Planning an event takes months of hard work. The hard work doesn’t end once the agenda is planned and the venue is booked.
The event is not going to promote itself.
Once the event foundation is built, it’s time to shift gears to marketing. Creating a strategic marketing plan is vital to getting the word out, promoting the event and building buzz. Like a major motion picture, an event needs a strong marketing strategy to ensure its success.
Spending time up front to map out a plan will help keep you on track to make sure you hit your revenue and attendance goals.
Here are 5 steps to create your event marketing strategy:
Define Your Goals for the Event
Identifying your goals for the event upfront will streamline the planning process and keep you on track as you move forward.
What are your goals for the event?
Goals can range from big picture items like building awareness for your organization to more specific goals like increasing attendance by 20%. Other goals may include:
Increase sponsorship by x percent or revenue
Generate X dollars in fundraising
Build awareness for organization
Showcase thought leadership
Build partnerships with community, clients, partners, sponsors, donors
Spend a few minutes to map this out. It will guide your marketing strategy and serve as a benchmark to evaluate the event’s success once it is over.
Audience
Who is the audience you’re trying to reach? You probably have an avatar of your clients, but it may be different from your event attendee. Create a separate avatar for your ideal audience participant to identify their top concerns or challenges; why would they attend and how will they benefit from attending the event.
By creating a clear picture of your audience you can tailor your event content, message and experience to best support them.
Design Your Event Website
In order to promote the event, you need to have a central hub where you can direct attendees to view the details and register. Begin by writing a description of the event that highlights the benefits of attending and what people will gain by attending. How will this event help them? What is the format? What is the agenda for the day?
Create a Marketing Calendar
Depending on the size of the event, you should begin marketing 2-6 months in advance of the event.
A marketing calendar outlines the marketing initiatives pre-event, for the launch and leading up to the event, and any post-event follow up. It captures the message or theme of the promotion, date it will be sent and platform it will be shared on.
Decide how often you will promote the event and through which channels. For example, will you send an email to your newsletter subscribers or post the information on social media? Write down each marketing piece on a calendar to indicate the date you plan to send it out.
Having a plan mapped out will keep you organized and help to track registration and revenue goals.
Do you need help with your marketing strategy for 2021-22? We’d love to help! Schedule a time for us to meet. Whether we give you some quick tips, or you need more in-depth help, you’ll walk away with valuable ideas.