The right marketing can ensure you get the largest and most relevant audience for your event. But your marketing efforts shouldn’t stop there — you want to build a buzz and get your registrants engaged and talking before, during and after the event.
Here’s how event managers can achieve just that, regardless of budget or experience:
Start with a great event website
Your event website is the face of your event — it’s the first place your audience looks for information, and where they’ll spend the most time interacting with your brand even before the event starts. Make sure you impress your audience with a sleek, professional-looking website that’s easy to use and navigate. Every detail counts: is the most important information front and centre? Do all links and buttons work? Does it take too many clicks to get to a certain page? Are the fonts scaled correctly and easily readable regardless of web browser? Remember, your website needs to be usable even to the least computer-savvy members of your audience. An unintuitive web experience can cost you valuable registrations.
Here are some of Cvent’s professionally-designed sample event websites for you to check out.
Keep branding consistent
It’s important to maintain consistency across your event promotions and marketing to build brand awareness throughout the event journey and maintain a professional look and feel. Make sure your emails, website, mobile app, and other event materials and communications all share the same fonts, headers, footers, colours and logos. Delegates should be able to recognise at a glance items pertaining to your event.
Use email marketing to engage before, during and after your event
Before you launch your email campaign, consider how you can get the most out of your marketing list — segmenting your invitees into categories allows you to personalise your messages to maximise resonance and response rates.
But don’t just deploy your emails as soon as they’re written; before you hit ‘send’ you want to make sure your emails look appealing and professional no matter what browser or device they’re viewed on.
Furthermore, good email marketing is professional in appearance and deployment. Be careful not to spam your lists or your contacts are likely to unsubscribe. For legal reasons, you should always include the option to unsubscribe at the bottom of all your marketing emails.
Test, measure and optimise for maximum success
Experiment a little to be sure what will work best for you. If you aren’t sure which subject line will grab the most responses or suspect that different wording might boost your conversion rate, test it out on a smaller batch of contacts from your list. Measure open, click-through and response rates, see what works best, and send your final marketing materials to your full list with confidence that you’ll get the best results possible.
Go Social
Social media is a fun and easy way to extend your marketing reach and help build a buzz around your event at little to no cost. Be sure to post your event on Facebook, and promote it on Twitter and LinkedIn. But social media is a two-way street — post topics for your audience to discuss, create contests with prizes and incentives, and encourage as much participation and sharing as possible. This not only spreads the word about your event, but builds the general excitement as well, and starts the audience engagement early.
