Event marketing is more or less an intimidating task. This is because it covers a wide range of disciplines which demand co-ordination across multiple teams inside an organization. However, if you have the right set of tools as well as strategies, it is certain that you embrace success in your endeavor.

Pre-event Marketing – Is it Worth the Effort?

Before you jumpstart your promotional initiatives regarding event marketing, it is essential to ensure that you are well aware of your goals – for some, it might be generating ticket sales while for others it might be creating a general buzz. However, for most of the people, these two aspects are of equal importance. Regardless of the goals, they need to be set in advance to make it a success and further, you need to ensure that the goals are well understood by each team taking part in the marketing campaign.

The next important thing to consider is to think of methods to determine whether your approach aligns well with the goals. For this purpose, you need to measure your performance and make necessary changes if required. Some of the things which could be measured include the e-mail click-through rates, social media impressions, paid ad performance, user engagement rates, and so on. Above all, it is crucial to know who you are planning to target for your promotional activities. Apart from concentrating your marketing efforts on the existing clients, it would be ideal to invite future prospects, partners, influencers, and the like for this purpose. Further, by utilizing the already available audience, it is possible to discover the right kind of people to whom you can channel the promotions related to social ads. This method helps you to locate the exact group without wasting your budget or other resources on the wrong people.

After your objectives and measurements have been set, now it is time to flag off your event marketing plan. In fact, it would be advisable to adopt a multi-faceted approach here which implies using different marketing channels for promoting the event. Some of these are listed below:

Email Marketing

It would be better to think of a communication plan and develop an email marketing strategy in advance to ensure guaranteed success. In fact, you are required to send different kinds of emails in order to attract the attention of the specific type of audience.

Public Relations (PR)

People usually give too much attention to the various digital marketing channels that they tend to forget the conventional methods which stood the test of time like public relations. It would be ideal if you assign the responsibility of generating awareness about the event to your PR team by means of media alerts or event listings in different newsletters and business journals.

Social Media

It is important to make sure that you allocate an exclusive hashtag for your event for the purpose of promoting it on the social media. Here you can use appealing videos, visuals, animations, etc. to capture the attention of the audience to your promotion-related tweets. Further, pinning posts also evokes good response.

Today, a majority of the companies make use of social media to publish big announcements in order to generate buzz for the event like agenda updates, new speakers, special events, and many such. Further, you can also utilize the power of paid social ads to increase awareness about the event.

Direct Mail

As digital marketing strategies have occupied the place of traditional methods in the world today, many ignore age-old tactics such as sending direct mail to the intended people. In fact, along with sending email invitations and conducting promotions through social media, you can try out using the direct mail strategy to send invitations to the VIPs. Here you could use some special theme or include a discount offer for tickets to make a difference.

Website

An attractive website is quite crucial for event marketing purposes. In other words, it should act as the central point for all information pertaining to the event. Further, you can direct all the promotional activities to this website and ensure that there is complete information about the event like detailed agenda, hotel and transport details, speakers, etc. in order to generate ticket sales.

Reaching out to Various Publications, Media, and Blogs

Reaching out to local blogs, various publications, and media sources is a tactic which is overlooked in most of the cases. However, this strategy generates great returns in the form of extra coverage and support for your event. In fact, you can get an entire piece of featured content done for your event as well. However, you need to do additional homework to get the media attention at the first place itself. For this purpose, you can make a list of the media publications who are willing to cover your event.

Micro-influencers

A micro-influencer can be defined as somebody who is very much active on various social media channels, and who is readily willing to market your product or service. Though they have a modest fan following ranging in some thousands, when compared to celebrity influencers, they are quite popular and generally have a hyper-active audience with specific interests covering certain verticals. It would be a good idea to create a list of micro-influencers who align very well with the objectives and vision of your event, and start interacting with them to make the most out of it.

Capitalizing on Your Existing Marketing Initiatives

It is essential to capitalize on the existing marketing campaign concerning the promotion of your event. For this purpose, you can include slides pertaining to information regarding your event to webinars. In this way, you can gather a relevant audience who is genuinely interested in the event and also, in other activities in which your company is involved. Further, if you maintain a blog, you can dedicate a few posts for the promotion of the event. In addition, if you are planning to attend other events during this period, you can spread word about your event in the same and encourage people to attend it. Here, you can go an extra mile and allow a few sneak peaks of the event agenda to create a buzz around it. If you are in the habit of sending newsletters on a regular basis, ensure that your event is highlighted in the same. Also, you can request your partners to lend a helping hand in promoting your event on their social media profiles as well as email lists.

Promotional Activities during the Event

Finally your event is here and you have a whole bunch of eager attendees on the venue. However, your activities does not end here, and you are required to continue with your event marketing operations throughout the event to keep the excitement going. For those people who are unable to attend the event and still are interested to know what is going on, there are many ways to keep them engaged so that they would be more than willing to attend the next event. Some of these tactics are listed below:

Live Tweets

It is essential to employ community managers to tweet the happenings of the event on a constant basis. In fact, they should serve as the eyes and ears on the venue and provide reports about the event on various social media channels. Further, providing videos and pictures of the event is highly recommended to enhance the presence and engage the audience even further. Also, you could ask the audience to share it on their social media profiles with the help of the specific hashtag.

Live Blog

It is quite effective to maintain a live blog of the ongoing event. Many companies assign writers the task of covering the entire session of the event and keep the audience updated by means of a live blog. This helps to enhance the relevance of the event on that particular day and could also be used as a strong promotional tool for the upcoming events.

Live Stream

You can move a step further and live stream the entire content pertaining to the event. By this way, you can provide valuable insights about the event to those who were not able to make it. In fact, they will relish this experience when they contemplate about the next event.

Post-event Marketing

Though the event is over, your work still remains incomplete. In fact, you can take a stock of all the marketing activities concerned with the event and close it in such a way as to use it in the future events. In fact, during the event you may have had the chance to get hold of a huge collection of videos, photos, testimonials, feedback, etc. All these stuff could be compiled into a fresh promotional tool which could prove to be useful for the next event. Moreover, you can organize the relevant blog posts and tweets to support your testimonials in the future. In other words, make a list of every stuff which could provide additional strength for your future campaigns.

To conclude, event promotion is more or less a mammoth task which spans multiple disciplines and that which require a lot of strategic thinking. However, if you follow the guidelines in the right manner during the entire event marketing process, success is sure and certain.