How to market an event: 15 tips for success 

Not everyone knows how to market an event –yet marketing and promotion are essential to giving your event meaningful impact. In this article, we’re going to give some concrete advice and tips, as well as some of our preferred techniques, for creative event marketing.

Understanding your audience

When thinking about how to market an event, understanding your audience will be key. You’ll need to understand who your event and message needs to reach, and how to encourage them to take action. You can segment your audience into specific targeted personas that are interested in your product or service. (This could be as general as basic demographics and a use case–”25-35 age group, needs a particular software product”-or as specific as creating a fictional “avatar” with a name and specific demographic details outlined, although generally the more detailed the better.) By categorizing the audience, you can determine who will be interested in the event and who won’t and will be better able to target messaging to the remaining segments.

The audience and messaging categories you’re creating don’t necessarily represent all of the people who will attend the event, or even the people you think will come –they should, however, represent the profiles that will see the most value in attending the event. By targeting messaging towards these audience categories, both the attendees and you will get the highest possible value from the event content.

Why promotion is important for an event

Not all “promotion” is necessarily “marketing” but all marketing needs to include promotion. Even if you have a great event planned, how will it benefit anyone if there’s no attendance or awareness? Promotion is a major part of how to market an event. Why? Because you could have the best possible event content, speakers, guests, and other aspects planned –but neither you nor anyone else can get value from it if potential attendees don’t know the event is happening or where it is! Promotion and marketing are what enable your event to achieve its goals, as we discuss in the next section.

Define goals and KPIs for your event promotion

We’ve mentioned before in our blog that having clearly defined goals and KPIs is essential for events, in-person, virtual, or hybrid. Being able to measure success is always important! It can be helpful to start with broad goals (such as “increase brand awareness”), however as you develop the event it’s also good to bring in narrower goals and performance indicators.

The main objectives of event marketing are usually to drive registration or ticket sales (if it’s a ticketed event). However, there are other goals that could be defined, and potentially measurable metrics to determine if your event is a success. We’ll outline the specifics of KPIs a little further along, but first, let’s take a high-level look at creating an event marketing plan.

Crafting your event marketing plan

In line with both audience profiles and stated event goals, you’ll be able to determine how best to market an event. As you create your event marketing plan, keep in mind your KPIs and any “SMART” goals (more details below), and remember that having a truly successful event means that both you and your attendees maximize value from the activities. Attendees should feel satisfied with their experience, and you should be reaching your goals.

Your marketing plan should speak to your target audience –but be ready to go for as wide a reach as possible. Even still, most likely only a smaller percentage of those you reach will attend (typically about 35%). Make a timeline for promotion and put your resources towards creating as much awareness as possible before the actual event. Start in advance, 3 to 6 months if possible! Map out your milestones and be ready to make periodic adjustments as you come closer to the date of the event. Have a timeline ready that you can follow with your marketing and promotional strategy to keep everything scheduled and organized.

5 online & offline event marketing strategies to market an event:

Brand your event

Branding is an important strategy to make an event truly yours! It’s often recommended the event have unique branding that may be separate from your company branding. However, make sure the brand identity of your business or organization is well represented in the event material. Branding should include distinctive colors, fonts, and imagery that can be used across marketing emails and social media posts. Additionally, you can create a tagline (or hashtag!) to keep your branding memorable.

The benefit of event-specific branding is it can also attract people who don’t already know about your company. This is essentially a win-win because whether your event brand or your actual business attracts the most attention, it will all be to your benefit in the end.

Build an event website

Websites are a marketing “must have” –event websites can be a primary source of information, and a hub for registration/RSVPs, ticketing, and payment, so you’ll always want to create one, and it should be one of the first objectives you take on in your event marketing. You might even want to consider using website traffic as one of your KPIs.

Offline marketing

We’ll continue to make digital marketing recommendations below, but, remember, just because digital can have superior reach it doesn’t mean “traditional marketing” won’t help as well! Physical ads such as posters, billboards, and banners are still a valid way to raise awareness and pique interest. If you have a physical facility you can place event marketing directly outside your business–if you work from an office, put up posters and signage so visitors can discover the event. Budget permitting you can also place ads in other locations to get the word out.

Create your own QR code

As a marketing strategy that can bridge the gap between digital/social and physical marketing channels, creating a QR code is an excellent way to drive traffic. The code, as you may be aware, can be scanned by a phone for information about the event. Custom QR codes can be sized and colored to fit your event and branding styles. It’s an excellent way to link directly to registration and ticketing, information about location and itinerary, and other informational material like opt-in email lists.

Participate in content marketing

Create a call to action and post it through your content marketing channels–this can include blogs, podcasts, social media, and video sites. If you’re already using content marketing, you likely have an audience who’ll be receptive to messaging around the event. Given sufficient time and resources you could even create new content marketing leading up to the event: blogs or vlogs, supplemental material, “behind the scenes” and other content setting up groundwork and building up anticipation leading into the event.

10 ideas to market an event

1) Working with sponsors, keynote speakers, influencers, and other brands. – With partnerships in place you are not the only one promoting, and it opens a door to gaining new interest from your partner’s audience as well.

2) Social media marketing – Putting advertisements on social media sites and search engines is a reliable marketing move. You can also retarget ads as you move closer to the event date.

3) Make a creative landing page. – As mentioned, a webpage is a must. If it’s a real stand-out, so much the better. Consider including video content or engagement features such as polls or surveys.

4) Posting in communities and groups – If promotion is allowed in the group, go where the people who use your product or service congregate.

5) Using SEO – Especially if you’re using content marketing, a solid SEO strategy will ensure your blog and video content can be found by potential attendees.

6) Targeted email marketing – Once you’ve identified your audience, email is a great way to reach them directly.

7) Offer early bird registration – This is a good way to get a sense of engagement before the event happens.

8) Physical/traditional marketing – We’re living in a digital society with virtual/hybrid event options, but as we pointed out above, don’t neglect the physical! Visible marketing through traditional channels will still increase awareness in your local area and beyond. You could place a sign outside your business, advertise through signage or make listings for printed media, and possibly even create, announcements or ads for print, radio, and TV.

9) Cross-channel marketing – Consistent messaging and branding across multiple channels can build trust and brand awareness for attendees.

10) Run a social media contest – Everyone likes winning prizes! Similar ideas include hosting an event countdown, or a social media challenge or takeover.

Promotional tools and technologies to market an event

Some of the essential tools you’ll want to look into for marketing an event or making your marketing process run smoothly, can include:

• • Email marketing: There are several email marketing tools that can be instrumental in getting your message out to a large audience. Like a website, this is something you could consider a “must-have”.

• • Social media: Possibly everyone’s go-to for getting the word out.

• • AI: It’s a new frontier, there are increasing ways in which AI could help, from crafting messaging to analyzing data.

• • Google Analytics: Speaking of data analysis, a tool like Google Analytics or a similar capability allows you to see page views, identify detailed demographics of visitors, track conversions, and other information that will help you identify your audience.

• • Project management tools: There are several different project management apps to choose from, like Monday.com or Asana, but the important thing is they keep your team efforts coordinated and are easy places to lay out a timeline and important tasks and milestones.

• • Creative tools: From something as purpose-built as Creative Cloud to sites or app features that allow your team to manipulate images, create and edit video, and lay out designs or documents, creative messaging is always a primary part of marketing.

• • Event platforms: Your platform will be a place to host content, or possibly the entire event if virtual. Platforms typically incorporate or integrate with some of the tech tools listed here.

Maximizing attendee engagement

Many in the events field recommend that event engagement start well before the event begins and keep going well after it ends. With an in-person event, a strong indicator of engagement is going to be registrations and ticket sales (if applicable) however virtual and hybrid events can offer a host of features that additionally support engagement and data. During the event marketing process, maximizing engagement will go hand in hand with maximizing event communication. One useful practice is asking attendees to sign up for SMS reminders. Before and during the event, social media will also be a key engagement tool–strategies like creating an event countdown can be a motivator.

Measuring success and ROI

KPIs for your event could include such things as:

• Social media followers added
• Pre-event ticket sales or registrations
• Website traffic (yours or the event’s)
• Return on investment (event budget vs. profit from ticket or other sales)

As we’ve also said before, a good way to identify a useful KPI is using the “SMART goals” method, that is to say, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

In understanding whether the goals for your event are purely financial (“sell lots of tickets”) vs. something less tangible (“raise awareness of and loyalty to our product”) you’ll be able to better determine what success looks like.

Meet Kaltura Events

If you’re looking for event marketing support, whether for creating a fully virtual event experience or an integrated tool for handling the particulars of branding, outreach, registration, lead generation, and other intangibles of an in-person or hybrid event, we’d love for Kaltura Events to be your platform of choice.

Create, manage, and measure all your events on a single platform using customizable templates for every need. Kaltura Events is a virtual events solution that can help you with every step of how to market an event and create spectacular virtual events in the bargain.

You’re also welcome to request a demo and we’ll show you how Kaltura Events can impact attendance, engagement, and ROI while being a seamless, fully brandable, lead-generating machine.

Summary

Learning how to market an event is a big topic with a lot to cover. However, laying out the basics should give you enough of a foundation to continue in the directions that interest you most–or are most suitable for your brand or event. We hope that this advice enables you to take the first steps of your event marketing journey!