Planning and hosting an event is a huge task. From the first idea of doing an event to its execution on the big day, everything about it has to be perfect.
To determine the real value of your event, you must focus on one outcome: the interest and attention of your audience. From a company’s point of view, your product or service is for them, and their interest is the biggest contribution you need. So, to attract your audience’s attention and interest, you need to do effective marketing for it.
For events, we use the term event marketing to let the customers stay aware and be interested in your upcoming event. So, here we briefly explain its importance along with some ideas to market your event optimally.
Why Event Marketing Matters
Using event marketing is as important as hiring an event production company like AV Productions to support events.
It is a strategic process through which you tell the audience that your product is important for them and it has a tangible benefit to them.
You should understand that only posting on social media and sending emails won’t create interest in your customers. Here, event marketing takes the stage and puts effective efforts into play to create awareness, interest, consideration, conversion, and retention from the audience to attend your event. With the correct approach of event marketing, you can even utilise your event ticketing software, make necessary customisation to reflect the theme of your event and promote the event even while selling the ticket. Hence, completing the natural flow of the marketing funnel to draw leads to your product.
By marking these five marketing funnel stages, you can confidently say that your upcoming event will be successful and result-defining for your company and services. So, to make your event successful, invest time and effort into marketing your event.
Steps to Create An Effective Event Marketing Plan
Event marketing is a complete process with its own steps. Each creates a driving force to promote your event and its purpose directly to the audience. By acting on the following steps, you can create an effective event marketing plan and get ready to experience a successful event with beaming interest from the audience.
Set The Event Goals Clearly
Before making any plan, the first step is to identify the goals. Your event has some goals, set those purposes aside on a paper. When we clearly set the goals we want to achieve from the event, the whole marketing plan and its execution becomes very easy.
You need to be clear as to whether you want to generate leads for your products or whether the event is there to introduce and create awareness for the product among your customers. What if your event is a conference where you will discuss ideas?
The main thing is that the purpose of your event highlights the kind of marketing approach you need to adopt to get the best response from the audience. So, write your event goals first and then lay out the marketing plan for it.
Understand Your Audience
What type of audience are you targeting? This is the question that you need to answer to find the right messaging for the event.
Again, the purpose of your event will bring you closer to the attendees you want to fill the venue with. Let’s consider you are holding a conference to introduce and discuss a new product from your company. So, with the intent of the conference, you know that your audience will be industry-specific directors, journalists, your customers, and sponsoring professionals and influencers. With your event’s goals, you can name the right audience for the event. By targeting the right audience, you can achieve the success of your company’s event.
Set A Separate Budget For Event Marketing
Before you put action on the event marketing plan, you must decide the budget bracket for it. Here you have to break down the spending cost on two things: the event and its marketing plan. Your company should have separate budgets allocated for these two things to keep the stream of work coherent.
Your marketing plan would include advertisements, sponsors, and production costs for marketing materials (signages, exhibition stands, content development, merchandiser costs, ambassadors, and giveaway materials). You need to create a budget to spend on the cost and production of these elements. For successful event marketing efforts, a good amount of budget is needed to implement the marketing plan for the upcoming event. To measure the success of your marketing efforts, you can use tools like event ticketing software or cost estimating software to track expenses and evaluate the return on investment for your campaign. By utilizing such specialized software, you can analyze the financial aspects of your event and make data-driven decisions to improve future strategies.
Create A Unique Voice For Your Event
Event marketing is nothing without its unique message. The whole purpose of the marketing strategy is to reach out to the attendees and tell them why your event is important for them to attend. The whole event marketing strategy should be based on that message. So what will your advertised content say?
Tell them the purpose of your event, its need for the industry, and what service and benefit it would bring to the attendees and industry people.
For example, for a launch product event, the tech companies create the themes of the need for a new product, excitement, and easy and futuristic solutions for people. All these subjects create interest and enthusiasm to attend the event and have the best experience of the product by the tech company itself.
When you craft a message based on these questions, your event marketing communication will become clear and effective for the audience to understand. This will entice interest and an intention in them to attend the event.
Create Engaging Content
For marketing, you need to create engaging and interactive content. Event marketing is only successful if you create the message in an engaging manner. You can make promotion content based on the marketing message of the event.
This strategy is very good and works most of the time, but it is not a one-size-fits-all criterion. Your content strategy should match the purpose of the event. For example, for a product launch, a company would take an abstract and show approach to create curiosity and interest among the audience. But for other events like corporate conferences and trade shows, your content should be clear and have important details to create awareness and intent among the attendees.
Pick a strategy and then create the whole content work around it. This will not only give the message to the audience in the right way, but also the event marketing strategy will be effective.
Pick the Right Media Channels
For event marketing, you need to pick the right media channels to do the work for you. Advertising and its channels are the fastest and the most effective way to reach the audience and draw them towards your product or work.
Depending on your budget, keep traditional marketing and digital marketing together for the best results. You can set the strategy and carry out traditional marketing efforts like ads and outdoor advertising. You can use television ads and posters to create awareness about your big day. With this, never forget the power of digital marketing. Using channels like social media, email marketing, paid ads and public relations, you can spread the news of the event and persuade them to join the big day.
Leveraging the power of all media together, you can create effective event marketing efforts and make the audience look forward to your event.
Tap The Power Of Influencers
Influencers are a great way to add spice to the event. These days with social media and the incomings of new trends, the stars of social media have become universal messengers. Any topic of discussion you can name, whenever an influencer picks it up, the discussion reaches to all.
You can invite and make influencers a part of your marketing strategy. They are the bold faces on social media and they can easily promote your upcoming event. The more they engage the event conversation with their followers and on social media, the more chances you have to get a larger audience.
Promote With Action
When you have set all the plans and created all the strategies, it is time to put them into action. The promotion part of your event marketing strategy is very important. You need to carefully market the promotional content across all media in relevance to time.
As a general rule of thumb, start promoting the event at least 1 or 2 months ago so you have enough time for awareness and interest development for the audience. This gives you a consistent edge in promoting the event without coming off as desperate for attention.
Moreover, the timing of the content posting matters greatly, too. Try to post about the event in peak social media hours with 1 or 2 posts, and send at least 2 emails per week to keep the audience hooked and interested about the upcoming event.
You can always adjust the frequency of content with respect to time and trends on social media to promote the event for the better.
Post-Event Strategies To Plan Better For The Future
So, you have created and implemented the event marketing plan. Even if you pulled a good event for your company, you must think that the work is done, but it isn’t quite yet. Like, there are post-event strategies that you need to put your focus on.
Post event strategies mean studying the impact of event marketing efforts and how well they have worked for the event. By tracking the results, you get a clear view of how to make your next strategy better.
Let’s discuss the post-event strategies:
Track KPIs
For every successful marketing campaign, the post strategy work is to study the tangible effects of it. When you implement event marketing strategies, utilizing software built for specific needs can help you measure the steps taken to engage the audience and evaluate their success.
Now note down all the results that your advertising made for the event. All the content that you made, how much engagement it got from the audience. All the emails that you sent to the community, how many people showed up to your event. By noting all these results, you would get the important KPIs.
KPIs tell you what channels and what strategies you need to adopt to make your marketing campaign better for the next time.
Take Feedback From The Audience
After the event, you can still keep your humble efforts going on by asking for feedback from your audience.
You have the information of the attendees and the industry people. Now for a proper follow up, ask them to leave a review of your event. Their review will tell you two things: top performing factors from the event and the area of improvement. These two things will set a better pathway for you to follow for the next marketing campaign and the event.
Wrapping Up
We know that a strategic and result-oriented event marketing plan is the only way to promote the event in the right way. Your marketing plan should include solid strategies and effective practical work to hit the sales targets for the upcoming event. Think carefully about your next event, use the above-mentioned strategies, and play the right marketing game to win the audience for your event.
