Personalization, advocacy marketing, and sustainable content are in. Unoptimized, boring websites, generic emails, and neglecting attendee-generated content are out. We analyzed the latest trends in event marketing to pick the crème de la crème of event promotion tactics and ideas for you to implement at your next event.
Out: Letting your marketing and sales fly solo
One of the first mistakes you can make at the beginning of your event promotion campaign is to exclude your customer-facing teams. If you want to successfully spread the word about your event, make it a team sport, coordinating your marketing and sales teams to work together.
In: Creating group effort for event promotion
A genuinely effective event promotion campaign involves close collaboration between marketing and outreach teams. This collaboration ensures consistent messaging, better targeting, amplified reach, and an enhanced customer experience. Here are a few steps to make this collaboration a success.
🔑 Define key points of communication
Get your teams together to identify your target audience, refine your messaging, establish your positioning, and prioritize your communication channels.
📝 Provide the necessary go-to-market resources
Once your teams are aligned on the value of your event and have developed the key points of your promotional strategy, make it easy for them to promote your event through the designated channels by supplying them with ready-to-go templates, images, and other relevant content.
🏆 Reward success
Make it fun for your teams to drive registrations. Introduce fabulous prizes or benefits for individuals or teams that deliver the best results.
Out: An event website that gives too little (or too much)
The first touch point, the final destination, and a content hub – your event website is all that and one of the most powerful tools to promote your event. That’s why it should be just the combination of great visual design, interactive elements, and functionality.
In: Optimizing your event website
A well-built event website should tick a few boxes, from a user-friendly design to an event hub for information, registrations, and engagement. Here are some elements and practices to make it stand out.
💥 Place CTAs
Ensuring your CTAs are visible and engaging directly correlates with higher registration rates. Consider that 47% of registration buttons on high-converting events appear at the top of an event page.
People trust other people. A tool like an event social wall helps you create a safe and fun space for your audience to engage with your brand and each other and show their excitement for your upcoming event. Embedding a wall highlighting authentic human interactions and excitement into your event website is a great way to drive attendance.
⭐ Related: Social Event Wall: The Future of Virtual Gatherings
🎯 Embrace event retargeting
By targeting ads to people who have previously visited your event website but haven’t yet registered, you can keep your event top-of-mind and encourage them to revisit and complete their registration.
Out: Starting a new gig just for an event
It might be tempting to start a brand new podcast to boost your promotional efforts, but it could also prove a waste of valuable resources since new marketing channels usually need some time to take off and grow an audience. And for an event marketer, time is of the essence.
In: Making the most out of your existing channels
The more innovative move would be to spread the word about your event on platforms with a following. This not only delivers the message to where your audience is, but it also strengthens your brand image.
✍️ Utilize email signatures
An effortless but powerful way to spread the news of your event is to weave it into day-to-day conversations. An act as simple as updating your team’s email signatures with a mention and a link to the event page can make a difference in amplifying your event’s reach.
If social media is your strong suit, create your event promotion campaign around an event hashtag. It will help you track the conversations, harness user-generated content (UGC), and spread awareness.
⭐ Related: Event Hashtag Strategy Guide
🎙️ Blog, podcasts, YouTube shows
If your organization already has a well-established blog, a YouTube series, or a podcast, congratulations—we know it’s hard to get there. Secondly, you can use those platforms to boost your event promotion.
You can add some CTAs to your relevant, popular blog articles, give your event a shoutout at the end of your podcast or video project episodes, or even invest in a series of interviews with event personas.
If you have a local star on your team, a.k.a. someone who’s a trusted expert in the industry, active on his own socials, and has a good following, your event promotion period is a good time to put them in the spotlight.
Out: Brand-centered event promotion
More often than not, event promotion communication takes a one-to-many approach, with brands solely pushing their events and promising a fantastic experience to their audience. However, the message becomes much stronger when more trusted voices join in to advertise the event, amplifying its reach and impact.
In: Advocacy event marketing
There’s no better marketing than people having a positive experience at your event and sharing it with the world. Let your audience speak up for you and become your event ambassadors.
💖 Harness UGC in event promotion
UGC is every marketer’s secret weapon when it comes to crafting authentic campaigns since people are more likely to engage with content that showcases real testimonials rather than purely promotional material.
There are several ways to encourage people to spread the word about your event, from running a UGC contest to offering promo codes to your past attendees and speakers to share their content from the last event they attended.
🤝 Co-market with partners and sponsors
The event promotion period is also a great time to involve your partners, sponsors, and their audiences. Don’t be afraid to get creative and propose exciting co-marketing opportunities, like giveaways or video collaborations, but never forget the basics: provide ready-to-go marketing assets for them to share on their channels.
♻️ Repurpose event content
Reusing content from your previous events is a great sustainable practice that advocates for the quality of your event content and builds excitement for future sessions. From video clips to eye-catching infographics, there are many ways to get creative with content for your event promotion campaign.
⭐ Related: 14 Event Content Repurposing Ideas
Out: Bulk email blasts
These days, flooding people’s inboxes with impersonal marketing emails is considered in poor taste. I don’t know about you, but every generic email in my inbox gets a bombastic side-eye and usually remains unopened. 76% of consumers feel frustrated when they receive impersonal communications.
In: Segmentation and personalization
A solid email marketing strategy helps you deliver the right message to the right people at the right time, boosting the results of your event promotion. Divide your email list into smaller groups based on criteria like demographics, industry, registration stage, or past event attendance. That way, you can tailor your messages to resonate more deeply with different segments of your audience.
Event promotion takes a village
Trends come and go, but one thing stays the same: even in event marketing, people crave authentic experiences and fun opportunities to interact and express themselves.
A successful event promotion campaign involves collaboration with multiple parties, including internal teams, past attendees, speakers, and sponsors. Their collective voices strengthen your message and help to establish a genuine connection between your brand and its audience, effectively addressing all the whys and hows related to registration and attendance.
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