5 THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHEN PROMOTING EVENTS

Why Most People Who Run Events Don’t Invest Enough Time Or Money Into Promoting Them.

For most of us, when it comes to our event experience, we have always been the passengers. This means is we only remember our event experience from the time we've invested in a ticket. We remember getting the ticket, remember getting to the event, we remember the event experience. We remember the learning and the teaching that we've had. We remember whether we had fun, we remember even if the food was good or if it was bad, but what we don't remember is what empowered us or enabled us or prompted us to buy the ticket in the first place. This leaves us unprepared for thinking about our own event promotion strategies.

Did you know that statistically only about 20% of emails are opened and only about 7% of what we post is seen by other people in their newsfeed? What that means is simply setting up a ticket, sending an email and doing some posts about our event is just not enough.

5 Things To Think About When Promoting Events:

Where is my audience?

Let's think about where is our ideal audience? Are they on Facebook are they on LinkedIn are they on Instagram or are they down the street from us? Maybe, they are clients of our ideal partners? Once we have delved down and understood where our ideal audience is we're able to position our promotional strategy in front of them.

What is my audience looking for?

Now that we know where they are, we must understand what they are looking for. Are they looking to have fun? Are they looking to us to listen to their problem?

Are they looking to simply reengage and reconnect and network? First, understand what your ideal client is looking for and then create an event and a proposition that will really answer this question. Knowing this means we can create the right type of event and the right type of event description to engage our ideal audience to want to interact with us and come to our events. 

How can I reach my audience?

Once we know who our ideal audience is and we know what they're looking for we can look at how we actually reach them. What's going to give us the cut through? How do we get directly in front of our ideal audience? We do this by implementing a multi-platform marketing strategy; Social media, email, face-to-face interactions and through partnering with others.

Where are they in their purchase decision cycle?

If they are at the very start of the cycle, what's known as an unaware market space, then the best communication is: why this event and who it's for?

If they aren't aware of who we are, talking about the nuts and bolts of our event is the wrong type of conversation. Once we’ve got them engaged, then we can delve further into our content and our copy through a telephone conversation or through an email campaign. Remember; really understand the buying cycle of your ideal audience so that we’re able to communicate the right type of message at the right time.

How many times will my ideal audience see my event promoted BEFORE they make a purchase decision?

This is the final and the most important point. We have been told that to make a purchase decision, we need to have 11 touch points across seven platforms. Ask yourself, am I doing that? Because I can tell you that putting up a link, setting up an event page, doing a post and sending an email is not making 11 touch points across seven platforms.

In the event marketing process, we have very limited time to get people engaged. This means making sure that we are hammering our event promotion as much as possible.

Many of my clients tend to really dislike this idea. They don't want to annoy people that don't want to upset people. However, if we have invested the time to understand our deal audience, understand where our audience is, exactly what they're looking for and how we can reach them. We understand what platform they are on and where they are in their buying cycle and communicate accordingly we stop people getting annoyed and instead convert people to purchase and say thank you. 

We Are In The Business Of Solving Problems For Our Ideal Clients

If we know who our ideal clients are, we know what they're looking for, we’re really solving a problem then we’re reaching them and we’re getting cut through. We are solving their problem. We understand their wants and their needs. We’re making sure that we really do hit those people, multiple times across multiple platforms and really connecting to empower them and encourage them to make that purchase decision. Our promotion efforts are slowly prompting people to make their decision because we know that what we’re going to give them is going to be valuable.