Whether your event management is focused on conferences and trade shows, music and sporting events, or anything else, all events have something in common; a drive to engage and entertain their attendees.
Though certain nuances like social media platforms and content types can vary wildly from one kind of event to another, there’s a number of universal principles that can be applied across all event marketing strategies. By understanding and applying these methods, you’ll not only drive up attendance and fortify your brand equity, but also enrich the experience of your target audience, from the moment the event is announced right up to the doors closing.
In this post, we’ll look at three out of six of the best digital marketing strategies you should be using to help promote your next event.
Define/Redefine your KPIs
For many event management professionals, one of the best things you can do for your overall digital marketing is to go back to basics, and review the core objectives that drive your digital marketing efforts in the first place.
Any marketing campaign is only as effective as your ability to verify its impact. While it may take resources away from more immediate, hands-on tasks, taking a proactive approach to your KPIs can work wonders for seeing a campaign’s realtime effectiveness, and give you powerful insights unique to your business and audience, which you can then use in your future campaigns.
According to leading events and meetings journal Skift, only 61% of event professionals measure according to their specific event objectives. If you make yourself part of the remaining 39%, you’re going to have a huge competitive advantage as you continually experiment and hone your marketing tactics.
Obviously, if you try to measure every little facet of your campaign’s performance, you’re only going to make it harder to draw actionable insights. Take steps to ensure the KPIs you focus on feed into the broader goals of your business, that they’re objectively measurable, and that you’re avoiding any vanity metrics that may find their way into the mix.
Map Out an Effective Social Media Calendar
In 2022, if an event is promoted on social media, it might as well not exist.
Once a date is set for your event, you should be mapping out a comprehensive social media calendar that will effectively promote your event, driving up attendance and helping you hit those KPI targets.
Every major social media platform comes with countless tools you can use to promote an event. Make sure you’re researching them thoroughly and narrowing down on the tools that will resonate the most with your audience.
Instagram countdown stickers showing the time left until your event starts, Facebook event pages that give guests all the info they need in one centralized place, and Twitter teasers can all go a long way in generating buzz around your event.
While it’s good to have a social media strategy that covers a lot of bases, you should make sure the way you distribute resources across different platforms according to the audience your event caters for. If you’re putting on a marketing conference, you’re likely to get much better results from posting on LinkedIn than on TikTok!
However you distribute your resources, make sure your posting schedule for each platform is nice and steady, and aligned with your close competitors. If your audience starts to feel suffocated by a constant barrage of marketing messages, then you may only serve to send them rushing for the “unfollow” button.
Revisit your Event Website’s SEO
Though event marketing and social media certainly have a cozy relationship, make sure you’re not neglecting the core of your digital assets: your event website.
Well-executed search engine optimization can be an exceptionally powerful tool for drawing engagement from segments of your audience who aren’t all that dialed-in to your digital brand. By revisiting and re-optimizing your event site’s SEO, you’ll be able to put your event in front of the more adventurous attendees, who may have never heard of you but search Google using terms like “marketing conferences/neo soul concerts/art lectures near me”.
Simple changes like making sure all the key details of your event are available as text on the homepage, ensuring that images and videos are accessible to Google’s crawlers and optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions with the right keywords, can all go a long way in boosting visibility and traffic for your event site.
As you go about reviewing how search engine-friendly your site is, make sure you’re not forgetting the human in the equation. For several years, Google’s algorithm updates have shown a trend of prioritizing user experience (UX). Make sure that optimizing the more technical aspects of your SEO work doesn’t get in the way of a positive experience for your users. KAU Media Group supports this by stating that, “a poorly laid out website with poor functionality that is hard to purchase from is not going to inspire people to use it”.
Part 1 in Digital Marketing Strategies to Help Promote Your Next Event. Keep your eyes open for Part 2.
Daniel Groves is a business growth strategist and author, constantly developing his knowledge and sharing his experience with like-minded entrepreneurs, business owners, and event growth strategists. Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn: danielgroves90
