Mark AdamsIf you’ve ever run events, you’ll know that no matter how amazing they are in concept, they very rarely just ‘sell themselves’ . In order to sell tickets, you need to be armed with an event marketing strategy that effectively promotes your event to your target audience.
In this guide we’re going to discuss what event marketing is, strategies you can use to create an event marketing timeline, with each promotion reinforcing the last, and how to ensure the right message is delivered at the right time, and to the right person.
While it’s impossible to present a perfect ‘catch-all’ event marketing plan – every event is different, as is every lead time, budget and target market – there are many common tactics and event marketing ideas that should help guide you when setting out your own event marketing calendar.
The Four Stages of Event Marketing Strategies
In order to create an event marketing calendar, you need to think about the four stages of event marketing as recorded by the marketing experts at Eventual.com.
You need to
- Learn the audience’s needs to construct an event marketing plan.
- Marry your message to your target market’s message.
- Build your online presence and build up your online email database.
- Develop a good rapport with potential sponsors to achieve first-rate sponsors and securing the benefits you’ve worked so hard for.
In order to effectively use this information to create your event marketing calendar, you need to ensure that you have given enough thought to the four stages of event marketing to successfully focus on each of them.
Stage 1 – Learn the Audience’s Needs
In this stage you need to learn as much as you can about your attendees, anticipate their challenges and figure out what their needs are. We’ve written an article about the four things you should look for when interviewing an new client – you can read that here:
- The Top Four Things You Should Look For In A New Client
- In order to understand the needs of your target audience you could do one of the following:
- Ask the people you know and trust for their recommendations.
- Ask the people you know who are similar to you what they would recommend.
- Talk to attendees or clients of similar events and ask them what they liked or didn’t like about the event.
You could also employ individual tools like Eventbacker or Eventbrite to build up your own personal database of past attendees and potential attendees – use these tools to talk to past attendees to gain valuable advice and endorsement on non-financial operations of the event.
Learning how to handle lead times is a vital part of event marketing, you need to make sure that you’ve got a good lead-in time to the event, and in order to effectively organise your promotional campaign, you need to be correctly geared up to begin promoting and sending out promotional materials in the weeks leading up to the event.
The key to get right is this: you need to ensure that you are not overburdening yourself too soon, or rushing to get the most important promotional campaigns in place – as well as this, if your marketing material is overproduced, you’ll highly likely come across as an amateur in the eyes of your audience.
Stage 2 – Marry Your Message to Your Target Market’s Message
In this stage, you need to figure out how to marry your event message to your audience message.
There are a lot of strategies you can use, but one of the main ones we’ve seen is to combine your promotional ideas with your target market’s key talking points.
Marrying your message to your target market’s message correctly can be a very difficult process, but one of the biggest keys to success is ensuring that you are not attacking your audience head on.
You could use your main message to get publicity for the event that you are secondary promoting.
Using this principle can help you promote your event to your target market and get positive coverage for your event.
Stage 3 – Build Your Online Presence and Build Up Your Online Email Database
The achievement of stage 3 is a very easy one. As a part of your event marketing strategy, you need to build up your online presence – this simply means that you need to build up your social media presence, as well as your website.
You do need to ensure that you are using appropriate marketing materials for your event, and you’ll also need to have as many good and effective marketing ideas as you can to ensure that you have content that is engaging and useful to your target audience.
Is unique, engaging and useful to your audience is a vital part of your event marketing strategy, and you need to ensure that you don’t end up with a mishmash of unrelated content that means nothing to your audience – you’ll need to make sure that they can find your content easily and deliver a message that they want to hear.
You need to make sure that you have as many ways as possible to receive digital marketing, but also the ability to fully engage your target audience – for example, if you’re making content on Instagram and Facebook, you’ll need to make sure that you have a very strong online presence and that you can deliver a top notch user experience to your audience.
There are a lot of marketing experts out there that will tell you that you need to have as many small and as insignificant marketing campaigns as possible that work across all channels, but there is also a lot of merit in investing as much time as possible into one idea that is providing you a lot of money for your event marketing – for example, you can use event marketing to attract high-quality leads.
This is where you are going to be able to utilise more of your marketing content to get new sponsors on board, as you’ll be able to ask that potential sponsor for a lot more than money or attention – it’s down to your audience to start to trust you in order to secure the benefits you’ve worked so hard for.
Massive Milestones in Event Marketing
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Now Let check how To Build an Awesome Event Marketing Plan in 9 Steps
Building an event marketing strategy is essential if you want to make sure that you are marketing towards your audience and making sure that you are engaging your target market – as mentioned in the previous article here, you’re going to need to make sure that you’re tailoring your content to your audience and their requirements to truly engage your audience.
Building an event marketing strategy is not going to be the cheapest marketing campaign, but it’s one that will ensure that you’re building a strong relationship with your audience and securing valuable leads for your business.
This is one of the most simple guides that we’ve ever put together.
It’s down to you to make sure that you do follow it properly, and the rest is just going to be down to luck. This exactly what it’s going to take to be successful in event marketing– you should be investing in your event marketing as much as you can, as you are going to be investing a large amount of your time on it.
This is a guide that will provide you with all of the direct information that you need to ensure that you are building an effective event marketing strategy – it’s a step by step guide that will provide you with all of the information that you need to know to start building your event marketing strategy.
There are many ways that you can use this event marketing strategy, but we have provided you with the one that is the simplest and easiest for you to simply follow.
1 – Identify your goals
You need to set up your aims before you start to build a thorough event marketing campaign, as you’re going to need to know what you want to achieve and what you’re aiming to bring to your event marketing strategy.
You will need to make a list of your main motivators, for example, you may want to ensure that you are building a good rapport with potential sponsors, and you may also want to ensure that you are achieving overall publicity for your business to gain further exposure for your event – you can think of the main goals of your event marketing campaign in this way.
2 – Decide what your main event is going to be
You’re going to need to think about which event you’re going to focus your event marketing strategy around, and you’ll need to figure this out yourself – you will want to pick out something that you’ve already decided to do, because if you don’t choose something, your event marketing strategy will simply be a random set of content that doesn’t really relate to your main goal at all. You’ll need to make sure that you review your event marketing strategy and ensure that you don’t wear yourself out too much with all of your different content research – always make sure that you are creating one solid strategy for the campaign.
3 – Decide what you want to focus on and why you’re doing it
Your event marketing strategy will be different for everyone, as this is down to your main goals for your campaign. If you’re creating an event marketing strategy to bring in more potential sponsors for your event, your message needs to be more targeted to exactly what you want – You may target the different guest list markets that your potential sponsors will be searching for, and may target their various goals and motivators as well. You can see how this will be different for each company or organisation that you are building a message towards.
You may also want to target a particular way of delivering your message to your audience, for example, if your main aim is to make sure that you are building a good rapport with your audience and getting them to feel a certain way towards your event marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you work on your messaging and ensure that this is the style that you use.
4 – Brand Description
Your event marketing strategy needs to clearly describe who your brand is – you need to be able to show people what your brand looks like, you need to be able to show people who you are and provide representation of who you are and what your organisation is about. It’s important to make your branding and promotional material fantastic, and if you want your business to go as far as event marketing, you want to make sure that you make every effort to reach out and engage your target audience.
You need to get your message out there, and you need to make sure that you’re selling yourself to your potential audience.
5 – Create a content plan
In this stage, you’re going to need to create a content plan that will be tailor-made to your event. You can’t just prepare a set of content for your event marketing strategy without thinking of the audience you are planning to engage, as this will not provide you with the results that you want. You need to keep your audience in mind, and ensure that your content is the best that it can be.
You will need to make sure that you are building an effective event marketing campaign that is going to engage your target audience, and you will need to ensure that you are communicating with thought and consideration for your potential audience members.
6 – Create a return to base plan
The next part of your event marketing strategy is a return to base plan – which is the actions that you’re going to be taking on to see how much you’re succeeding in your event marketing. You need to look at the return to base plan to see how effective your various content and campaigns are – are you able to keep engaging your target audience? If not, perhaps you need to work on that. You need to take a look at the return to base plan to make sure that everything that you’re doing is working towards your main aims. Take a look at the return to base plan to make sure that everything that you’re doing is working towards your main aims.
7 – Create a main campaign
You’ve been creating a content plan for your event marketing strategy, and you’ve also been looking at the return to base plan to make sure that things are working like you want them to work – and in this stage, you will want to create the main campaign for your event marketing strategy. It’s the main event marketing campaign that you have been creating, and you want to see it come to fruition.
You need to work closely with your producer, and you need to make sure that they are able to assist you in creating the main event marketing campaign that you want – if you want to engage your audience in the way that you see fit and keep them thinking about your business and your products, you will need to make sure that you are engaging your audience and following up your content, you will need to make sure that you are keeping your producer up to date on what you are doing with your content, so that they can work with you to make sure that everything is coming together.
8 – Create a content calendar/season plan
You’ve created the main event marketing campaign, and you’ve been working with your producer to create your content calendar/season plan – and in this stage you will want to review your main event marketing campaign , and make sure that you are going to be interacting with your content in the way that you want. There may be something that is working well for you that you will want to treat as a main event marketing campaign and keep up with regularly, or you may want to evaluate the content that you have and look for something that you can create that you can work with. You will want to review your main event marketing campaign on a regular basis and ensure that it is staying fresh and that you are getting the results that you want. You will need to make sure that you are regularly, and your producer will need to work closely with you and ensure that you are working towards your main goal.
9 – Determine main content
If you are working with a person that is on board to support you with your event marketing strategy – it will be easier for him or her to take this step and see how your main event marketing campaign is going. You will need to work closely with them to see if they notice any different that you thought would be there with your main event marketing campaign – it’s important that you are there to turn this into action in the sense that you are going to be coming up with content for the main event marketing campaign that you want to build. In the final stage of your event marketing strategy, you will want to work with your employer, and work together to make sure that your main event marketing campaign continues to go well.
You want to make sure that your main event marketing campaign is working, and that your audience is staying involved with your company. You want to make sure that you’re interacting with your users, and that you are working towards the main goal of the organisation.
One of our experienced event marketers will work with your brand within your budget and timeframe, and will produce a campaign that is sure to gain you the massive exposure that you are looking for. Let our team help you boost your chances of raising interest in your special events.
Feel free to contact us by phone, email, or through our online chat function. We’ll be happy to assist you with your event marketing campaign and to ensure that your event marketing campaign is working to its fullest potential.
