A How-To Guide for Targeted Event Promotion

Promoting an event represents a unique challenge in itself – there are too many different things to plan and execute. Something will always tend to go topsy-turvy as the event date nears, compelling you to make last-minute changes to your plan. And therefore, it is essential to have a well-planned promotion strategy for the event to achieve the desired targets in terms of registrations and walk-ins. Event promotion uses various marketing tactics to generate awareness and buzz around an upcoming event to attract attendance and participation. The following are ways by which you can promote events effectively:

Analyze your Budget

Every event must be organized on a fixed budget, out of which some part would be dedicated to publicizing it. Once you know how much has been allocated for event publicity, you must create a comprehensive plan on how much to spend on different channels. These channels could be both online and offline. The following are some of the most effective channels through which you can promote your event:

Blogging

One of the most effective ways to promote the upcoming event is through blogs. Blogging is essential for two reasons:

• If you already are actively blogging on your website, your website would be ranking high for several keywords. In such a case, you can promote the event blog on your home page and get people to visit the blog page from your home page.
• A blog gives you space to cover in considerable detail the key takeaways the intended audience can hope to gain by attending the event.

Additionally, if the event is conducted regularly (say on a monthly or annual basis), you can always link the blog from your past events to the new blog post. This not only builds internal links but also benefits by:

• Convincing the audience of the value of attending the event
• Giving more pages to offer CTA (like a link to provide contact details as a prospective attendee)

Aside from promoting on your website, you could also consider writing guest blog posts on third-party websites which see regular traffic from your target audience.

Have a strong SEO presence on the event website

Following the above, having an SEO-optimized event website could be another way to generate interest in the event. Unlike your regular website, this would be a website only about the event. The event website can offer far more visuals from past events and share key important happenings and things to look out for at the upcoming event. You will have to adopt the same SEO optimization methods you use for any other website, such as:

• Optimizing on-page elements such as meta tags, alt texts, descriptions
• Making web page designs user-friendly and easy to navigate on mobile
• Target ranking for specific keywords
• Focusing on technical SEO

Emails and Newsletters

Newsletters are a more effective way to communicate with a targeted audience. You can keep sending newsletters with recurring emails reminding the recipients of the upcoming event. You could also create a ‘lead magnet,’ which would help you gain access to details of the people subscribing to your newsletter. This information could then help you segregate your target email recipients into various groups and devise customized promotional emails for each group to focus on those aspects of the event that would appeal the most to the specific groups.

Social Media Promotions

Today, people spend several hours on different social media platforms, be it Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Each of these has a unique importance in marketing – Facebook will pop up a detailed post on the event on your followers’ timeline, while LinkedIn will put it up as a visible-for-all post. Twitter can be a great place to give a short overview of what to expect before you can draw the audience to your blog post. Instagram can help in promoting the event visually. Using a consistent cross-platform hashtag, you could also attempt to get the event to trend organically, thus generating a buzz around the event name. You could use Facebook to re-target ads to users who had visited your website, so sponsor LinkedIn posts or Tweets for greater visibility among your target audience.

Influencer Marketing

One of the most effective modes of marketing today is doing it through influencers. Influencers have a dedicated, loyal follower base and enjoy a high level of trustworthiness. You can try to identify such influencers followed by potential event attendees and get them to promote your event. This can generate interest in the event and, therefore, greater participation.

Referrals

One of the potential target segments that would be most likely to attend your event are people who have participated at the same event or any other event you organized and have left a positive review or rating. You could try to reach out to such people again on a personal level through telecalls to inform them about the event and, if possible, get them to register for the same. Moreover, because they have had positive experiences, they would also be strong word-of-mouth advocates for the event. And you could incentivize the same by offering various discounts or rewards for every referral.

One of the potential target segments that would be most likely to attend your event are people who have participated at the same event or any other event you organized and have left a positive review or rating. You could try to reach out to such people again on a personal level through telecalls to inform them about the event and, if possible, get them to register for the same. Moreover, because they have had positive experiences, they would also be strong word-of-mouth advocates for the event. And you could incentivize the same by offering various discounts or rewards for every referral.

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