Promoting your business will be easier to highlight if you connect them to a big event. Are you moving to a new space, opening a new office, or starting a new product line? These events will be easier to draw attention to if they’re tied to a new feature. Make these events part of your expansion planning. Read on for 6 event marketing strategies and ideas.
1) Make Registration Easy
If signing up for your event is a frustrating challenge, you may get hard-core participants but few others. Keeping your business name, website, and phone as visible as possible is critical to pre-engaging with your attendees. During registration, make sure you gather names, numbers, and email addresses.
2) Send Smart Reminders
To that end, share reminders sparingly. If you are bringing in a guest speaker, get their expertise on your website in a blog post or a video and share this via email with your attendees and possible attendees once and only in one format. Overloading attendees and interested parties can be a serious turn-off if folks feel overwhelmed.
Once people are registered, consider sending texts letting booked attendees know
- where to park
- where to get a great lunch or coffee
- what traffic to expect at the venue
The physicals of attendance should also be sent as a pdf attachment in the email confirming registration. Finally, send a final reminder the week before the event with a link to the same information so your attendees can safely get to the venue.
3) Draw The Eye
If you own a car dealership and are expanding your offerings, eye-catching tools like feather flags can bring in street traffic. If you’re making a big change in your offerings or your branding, make sure you also update your
- letterhead
- signage
- color scheme
Consider putting ads in your local paper and if you can get the room, make it a color advertisement. Add a promotional line to your invoices before you mail them out, print up tiny labels to add to all outgoing envelopes, and consider mailing out a promotional card specific to your event as soon as registration is open.
4) Create a Virtual Banner
As you work on your physical color scheme and promotional designs, consider updating your website. At the very least, add a banner reminder to your website with a link to the registration. Make it possible to register from your app or your phone as well as on a laptop or a desktop. Right-sizing these changes can be a challenge; get your website designer in the loop as soon as you have an event in mind.
5) Check Your SEO
You may be a known power and respected expert in your industry, but if you want to draw in people from peripheral industries you will need to get your search terms checked out and vetted. Using paid ads can be a wonderful way to promote your big event, but paying for advertising without updating your promotional language may be a waste of your advertising dollars.
You must get out of the fishbowl of your industry to review your promotional and advertising language, especially if you wrote it. Just as it is nearly impossible to edit your own narrative, it is very difficult to understand how challenging your jargon can be. Consider bringing in an SEO specialist from another industry entirely to review your promotional text before it goes into an ad.
6) Consider Social Media
Promoting your business and event on social media may be a challenge if you don’t have a social media manager. For highly technical industries, the risk of proprietary data loss can be so extreme that you may never have even considered setting up a social media account.
However, the key to a healthy social media promotion is people, not information. If you have a blogger or a set of freelancers who create your blog posts, ask your social media manager to put together short posts from these blogs to share information about the people who work for you and the communities you serve. The specific technology of what you do can be protected; the people you help can promote your event.
Recent world events have made it hard to gather as a community of professionals. Hosting a big promotional event at your venue may feel overwhelming. Do your best to register attendees to best manage the numbers and provide optimum chances for learning.
