Organizing an event requires considerable investment. Roping in the best talent, creating ideal event ambience and putting every other thing at place consumes most of your budget and if this is the case then you are left with little in your purse to allocate for marketing and event promotion.
But you cannot afford to miss out on event promotion as it is imperative to success of your upcoming conference. So how do you maximize your event promotion while working on a tight budget?
The answer lies in online event promotion. If you are wondering how? Then go through these six proven online event promotion tips that fuel your event promotion without ripping you off.
- Use content marketing for promotions-
If you are still banking on advertisements for promoting your events and turning a blind eye on content marketing then you are fighting a lost battle. Content marketing comes with a host of benefits allowing you to market your event online and that too without eating much of your budget.
According to studies, 70% customers prefer articles over advertisements while learning about the company. The same study also found that 63% companies increased their marketing effectiveness by posting content on social media.
Content marketing involves creating relevant and informative content for a specific audience with an aim to drive customer action. Blogs and articles are popular forms of content marketing.
As an event planner, you are aware of the nuts and bolts of your events. Tap this expertise and create few articles on your blog so that customers get to know interesting information about the event. Tell them why they should attend your upcoming conference and create excitement.
Write about speakers to increase curiosity about the event among the attendees. You can talk about past experience of the speakers and give links of their works or can write a simple blog post introducing the speaker to your audiences.
All these contents bring customers closer to you resulting in effective and better event promotion.
- Tap potential of Email marketing-
In the age of Apps and social networking sites, Email still holds its own advantage. Demandwave.com’s survey shows 95% of digital marketing professionals use email marketing for promoting their companies while Getresponse.com found that emails delivered the highest ROI across industries for marketers.
Although the numbers are encouraging, email marketing should be done cautiously. Customers hate spams so ensure your emails do not land in the spam folder. To achieve this feat, focus on personalization and unique content.
Studies have found that emails with personalization have 75% higher open rate than the ones without it. Make sure you deliver unique and relevant information to customers through emails. Send event schedules, interviews of speakers and other details through emails.
Using a reputable email service provider (ESP) is worth spending money on as it prevents your email from landing in the spam folder. Do not forget to write a catchy yet simple subject line that makes customers click on the email.
If you are using images in emails then be careful as according to ExactTarget more than 60% of customers have blocked images by default in their email settings.
Planning your email strategy in advance is critical to the success of your upcoming conference. If you are struggling to find time to focus on email marketing, take help from email marketing tools that manage your campaign without having to open your wallet.
- Have presence on Facebook through event page
As the world’s most popular social networking site, presence on Facebook is imperative to success of your online promotion campaign. Thanks to its 2 billion active users, missing out on Facebook is a heinous crime for an online marketer.
Creating an event page is the best way to utilize Facebook to foster your event promotion. An event page lets you share event content such as pictures, events, articles, and location details with customers quickly and the best part? You get to do all this without spending a dime! (You may pay for additional advertisement)
As your customers like and share content posted on your event page, your event information gets circulated on Facebook resulting in creation of a buzz. You can also invite your friends and followers to your event through the Facebook event page. Facebook notifies users about events which their friends are attending and it results in increasing the footfall.
A valuable benefit of Facebook event page is the ‘Attendance Metrics’. This tool lets you track the headcounts and also provides insights on the people who declined your event invitation. Through these tools you understand demographics of your customers and gain useful information.
Facebook events page spreads the word about your upcoming conference, lets you connect with your customers and offers important customer related information. And you receive all these perks through a simple and quick process and with no or little investment.
- Embrace Infographics for social media-
Nobody likes to read plain text. Humans love visuals and are attracted more towards images than texts. Studies show that 40% of people respond better to visuals than plain texts. Infographics exploit this psychological fact to garner consumer attention.
Infographics is the next step in content marketing as it fuses text with images to create an appealing and engaging form of content that attracts people. Popularity of infographics is on the rise on internet and is evident by the fact that from 2015 to 2016, use of Infographics for online marketing rose from 50% to 58%.
While promoting your upcoming conference on social media create infographics that showcase positive benefits of your event. You can include intriguing statistics related to the event theme in the infographics. But remember infographics are simple and cannot be cramped with too much content. So, use words cautiously.
Creating infographics isn’t a rocket science thanks to the plethora of online tools available. With help of these free and cheap online tools, you can create an engaging infographic for your event promotion in no time.
- Play the ‘social proof’ tactic-
Humans look at other people’s actions while deciding on the correct choice in a given situation. Doing what others are doing is a natural human behavior and this psychological phenomena is been exploited by marketers since years.
Several tickets booking sites show the number of tickets already sold while product advertisements mention the number of consumers who have already bought that product. These tactics create an impression in consumer’s mind that the service is already popular and it pushes them in buying it.
Keep updating the number of attendees in real time on your online events page to reflect growing popularity of your event. Also show the number of remaining seats available in the ‘call to action’ section to create a sense of urgency to buy for your customers.
- Utilize power of your existing network-
Why not make use of your existing network while promoting your upcoming conference online?
You may have a person with a highly influencing power in your social network and the only way of figuring it out is by reaching out to them. Ask your friends, collogues, past vendors and sponsors to share your event details.
While making contracts with event guests and stakeholders add a claim that requires them to share event details through messages. This cross-promotion fuels event publicity and helps in reaching out to various target audiences.
Tweets, Facebook posts and emails sent by your team members, guests and stakeholders opens up unique channels for connecting with customers and as these updates come from people they know, possibility of positive customer action is more.
Tapping power of existing network is crucial in online event promotion as it fosters publicity without any spending.
Online event promotion works wonders if done effectively. The tremendous potential of online world can be tapped successfully by weaving a neat and judicious event promotion strategy. Utilizing these above listed six tools help in channeling online world’s power and prevents your budget from swelling.
