your marketing events to your audience and their needs is key if you want to sell lots of tickets and entertain your clientele. Get the ball rolling by researching your industry. This will give you a clear sense of direction when you’re looking to book musicians, guest speakers, or conferences. Remember to follow up after the event with an in-depth debrief, too, as this will improve your future event marketing strategies.
Growth Hackers is an established growth hacking agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners tailor marketing events for maximum influence, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
