Looking for a way to revitalize how you promote your events? Look no further – here are a few of the most promising strategies of to try now.

Running a successful event is about more than what you do on the show floor. It’s about what you do before and after, as well. How effectively you promote a trade show or conference is arguably as much a factor in whether it flies or flops as vendors, keynote speakers, or presentations – maybe more-so.

With that in mind, let’s go over some of the biggest trends in event promotion emerging this year – and how you can tap into each with a successful strategy to bring your event to more eyes than ever before.

By now, everyone knows that they need to be on social. Promoting your events on Facebook or live-tweeting a keynote is table stakes in 2018. This year, why not take things a little further?

After all, recent changes to social algorithms are going to make it more difficult than ever to reach your target audience. Posts that don’t immediately inspire deep engagement are likely to get lost in the digital noise of the social web. As such, in order to stand out, you’re going to need to get creative in how you engage your audience.

Promote your event while it’s going on with Instagram stories, and save the best ones to your instagram account. Make smart use of influencer marketing (find people with pull who are into your events, and inspire them to promote for you). Consider hosting livestreams of your event or live Q&As on sites like Twitch TV.

The trick is that you need to start using social media in the same way your attendees do – it’s no longer enough to use it like an event planner, you need to start using it like an attendee.

You might be surprised to see email on this list. After all, it’s an archaic medium, isn’t it? What good is it for event promotion? You might be surprised.

I don’t think I’d be remiss in saying that you’ve probably planned most of your events via email. You probably have a ton of emails from vendors, clients, and sponsors sitting in your inbox at this very moment. And even if that statement is inaccurate, the vast majority of people still check their email accounts every single day.

Creating intelligently-targeted, personalized promotional emails to people who have signed up for an event or signed on for a mailing list can be a great way to increase engagement and encourage more people to attend. And when I say personalized, I mean deeply so – your email lists should be segmented as much as possible, separated by anything from interests to location to age.

Just make sure you make unsubscribing from such lists both easy and intuitive, or you’re bound to generate more frustration than engagement.

Also referred to as engagement marketing, experential marketing encourages its audience to directly participate in the evolution of a brand (or in this case, of an event). Rather than looking upon your attendees as passive participants, it looks at them as part of the event itself. It gives them a direct, active role in shaping their event experience.

What that means depends largely on you. Maybe you’ll allow people direct input on what keynotes and presentations to include as part of your promotional efforts. Maybe you’ll include virtual reality or augmented reality on your event floor.

The important thing is to give your attendees agency over how they experience your event – and to make it clear from the start that they have such agency.

The biggest challenge facing event planners (and businesses in general) is reach. There are so many different businesses and brands vying for our attention online these days that it’s a wonder any of them get through to us. This is one of the biggest challenges in event promotion – but it’s also one of the most promising opportunities.

As part of your promotional efforts, you need to decentralize. Extend your reach beyond a social media page or event website. Start posting about your event on promotional apps and websites like Goldstar. The key is to allow attendees to find out about your event through as many channels as possible – and to let them purchase tickets the instant they find out about the event.

Promotion is as much a part of your job as event management, like it or not. That’s why you need to be aware of emerging trends – and aware of how best to tap into them. Because if you don’t know how to promote your event, it doesn’t matter how great it is. No one will know about it.

Brad Wayland is the Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCotton, a site with high-quality, easy-to-design custom t-shirts.

 ROI (Return on Investment) is described as measuring the gain or loss generated from an investment, usually relative to the amount of money spent, and shown as a percentage – the higher the better.  

When organising an event, ROI isn’t as simple as calculating amount spent vs revenue. There are many different ways to measure the success, particularly if you are organising a free-to-attend event.  

The first thing to focus on are the goals of the event.  Why is the event being organised? Who is the audience? It is imperative to prioritize the objectives before deciding the ways to measure event ROI, as different methods will increase the chance of getting the data you need.

Some data to be measured at your event may include:

Here are four effective ways to measure the impact of your event, and how your results are measuring up against your objectives:

Social media has become increasingly essential to event marketing.  Not only is social media needed for event promotion, it is also a valuable way to measure ROI, and gauge reaction online.  You can track the number of attendees who are talking about your event before, during and afterwards – paying attention to positive and negative comments – which is a quick and easy way to measure the impact of your event and troubleshoot issues.  Creating an event hashtag can further increase the ability to track your impact, making it easier to see what people are saying online.  

Social media listening boards like Hootsuite and Google Alerts can be used to help gather some information such as the number of shares, likes or mentions and great ways to collect comments about the event all in one place.

Event surveys continue to be a great source of information to measure ROI. Due to the improvement in event technology it’s no longer a piece of paper that gets handed out and rarely returned!  

Surveys can be emailed out to attendees after the event is finished, and are a great way to find out how attendees felt about specific parts of the programme, and even better if sent out as soon as the event has finished whilst the content is still fresh in their minds.  A good way to encourage feedback to be submitted is to provide an incentive for attendees to fill the survey in, such as a discount off next year’s registration, or a link and password to event photos.An alternative way to encourage attendees to share their immediate thoughts is to send out the survey link to them during the event itself.  (Tip: Attendease has integrated survey capabilities on their platform!).

Good survey design is crucial – make sure the questions you are asking directly relate to the data you are measuring. As well, the metrics that come with the survey, such as time on page or open rate give an indication of attendee engagement. It all ads up to data that indicate who might be a qualified leads and worth pursuing for next time.

This is a simple way to measure success of an event – compare the number of attendees registered to last year. This data indicates how effective your marketing has been prior to the event and the higher the number of attendees, the higher the chance of a positive ROI. Tracking registration data also will indicate where people heard about your event, what sector they come from, and other data that can provide prospect profile intel.

Event badges are much more than a way to let others know your name. Smart badges are a registration tool that can be used to enhance the attendee experience and capture ROI metrics.  For multi-session events, barcoded badges facilitate attendees checking in and out of different workstreams. Event management software makes it easy for attendees to connect with others – exchanging information without having to hand out a business card.

Badge metrics can be used to analyze busier areas and times at an event, monitor connections made between attendees, and quickly track how many people are onsite – all of which help determine how engaged attendees are, leading to understanding event ROI.

There are multiple techniques to measure event ROI and those described above are a just a few to consider during the event management process. Understanding the ways to measure your event ROI depends on what the business priorities are and the reasons for putting on the event itself.

The best part of being an event planner can also be the worst. The variety, excitement and increasing responsibility of your job is what you love, but it also can keep you up at night.

It’s very likely that these 5 event planning challenges have led to a few sleepless nights – but read on and learn how to master some of your most difficult event marketing obstacles. 

What if no one shows up? All the event planning you do is for nothing without an audience, so how about a few things to to boost attendance?

Feeling the pressure to provide increasingly sophisticated events for lower budgets? Most event planners are in the same boat, so what if you could do more with less?

Event marketers are often expected to be designer, team lead, marketer, sales and finance experts. Ready to avoid a sure-fire way to overwhelm?

You’ve probably got a bucket load of lead generation, web design, project planning, social media, and team collaboration tools as part of your worklife. How about coordinating them easily all in one place using event planning software?

Wondering how much pipeline was actually created from your last event? Others in your organization likely are too. Here’s how to measure some of that impact.

Event professionals can have it all. Get some balance (and sleep) back in your life by embracing and mastering these event planning challenges.    

Attendease is a cloud-based marketing automation solution for corporate event managers and teams. A modern, feature-rich event management software that enables the management of an entire range of events of all types and sizes.

Event marketers are inevitably stretched for time, with never-ending To-Do lists and limited resources. Under these intense conditions, it’s no surprise that issues arise. Unfortunately, in the running of a successful event, there’s little margin for error. Attendees have high ROI expectations and low tolerance of problems that compromise their experience.

Thankfully, an event automation platform can save the day. Even if you’re a team of one, you can pull off a sophisticated, streamlined event that wows your attendees—all without breaking a sweat. With an event automation platform, you can delegate most of your routine event tasks to the platform and focus instead on functions that contribute to attendee experience, lead generation, and ROI.

The goal of an event automation platform is to simplify the event management process by delegating and automating as many tasks as possible. Automation eliminates time-consuming and error-prone manual processes and ensures a professional event that comes off without a hitch.

Here are some examples of how an event automation platform can help you avoid common event management pitfalls:

If you’d like to see how the Attendease event automation platform can optimize your event registration process—and ensure happy attendees—check out www.eventupplanner.com for a demo.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we examined how to produce an event that is perfectly crafted to fit the needs of your buyer personas, also known as your event attendees. In the second part, we’ll show you how to best serve your overall business marketing strategy using this event planning approach.

Creating an event template that is consistent with your brand priorities

Regardless of how many and what type of event personas you are catering to, you must make sure that your content ultimately tracks back to your event objectives. Partnerships with sponsors, types of exhibitors and the nature of your presenters must all be in keeping with your overall business philosophy and support your position within the marketplace, yet effectively appeal to your target audience and the suggested event sessions, to ensure all the details are aligned.

You should start by thinking about your brand and what it stands for, then build out an event that displays your industry expertise and thought leadership, by offering an assortment of useful take-aways to your attendees.

One of the best examples of this is techsytalk LIVE, the NYC based event tech conference that’s a must for every event planner’s tech conference calendar, offering a broad selection of tech solutions and industry updates. While the conference producers, Liz King Events are not tech vendors, they lead by example, integrating a ton of event tech into their own high end planning services. The conference demonstrates this. It also supports and promotes many people in the event tech industry while reinforcing the strength of LKE’s event planning acumen.

Creating an event budget, by segment, allocating resources in keeping with attendance

Once you understand who your marketing personas are and what sorts of offerings make sense for each of them, you can properly allocate event budgets and resources to support each segment. For example, your conference may be attended by a mix of technical buyers, executives, IT professionals and folks from the business unit. Understanding in detail what each of these groups wants and needs will guide the streams of content you offer each of them, and help you develop separate tracks accordingly, in proportion to the size of the groups. This, in turn, will dictate the types of room set-ups and technical requirements for each track, as well as the corresponding budget allocations to make the whole thing fly.

Developing an event toolkit to cover the technical needs of each of your events

Whether you are planning conferences, user groups, road shows, product launches, trainings, seminars, webinars, sales kickoffs or leadership meetings,  you’ll want to make sure that you have the appropriate event technology and tools to execute on every level. In the best case scenario, your tools will have comprehensive enough capabilities to work for you across a whole suite of events, throughout your entire season. Integrated event platforms such as Attendease offer the ability to be used across multiple segments for a repeatable event process.

Download our Marketing Personas E-Book to learn more about understanding your attendees and creating messaging & content to meet their information needs.

As any experienced event planner or event marketer knows, you must understand the attendees you would like to have at your event, and how you will give them what they want. In other words, you have to be absolutely clear about your buyer personas. Once you understand your different attendees and their needs, you can create the perfect journey through your event for all of them.

How to Find the Best Attendees in the World

First things first. Who are the people to whom all your event marketing efforts are directed? Once you are clear about this, you’ll be well on the way to determining what types of offerings your event must provide, as well as technical requirements, amenities, and entertainment. Understanding your natural audience gives you the resources you need to create the perfect show for them.

You’ll need to be clear about the demographics of your prospective event attendees. This means basic information like age, gender, occupation, lifestyle preferences and geographic location. But you’ll need to dig even deeper. What types of publications do they read, what sort of leisure time activities do they enjoy, what kind of music, food and movies do they like, what kind of clothes do they wear? These all go to giving you a better idea of where you can find them online, and what type of content will generate the most positive response from them.

Defining relevant content and topics of interest to your personas

Event attendees are busy people. If they are going to attend your conference or symposium, then they are expecting valuable and impactful take-aways. Resources for event planners need to encompass the latest industry trends and topics, valuable tools that will enhance their productivity and cutting edge ideas that help to expand their thinking. As an additional benefit, if your target marketing is on point and you identify your personas properly, you will create an opportunity for dynamic networking exchanges between like minded individuals, likely to produce fruitful new business relationships.

Giving your attendees the sessions they really want

At any given event, you will most likely be hosting a variety of different personas, including exhibitors, presenters and attendees who occupy many levels on the decision making chain. You’ll want to make sure that session management reflects the needs and priorities of all of them. Depending on the event set-up, you may want to develop separate tracks of presented content, such as breakout sessions, where people can choose which track they find the most compelling to attend. For example, offering tech panels for the developers and back end programmers in your crowd, top level industry trend data for marketing, sales and branding for executives, and plenty of best practice information for planning and policy professionals.

For more information on how to custom tailor an event for your attendees that meets your business objectives, check out Part 2 of this series!

Download our Marketing Personas E-Book to learn more about understanding your attendees and creating messaging & content to meet their information needs.

One of the best innovations in event tech over the last few years is the advent of event apps as an extension of many event technology platforms. Their mobility and flexibility have made the jobs of both event marketers and event planners much easier. One of the great advantages of event apps is their ability to offer us distinct analytics to help us refine our efforts as we produce our current events and plan more strategically for future events.

Here are the top 7 insights that event app analytics are capable of giving us:

1) How Well You’ve Marketed and Promoted Your App

By monitoring the number of users who’ve downloaded your event app and are actively using it, you’ll know if you did a good job getting the word out. Depending on how many impressions your pages are getting, and how many clicks you receive on each page, you’ll have a sense of how much viewers are actually using it. This reflects on how well you promoted your event app as an all purpose event navigation tool.

2) Attendee Insights

You’ll get a good sense of attendee behavior when you examine which pages they are accessing the most. You’ll get to understand their interests based on which speakers and sponsors catch their attention. You can also learn more about your attendees based on when they use your event app, how often, and for how long – invaluable insights for event planners who are looking ahead to next year…

3) How Attendees Are Participating in Your Event

These are some of the best attendee insights to come out of your mobile event app – the analytics that show which sessions they attended, which Q&A’s they participated in, how they responded to surveys and polls, the notes they took, and how they socialized aspects of the event. You’ll get a ton of information about how attendees interact with all the dimensions of your event, giving you clear signs of what elements are most popular and which can use some improvement.

4) Sponsorship and Advertising ROI

Your event app can provide you with real nuts and bolts information that will help you give important feedback to your sponsors and advertisers. If you can demonstrate with clarity how many sets of eyes are on their ads, how many people are reading their profiles and clicking on their sales and marketing collateral, you’ll be making a case for their continued support for future events. Event marketers take note, you can really benefit from this type of info as you plan future sponsorship campaigns.

5) Real Time Data

By examining who is registering ahead of time for what sessions, what attendees are saying on social media, and how they are connecting with other attendees, you’ll be in a better position to meet their needs. For example, perhaps certain sessions have been overlooked and need a little in the moment advertising, or others may be more popular than expected and require additional seating or other amenities. Your event app can supply you with data that will help you make changes on the fly, to improve the overall experience for your attendees – essential intel for any event planner.

6) Networking Quality

As part of today’s integrated platforms, mobile event apps often have a matchmaking capability that begins well before the actual event. Your attendees will be connecting with one another in anticipation of in-person meetings at the event. You’ll be able to gauge how many people are exchanging contact info, socializing and sharing other types of info such as notes, pictures and other documents. As good networking is a high priority for most event participants, it will help you customize their experience to support the development of these kinds of relationships.

7) Troubleshooting

How much did your attendees access their event app to obtain information and guidance? What kinds of information did they need? Directions or other travel assistance? Did they require some kind of support or report any specific problems? This kind of insight is invaluable in helping you determine how well you’ve implemented your event technology platform in service of a positive user experience for all of your event attendees. 

When planning an event, everything flows from knowing your audience, also known as your buyer personas. With a detailed understanding of what they do for a living, what they do for fun, where they hang out online and in real life, the types of resources they possess and what types of special needs they might have, your in-depth knowledge of your buyer personas will drive all aspects of your event, from ideation to execution. Understanding your buyer personas, you’ll be able to craft a targeted marketing campaign, define content that will be relevant to them, and produce an event that speaks directly to their interests and preferences.

Expanding Our Audiences, Branding and Staying Consistent

Jessica Levin, President and Chief Connector at Seven Degrees Communication, explains how events can be a powerful extension of your branding. “Many brands have wide audiences. It’s not as much about staying on brand as carefully planning messaging and being strategic.”

Our events can be the vehicles for expanding our audiences if we understand the need to be consistent in all phases of planning. As Levin explains, “When targeting a new audience,” it’s important to ask the question, “What value do they bring to your organization and the attendees? What value can you deliver to them?”

By focusing on a high quality value exchange, we offer our attendees a unique buyer’s journey that speaks directly to their needs. When we expand this vision to include an entire season, then we have the opportunity to create a whole suite of events that reach different personas on different levels. These can include conferences, user groups, road shows, product launches, trainings, seminars, webinars, sales kickoffs and leadership meetings. Even with this many offerings, consistency from marketing to execution creates a brand cohesiveness that is difficult to challenge.

The needs of buyer personas always drive content

Most events host a variety of different personas, all of whom must be taken into account during the planning stages. For example, a conference along the lines of Techsytalk LIVE, the NYC-based yearly event tech conference, hosts a good mix of 3rd party planners, agencies, corporate and agency event planners. Session content reflects the needs and priorities of all four of these different personas.

Says Levin, “One event may appeal to many people and those people want to meet each other, but their individual learning needs may differ.” Thus planners will offer separate tracks of presented content geared towards each group of buyer personas in attendance. This commonly takes the form of breakout sessions, where people can choose which track they find most relevant to their particular needs. When an event offers multiple offerings along different tracks, there are definitely opportunities for audience expansion, but again, care must be taken in maintaining consistency.

We all want to create dynamic and exciting events, but even quality content can fall flat if it’s not in line with your buyer personas. Jessica recalled the following situation: “One group I work with created an amazing forum event. Great topic – very timely. But the core audience wasn’t interested. The group didn’t have the right audience in their database, and it didn’t meet the immediate needs of current members. It [the content] had value, but to a new group. They struggled to get attendance at what should have been a very strong program.”

Nuts and Bolts, Buyer Personas and Budgets

It really does pay to do your research up front and understand exactly what your buyer personas want and need in an event. This understanding will define the types of resources you bring to the table, how you allocate your budget, and the kind of tools necessary to execute your vision. Smart planning dictates that you gather as much data about your attendees as possible, beginning with registration and continuing through to the event and its aftermath.

As you come to understand your personas over time, you’ll be able to cultivate your communication and marketing strategy accordingly. This will include how and where you socialize your event and the types of outreach methods you use, and will ultimately connect back to the nature of your event presentations. You’ll want to make sure that you budget appropriately into the sectors of your event that track to the main personas at the heart of your audience.

Building Your Own Event Community

Over time, you’ll be able to develop a community around your events, capable of driving an entire season of offerings. Building an intimate understanding of your buyer personas is at the heart of your ability to explore new horizons within your industry and expand the limits of your engagement. Once again, Levin offers some words of wisdom on the subject:

“At the end of the day events are social. They bring people together, and that’s your best driver of excitement – other people.” An excited group of attendees can elevate your event to a whole other level: “How they help promote it, how they actively participate, how they encourage others to participate. Breaking from the norm helps too. How many events have you been to where you learned nothing? So many events play to a common denominator and then noone is happy.”

In the end, it’s best to listen to your people. “Give people exactly what they are looking for and you’ll blow their minds.”

Contact us to learn more about how Attendease can help you achieve your event objectives.