Without further ado, here’s our 10 step guide to step up your event marketing strategy in 2020:

1. Seek Out New Venues

Although you can’t bid farewell to traditional venues, seek out new venues that cut out the boring factor of the same old conference rooms and auditoriums. Seek out non-traditional spaces such as gardens, warehouses, rooftops, museums, art galleries, and co-working spaces. Anything that gives your attendees more time to network with each other and elevate the bonding experience. This doesn’t mean that you cross off the regular venues on your list. You just need to drape it better in terms of styling and decor. You could pick up a few pointers from our piece on Designing The Ultimate Event Experience. 

2. Partnered Events 

Partnering with local businesses or sponsors that tie in with your event is a marketing match made in heaven. Maybe your music festival could amplify it’s brand awareness and impact by partnering up with that world-renowned brewery. Your event marketing campaigns gain more speed and weight when marketed through your sponsor’s channels. Maybe partner up with an event ticketing platform like Yapsody as well? Just saying…

3. Event Website Persona  

Your event attendees should get an instant feel and grasp of what your event will turn out to be. Don’t leave anything to their imagination except for a teaser that makes them grab your early bird tickets ASAP. This is where your event website persona plays a trump card in selling out the first phase of event tickets. 

With our Online Ticket Store, event marketers can brand and customize every element present of their ticket store. Apart from getting a personal subdomain, you get the option to customize your event ticket as well. Brand it with your logo and tease the upcoming events on the ticket itself to create a strong brand recall.  

4. Map Your Attendee Journey

Once you understand attendee personas, you need to map out their journey on your website and social media channels. There are multiple touchpoints for you to leverage – your event website, emailers, registration process, event check-in process, event perks and so on. What makes them click is the answer to win their hearts. Many of your events were mind-blowing but few fizzled out. You need to dig deep into insights and reports to check why that happened. With our Insightful Reporting, peak into your Event Sales report and Consolidated Inventory reports to plan better next time. 

5. Create Content Buckets 

Pillar your content based on different venues and types of attendees. Attendees for a seminar or conference might prefer podcasts and interviews from the keynote speaker. Similarly, for clubs and casino attendees, make them guess your next headliner act by putting up music playlists. Even if they don’t guess it right, you’ll understand which other artists they’d want to see live. We’d suggest you keep it topical and use hashtags to show up in trending searches. 

6. Event Marketing Frequency

Now that you’ve figured out your content, you need to actually schedule them in a manner that would garner maximum reach and shareability. Are your event attendees most likely to DM your Instagram post to their friends on a weekend or a weekday? Your event marketing frequency should match your audience’s browsing patterns. Stop posting randomly to avoid random results. You might want to look at our Event Marketing Services that have strategically increased revenue for many entertainment enterprises.

7. Live Streaming 

Your event attendees booked early bird tickets but unfortunately got stuck in a meeting on the D-Day. With live streaming, you’re giving them an opportunity to be a part of your event experience through different platforms. Instagram is a favorite among event marketers due to its innovative features and popularity. Divide your live streaming into pre-event, event, and post-event to keep them hooked. You can also save the stream on your camera roll which can be used in an after movie as well. 

8. Utilize the Power of Video

2019 was dominated by video content and shows no signs of stopping. Blogs and emailers are great for the initial pre-buzz marketing. Content in a video format seals that deal for many event presenters. A 30-second teaser is great for grabbing eyeballs and generating leads across multiple social media platforms. A video montage of your past events, if done well, refreshes memories of your attendees and works as a magnet for new audiences. Invest in a production crew that understands your vision.  

9. Turn Event Attendees Into Event Marketers 

Just how you’d turn your event partners into marketers, turn your event attendees into live event marketers. Maybe a contest or a giveaway to up the ante and create a competitive aura works well. Hook them with a catchy hashtag, design a great event, and let their Instagram stories do the marketing. User-generated content is organic traffic that is a true test for your event success. Your brand’s notification page blowing up with tagged pictures will be a worthy reward for any event presenter. 

10. Use Feedback and Survey Data 

After everything is done and dusted, you still need to gather post-event data. Give your audiences a tool to voice their opinions. Some might rant out their frustration of being held up at the queue for too long while some might give you a genuine piece of feedback that will change the game for you. Watch out for that tidbit that will elevate your attendee experience for future events. Maybe after a week or so, ask your attendees all the right questions through our Questionnaires and Surveys feature that will help you create easy to answer logic-based questionnaires. 

We hope this 10-step guide helps you step up your event marketing strategy in 2020. If you’re a new event organizer on the block, Sign Up with Yapsody to create, promote, and sell event tickets online. 

For more event industry insights in 2020, subscribe to our blog.

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Kick starting your marketing well in advance ensures that activities such as resource allocation, promotion, and engagement is performed more effectively resulting in higher conversion. Marketing coupled with a proper strategy will further catapult you to higher engagement levels and even sold-out events! Here are 5 ways to use targeted event marketing strategy for your events! Here are 5 ways to use targeted event marketing strategy for your events and make maximum profit by selling event tickets online.

1. Make yourself easy to find

Not only should you post online content regularly, but you must also make it easy to find. You can share content by bundling with different content on your website or social media channels. For instance,  if you have 3 or 4 events lined up for the month of May, then you can promote it as “Upcoming events for May 2018” on a single page and promote it on social media as well as different channels, which will make it easy to find your events in a single location.

You can also create a hashtag for your event and while posting anything related to that event, you can post using that hashtag. Make sure to use a hashtag which is unique, so that recollection is easy and your attendees can then follow your event updates.

2. Promote events using paid ads

Social media platforms are making it difficult to reach your attendees organically. According to a recent update by Facebook, they have implemented changes in their algorithm. Priority is now given to content from the user’s friends and families over the content from businesses and news websites.

This is not only about Facebook, it is also about other platforms like Twitter and Pinterest. They are going to give more preference to paid ads over organic content generated by companies. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter costs less compared to other traditional ad platforms like TV or print ads. Additionally, they give you better options of targeting attendees based on user location and interest. So, in order to reach your attendees, create ads and promote using mechanisms like Facebook Pixel. Yapsody gives you the option to easily integrate your Facebook Pixel, which helps to promote your events to individuals who are more likely to purchase.

3. Be in touch with your event registrants via email

You need to keep engaging with your event registrants. The best medium to stay in touch with your audience is email marketing. According to a research, 73% of in-house marketers worldwide said that email marketing provided a strong ROI.

Therefore, you must leverage email marketing but keep in mind that you need to send personalized emails in order to improve effectiveness. To evaluate the effectiveness and success of your email campaigns, you need to keep track of the “open rate” and “click through rate” of emails and also check the conversion ratio – recipients who are reading your email and purchasing tickets. All these parameters can be tracked through Yapsody’s upcoming “Email Marketing” feature.

4. Improve SEO of your event landing page

SEO is the 2nd most effective medium for marketing after email marketing. Investing in SEO takes a lot of efforts, but the effects are long lasting. You need to work on both on-page and off-page SEO activities to get your event at the top of the page rankings by search engines.

Yapsody provides SEO customization for your events, which helps you to edit on-page SEO elements like title, meta description and meta keywords of your events thereby helping your events rank higher by search engines.

5. Create a buzz around your event

When it comes to your event, your performing artists and special guests are the primary stakeholders. If you want your event to be a success, make sure that your primary stakeholders leverage their popularity and power to influence by creating a buzz around your event on social media platforms. This is the most organic and effective way to promote your event, since it attracts potential attendees who pursue those performing artists and special guests on social media as well as keep your event registrants engaged.

Start early

To make your event a success, you need to start doing these promotional activities in advance. Email marketing and SEO are the primary channels you should use to target your attendees, as they have better ROI compared to all other medium. Implementing these tips will help you stay in touch with your attendees, and get the most out of your targeted event marketing strategy.

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Event marketing isn’t as easy as it seems – it is not just about using the resources at hand, like social media, to advertise your event, it is about having a marketing strategy that is driven by a solid timeline and clever tactics. Remember, no two events are the same; never make the mistake of generalizing your event strategies, that would be a grave error on your part. If you’re still confused about how to proceed with event campaign, these pointers could come in handy.

Pre-Event Planning

The pre-event stage is critical since this will make or break your event. Most people make the mistake of starting the marketing campaign when the event is ready to be launched. You need to get the word out even before the details of the event have been finalized. So what if the trivial details haven’t been decided yet? You can still start a page online, and keep updating the page as and when the details are finalized. For example, you could have your page SEO optimized, and that would definitely increase the traffic to your page. Blog posts to the official page also form an important part of the marketing campaign.

An important part of pre-event marketing is partner outreach. You must reach out to as many companies and collaborators for partnership; that would amp up your resources which would be helpful in the next stage of the planning.

The Main Event

Just before the launch of the event, you could start an email campaign, that would reach out to your target audience. When people visit the page you’ve created, they get the option of signing up. You could send out an email blast to all those who’ve signed up, including your potential clients.

If you have some idea about PR, you’ll know how important a press release is. When your event has been launched, you could send out an official press release to all the eminent media houses to ensure maximum publicity. For more press coverage, you could even opt for search engine optimization which would bring your event into the spotlight.

It’s A Continuous Process

Paid promotion is a continuous process; you need to take every day into account and plan your strategy beforehand. For instance, you could make use of social posts and blogging to give your marketing a boost.

You have your attendee referral, don’t you? Keep that in mind while devising your marketing plans. Google adverts and Google AdWords would be a great way to promote your event in this particular stage.  This is a trying time for you as an event manager, you need to pull your socks up and give it all you’ve got!

The above roadmap could come to your rescue if you’re totally lost about how to plan your event marketing strategy. Official pages, blogs, email marketing, social posts, SEO, attendee referrals, paid promotion – there’s so much to take into consideration! Only a well thought out plan could help you with your endeavor. So go ahead, chalk out the perfect marketing strategy for your upcoming event!

The post How To Devise The Event Marketing Strategy For Upcoming Event appeared first on Yapsody.

1. #Promotion

If you don’t have a hashtag for your event, create it. Posters, flyers, tweets, pictures, emails – anything related to your hashtag should be posted along with your event hashtag. Ask your friends, relatives, sponsors, speakers, colleagues, and employees to use it whenever they are talking about the event. If your hashtag is a buzz, your event is going to ‘bee’ awesome. Sometimes, event promotion websites pick up your hashtags and tweet it.

2. If Money Speaks, Influence Sings.

Reach out to influencers related to your event using websites like www.buzzsumo.com, and ninjaoutreach.com. Gently convince them to spread the word about your event in return for free event giveaways, or simply ask them if there’s anything you can do to return the favor. Don’t push them, though, as it might have an adverse effect on the  you present.

3. Chat ‘em up!

Leave comments in popular blogs and forums that are frequently visited by your target audience. You can answer relevant questions on Quora and contribute regularly on Facebook groups in order to get recognized amongst your potential attendees. This will boost your Facebook event marketing and mark you as someone who’s reliable and approachable.

4. Be My Guest!

After many interactions, you’re bound to find an interesting and relevant topic to write a guest post on. These are typically 500-1000 words long, and you can send them to blogs where you’re active or the blogs that usually post similar content. If they agree to put up your post, you’ll be able to tap their followers for your own event or concert. And even if they don’t, you’ll still have some fresh content for your own blog. It’s a win-win, anyway, so why not?

5. Three Wise Men

Call up 3 sponsors, speakers, or event partners, and see what’s up with them. Maybe they are stuck in a tight spot with their roles at the event and could do away with some help from your end. Try to help them out if they need anything, and this will let them have a positive outlook towards you and the event. And, who doesn’t like talking about good things?

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