9 must-know marketing secrets for successful events

No matter how strong your event concept, design, or key message, you won’t be able to create the kind of impact you want with your event if you’re speaking to an empty room. Whether you’re launching a product, hosting an incentive trip, a networking event or a conference, you need to persuade the right people to be in the room with you, and keep engaged with the core messages of your event. 

The way to achieve this? 

Effective event marketing.

Let’s take a look at 9 of our First Event must-know marketing secrets for creating a successful event that gets the right people in the room and keeps them engaged with your event objectives. 

1. Know your audience 

You want these people in the room because ultimately, you think you’ve got the product, service or opportunity that will solve their problems. Invest the time in getting to know your audience, their likes, dislikes, habits and pain points. Once you’ve got a clear overview of the issues that matter to your attendees, you’ll know which topics and themes you’ll need to be covering throughout your marketing and communications. 

2. Market in the places where your audience will be

As well as understanding the topics and challenges that are important to your audience, it’s important to market to them in the spaces and platforms where you know they operate. There’s no point crafting an Instagram content campaign if you know your attendees are mostly professionals who spend their time on LinkedIn. Having a solid understanding of your key audience, their habits and interests will make it easier to tailor content that’s going to engage them with your event message. 

3. Keep the benefits clear and simple

When communicating why attendees simply HAVE to be at your event, you need to keep the quick wins of attendance clear and quick to understand. You only have a handful of seconds each time a potential attendee interacts with your marketing touchpoints, so you need to be crystal clear on exactly what they’re going to get in exchange for investing their time (and sometimes money) with your event. 

4. Spice up your call to actions

Rather than just ‘join here’ or ‘sign up here’ at the end of your emails or social posts, shake up the language you’re using to get people to click through to find out more about your event. You could opt for an action led approach, such as “I’m ready to network”, or add a dash of FOMO by hinting at how fast your tickets are selling “only 5 tickets left” or “2 days left on early bird deal”. The call to action is the hook that’s going to convince attendees that your event is worth it, so get creative when it comes to crafting the language that gets them there. 

5. Check your touchpoints: are you speaking to your audience in enough different places? 

It’s estimated that you need a minimum of 8 touchpoints with a prospective attendee in order to get them over the line and keep them engaged with your event. This can range from seeing a social media post to reading an article or press release, or receiving an email. Wherever you’ve decided to interact with your target audience, you need to carefully consider what nudges you need to be making to send your attendees further down the conversion funnel.

6. Grab the attention of everyone, even those that are required to be in the room

Even at events where attendance is compulsory, such as company away days or internal events, this is arguably where event marketing is more important than ever. When attendees know the decision regarding their event attendance has been made, they can disengage and only think about the event again when it’s time to head to the venue or log on to the livestream. Keep them engaged by sending them updates about speaker sessions, top tips for making the most of the event, or hinting at some of the activities and gamified elements they can get involved with at your event. 

7. Eshot and email campaigns 

Email marketing is becoming quickly regarded among marketeers as the secret weapon for engaging potential customers. An expertly crafted email campaign not only allows you to speak directly to your target audience, but you can track important insights such as open rate and click rate, to find out what kind of content is gaining traction with your audience. However, the key to creating a winning eshot is keeping things short and snappy. Your attendees have a busy inbox, so your subject line and content needs to be engaging from the get go.

8. Create an event hashtag

Particularly for public facing events, getting people in the room is all about creating an online buzz. A great way to do this is with an event hashtag. This is a chance to really get creative and send a clear message about your event, its values and identity. Not only is a hashtag a great way to get people in the room in the first place, it can keep the online conversation around your event going during and after the event too. Attendees and interested parties can search across social media channels for your hashtag to quickly see the highlights and takeaways from your event.

9. Make your tickets easy to find and easy to buy 

Once you’ve convinced potential attendees that they need to come to your event, you need to make the last step of the sign up process as easy as possible. All of this can be clearly housed in a bespoke event website. By creating a bespoke website you can customise the platform to fit the needs of your attendees and market the key benefits of attending your event. 
Want to find out more about how our marketing experts can use their trade secrets to create a successful event? Get in touch with the team today!