Preparing for an event is an exciting and challenging task. Interestingly, something you should keep in mind from the very beginning is your marketing strategy. Why? Well, you might create the best event with the highest quality, but how will the attendees know if they don’t hear about it?

3 Strategies for a Successful Marketing

This makes marketing a pivotal part of the process. This is why we have prepared three main strategies and ideas to make your event a success.

1. Identify your goals

This is the moment to determine what you want to achieve with your market strategy. Only by doing this will you be able to decide what the steps you should implement. A key tool to determine your goals is using the SMART guidelines. This is an acronym that you should always keep in mind.

👉 S for Specific: Setting imprecise goals for yourself might make them more challenging to accomplish. An example of a specific goal is to increase registration. Knowing this is your goal will allow you to implement strategies.

👉 M for Measurable: It’s difficult to know if you have achieved your goal if you can’t measure them. Continuing with the registration example, this is an easy goal to measure. You can see how many people registered after the event and see if this corresponds to the goal you had in mind.

👉 A for Achievable: You must set goals for your event that are ambitious, but realistic. It’s okay if you have to stretch yourself to meet them, but the key is ensuring they are within your reach. This way you will be able to know how to achieve it.

👉 R for Relevant: How important is this marketing goal to your event? For example, if your target audience doesn’t watch cable TV, is it relevant to advertise on this media?

👉 T for Time-Bound: Considering this is a marketing strategy for an event, it comes with its deadline. This allows you to focus on the goal and actively work towards it. Furthermore, time-bound goals are easier to measure, as well.

2. Create an event marketing timeline

This links directly with the last item on the SMART criteria. But it goes one step further as it allows you to create smaller goals for the things you want to achieve.

This way, you can set targets to accomplish that will allow you to publicize your event. By setting yourself a timeline, you can measure the extent of the reach of these smaller goals and increase your efforts for other timelines that are further down the line. Furthermore, this allows you to set specific strategies, which can be more or less aggressive, depending on how close your event is.

3. Create a marketing strategy

Sometimes keeping to the basics is the best way to achieve what you want. Therefore, here are some essential things you should implement to spread the word about your event:

• Email marketing: The key to email marketing is to start with personalized emails. This way the attendees will fell your personalized approach. However, as the event draws near, you should go for automatic emails reminding attendees of deadlines to register and share schedule information.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM): Social media is one of the most important tools to spread the word on your event. Create all your social media content and set up a timeline to post. Furthermore, you can turn your attendees into promoters. Interestingly, you can do this by creating giveaways based on shares and mentions. Don’t forget to create a hashtag!
• Content marketing: You should have a website that provides updated information about the event. It should be user-friendly so that people interested can get the information they need. Furthermore, continue to update it by adding infographics, blog posts, and videos.
• Online advertising: In the technological world we live in, you should make use of online advertising. Not only is it less expensive, but it will also allow you to reach many people quickly. Also, you can direct the marketing strategy to the people you want to attend.
• Offline advertising: This is a great tactic to use if you have a big budget and a broad audience. You should consider the demographics of your intended audience when evaluating if using this method is worth it.
• Influencer marketing: People like to follow advice from the people they trust. By contacting influencers to promote your event, your prospective attendees will receive information from someone they already know. This will increase engagement.

By applying these techniques, you can increase attendance, focus on enjoying your event, and ensure it goes off without a hitch.

Don’t forget to make an assessment afterward to see how successful these strategies were and what you could improve for future events.