Using digital marketing channels can help you achieve more registrations than ever for your events. For events businesses, content marketing, social media management and inbound marketing tactics can give your events greater reach, attract new audiences and improve your user experience.
Here are five easy ways to digitise your events marketing and use online channels to generate more business.
1) Think Strategically
Let’s think not in general terms of raising brand awareness, although this is part of a successful event strategy, but in terms of how to get more registrations. This should be your end goal and the benchmark by which all your activities are judged, whether you are engaging in competitor research, content marketing or email promotions.
Create a bespoke strategy that sets out how you will use each digital marketing channel for the best effect. Understand your target market. What is their demographic profile? What industries do they work in? What pressures are they under at work? How much do they take home, and how do they like to spend it? All these questions are relevant, because even B2B marketing is ultimately about people. It is people, not companies, who make the purchase decisions, and so a core part of your marketing strategy is to understand their motivations.
The more you understand the people who attend your events, the better placed you will be to create relevant content to draw them in.
2) Write Relevant Blog Articles
People attend your events in order to bring away something useful that will make their life easier and their job more successful. Your blog, and your content strategy in general, can supplement this by giving your audience a taste of the value they can expect from attending the events themselves.
Events companies have a wealth of material to write articles about. You can feature interviews with your keynote speakers, write visitor’s guides for the cities where your events are being held, give advice on the best hotels, and provide in-depth analysis of the topics covered in your events. Embedded in each article should be convincing calls to action that encourage the reader to register for the relevant event. Write, write, write - and then share your blog posts on social media and through email marketing.
Write bespoke content for each of your target customer profiles, so each reader will take away content relevant to them personally.
3) Use Videos
Videos are a fantastic way of marketing events, and thanks to YouTube and Facebook, it has never been easier (or cheaper) to reach a big audience. You can upload live streams or highlights of your events to your YouTube channel, embed the links into your blog and share them through Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also host videos directly through Facebook, including live streams. Twitter is great for video marketing too. Try hosting live Q&A sessions or exclusive on the spot interviews after your events.
4) Automate Your Content Calendar
Marketing automation is an event manager’s dream come true. Once you know your event schedule for the coming year, you can create a content calendar with planned blogs, social media updates, E-shots, webinars and videos. By using automation platforms such as Hubspot, or free apps like HootSuite and Mailchimp, you can plan your content to reach your audience in the days and weeks leading up to your event. This helps to generate a buzz around each event while taking a lot of the labour out of routine marketing tasks.
5) Use Analytics
Learning from past events is the best way to improve your future performance. Analytics are your friend here. Use a good analytics package to measure all of your digital marketing activities. Assess what worked and what didn’t. Discover which video had the most shares and what blog content had the most impact on your target audience. What sort of content correlated best with an increase in registrations? Getting under the skin of this information will help you to strategise better, to shed tactics that don’t work as well, and to increase the performance of your marketing content.
Events businesses can use social media, marketing automation and content marketing to achieve a noticeable increase in registrations in a comparatively short time – all at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. For business development advice tailored to the needs of your business, give our team a call today. We can help you develop a strategy that will increase your online visibility and raise the profile of your events.
