Research shows (I wonder who does these) that the most commonly used event promotion channels are email marketing, word of mouth, event website, and registered mail invites (as if you need a research to tell you that). And there are six tools that can be used to carry out the promotion using these channels more effectively.

EVENT WEBSITE

Consider your website to be a year-round marketing tool that can be used as the central point for all your marketing activities. Here’s how you can use it to your maximum advantage:

• Put up pictures of your previous events to get your potential attendees an idea of what your events are all about.
• Upload videos of guest speakers along with their presentation slides.
• Start promoting your upcoming events well before their scheduled dates so that you have enough time to spread the word and create a buzz.

e-MARKETING

Never forget the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) theory. Because, whatever efforts you put in will definitely reflect in the results you obtain.

When it comes to e-Marketing, you have to keep experimenting. Vary your content, your mail timings, subject lines etc. You have to constantly be aware of what your target audience needs, and deliver them that.

And as you experiment, keep collecting data and analyze it. Next, you put it to use and strategize according to your analysis. Your deductions aren’t supposed to be filed and buried in a marketing report.

CONTENT MARKETING

My personal favorite, this one.

Blogs and articles are like oxygen for your marketing campaign – breathe them. Everything important and relevant to your event should be put up as a blog. This encourages people to be involved with you consistently, and also helps you build your brand’s image.

Also, keep in mind the 10:1 principle which states that for every 10 pieces of content that you put up, only 1 leads to effective promotion. Keep experimenting with your content, too, but event updates should never be off the table.

WEBINARS

Webinars going hand-in-hand with today’s generation would be an understatement; they practically hug each other as they walk. What could be better than getting all relevant information delivered to you live while you’re enjoying the comforts of your house?

Conduct webinars that either build up to your upcoming event or are based on previous themes or topics. You can even conduct interviews with your past speakers who have served as great influences to promote your event.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Facebook is definitely used by everyone, but that need not imply that your target audience will also be just as active there. Try to find networks where your potential attendees are most likely to be found online, and share all content relevant to your event there. Also, when you’ve teamed up with speakers and sponsors, develop your relationships with them in arenas where their fans are also present.

PARTNERSHIPS

When you have good speakers on your list, ask for their assistance in building content pertaining to your theme to put up on social media, your website, and blogs. You could also interview them and share their videos on your networks. The key is to use them as marketing assets, but treat them as your team members.

The post Six Tools To Fix Your Event Marketing appeared first on Yapsody.

1. Create website content that can make conversions happen

Since your website is where people will land before they buy event tickets or think of buying, you’ve to make sure it not only prevents them from changing their minds, but also eggs them on. In order to optimize your website content so that it generates maximum ticket sales, follow these simple rules:

• Begin with your conclusion
• Use headings, subheadings, bullets, and numbers
• Keep things short and sweet. Avoid long sentences and paragraphs
• Incorporate overviews and summaries
• Highlight vital details
• Be considerate towards privacy and copyrights

Your website defines your credibility, so including your speakers, feedbacks from your past attendees, press mentions, photos from the previous events etc. can be a great idea. Also, keep updating your website and make sure no outdated information is lying around. Embedding Facebook or Twitter feeds and having an active blog also keeps customers in the loop. Avoid advertisements or banners on your website that may distract and annoy your visitors.

2. Design your pricing and promotional offers creatively

Because only pretty websites and newsletters can’t do the trick. Divide your tickets into at least three categories – Early Bird, Standard, and VIP. You can decide the price range by evaluating the average price of your tickets. If the average price of your ticket is $40, you can offer Early Bird category at $20-$30, the standard ones at $50-$60 and the VIP at $70-$80. Categories that convey urgency and are time/quantity restricted always work. If you have special discounts and offers, promote them widely. These can include ‘Buy 2, Get 1 Free!’, couple and group discounts, and referral coupons. With Yapsody, you can even have Access Codes, which are special codes that aren’t available to everyone and come along with special features such as a free dinner or an after-party. Never offer a lower price for the tickets than you’ve done before. This may cost you your attendees, and a great deal of reputation.

3. Your Call-To-Action (CTA) is your Superhero

Do not underestimate the power of that tiny button with two little words, because it has the potential to make, or break, a sale. To make sure you are using your CTA effectively, incorporate these factors in it:

• Offer benefits to your buyers. As covered in the previous section, this can be done by offering early bird discounts, group discounts, and referral coupons.
• Create a feeling of urgency by putting a time or quantity restriction. Make your audience feel as if they’d be missing out on something huge if they don’t register immediately.
• If you offer a money back guarantee or full refund, your attendees are more likely to register right away because of the reduced risks.
• Use imperative verbs for your call to action, like “GET YOUR TICKETS!” or “BUY NOW!”

4. Develop a lovable registration process

A lot of people, on seeing your website/newsletter/advertisements are going to think of buying event tickets online. But, if you have a gloomy, boring, lengthy registration process, they might drop it mid-way. Here are a few tips on how to make the process optimized for your attendees:

• Keep it short and simple. If there are ambiguous fields, add necessary descriptions.
• Information that isn’t needed shouldn’t be asked for.
• Although asking them to create an account may not necessarily lengthen the procedure by many fields, users tend to go ‘meh!’ when they are asked to do so.
• Know and use the currency, payment methods, and language that are local to your target audience. This is known to have boosted ticket sales by 300%.
• Conserve your brand identity by keeping the registration native to your own website instead of redirecting users to a third-party site or service.

5. Make your registration all-device-friendly

In an era where people browse the internet on their watches, building websites that aren’t compatible with mobile phones and tablets will work against you. While personal computers and laptops are usually used for browsing stuff that’s informative or entertaining, people resort to their mobile devices when they actually have an action to perform and a purpose to fulfill. If your CTA button or registration form is not mobile-friendly, users might get annoyed and give up, losing you a good 70% of your potential attendees.

In Conclusion, just take care of two basic factors – your website and your event’s registration form. All the above 5 steps revolve around these two, and in order to make a great impression, these are the boxes you should be tidying up.

The post 5 Little Tips to Increase Ticket Sales appeared first on Yapsody.

Social walls are big screens that are put up during events that collect and display all the social media activity that’s happening inside the event. For example, if you are hosting an casino events and have a dedicated hashtag for it, the tweets sent out by your attendees with your hashtags will be displayed on the social wall. This is refreshed every few seconds, ensuring that the display is real-time. Of course, your attendees will love it if their tweets are flashed on the big screen for everyone at the event to see, but is that all a social wall has to offer? If not, what else? Well, let’s have a look.

SCREENCEPTION

As funny as it sounds, that term is on its way to competing with ‘selfie’. The few seconds of glory that is received when an attendee sees his tweet on the screen encourages everyone to keep posting more and more on social media with your event’s hashtag. That level of social media activity can just work wonders for your event and your brand. Coming to screenception, it is a phenomenon that’s observed when someone clicks a picture of the wall when his tweet or post is being flashed and posts it. Doesn’t make sense, but sure as hell makes your online presence huge.

PROGRESS

The technology only witnessed the display of tweets and Facebook posts related to the event in its early days, but now social walls have a lot more than just that. Walls now have aesthetically arranged and integrated posts, images, and videos from across a large number of social media outlets including Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

WORKING

As much as I wish it were true, this Wall-E cannot think on its own and find out what has to go up and what needs to be ignored. For text posts, hashtag filters are used, while keyword or phrase filters are used for images and videos. Social walls can be highly customized, though, according to what you need for your event.

MODERATION

Like I said, this Wall-E doesn’t have a brain of its own, so it cannot moderate the posts that go up. Usually, live moderation is the most preferred technique where you can view and moderate every post before it is sent up on the wall using your phone or laptop. If you don’t have the time or resources for live moderation, you could also buy packages that provide basic profanity and keyword filters that can be preset. The easiest way to moderate the posts is by creating a twitter handle where you simply retweet the posts that you want to share and only these posts get to go up.

OPTIMIZATION

Social walls can be included in all kinds of events including conference events, trade shows, and fundraisers. You can embed social walls in a website or mobile app to create a buzz and encourage social media activity before or after the event. But, what matters is that your screen be large enough so that it is viewed by a large number of people at the same time. Social walls can also be used for internal purposes. For example, a private live screen can be used to connect remote employees to enable them to connect to each other.

WHY

• SOCIAL REACH: Like I’ve mentioned a million times before, it’ll increase social media activity around your event, boost conversations and foster communities before, during, and after your event.
• EASY TO USE: Live displays are big, but not complicated. They can be easily set up and configured. Plus, they create a happening environment that entertains your attendees and gives your event a tech savvy edge.
• MONETIZE YOUR WALL: You don’t have to share a random train of tweets when you can easily use your wall for running competitions and marketing your brand. Some smart techniques and you’ll be able to come up with a hundred ways of using the big screen.
• QUALITY CONTENT: Since their tweets will have a chance to get displayed on a screen that is being viewed by so many other people at that very instant present in the same room, the quality of the content is bound to shoot up.

WHAT

Social walls are a big leap when it comes to technology in events, and within no time, presenters have come up with innovative ways to put them to use. At the same time, one should realize that events have a lot more to them than just social media, so care should be taken that these big screens don’t overshadow everything else the event stands for. Your event wall shouldn’t just be an add-on; it should blend with the rest of your engagement tools and represent the innate values of the event. Depending upon your event, you can have a list of things to do with your wall, and the best way to figure that out would be to look at examples, sit with your team and brainstorm.

The post Wall-E: Social Wall For Your Event appeared first on Yapsody.

1. FLYERS

If you know the groups that belong to your target audience, you might as well figure out their hangouts. For events that are centered around the youth, you could try hanging flyers in cafés, malls, multiplexes, and gyms. Make sure your flyers attract eyeballs and give essential information about your event like the day, date, time, venue, how to register details on how to buy event tickets, and a brief description of what your event is about.

2. EVENTS

To know what kind of people are likely to attend your event, you’ll have to attend other events yourself. Get yourself passes to the kind of events your potential attendees are likely to attend, and have one-to-one conversations with them. Don’t have a high sales pitch, but while you’re chitchatting, let it subtly slip that you’re going to organize a similar event.

3. MEDIA ATTENTION

The key to a good event is thorough understanding of your audience. This also includes knowing what they might be interested to read or listen to. Get in touch with writers and shows that broadcast similar content, and request them to put up information about your event, too. Make sure you don’t miss out on the finer wh- details.

4. TALK ABOUT IT A LOT

Though it seems obvious that your friends and relatives are going to attend your event because, well, it’s YOUR event, it really isn’t. We take this assumption so casually that we even forget to inform them about the event at all. Keep dropping your event’s details in between conversations because it’s the simplest form of mouth-to-mouth marketing, and all the more effective.

5. MEET THEM

True, webinars and chats are doing pretty well, but nothing beats pop-ups. Have a promotional activity that’s engaging and amusing right on the streets where your target folks are most likely to hang out. You can also put up stalls and booths near your event’s venue and give out stickers or t-shirts to tell people about your event. Having it near your event’s venue will directly attract people who stay or work nearby, and are likely to drop by for your event.

The post Offline Marketing Tips For Your Event appeared first on Yapsody.

Get Site-d!

Your website, or your online ticket store, will probably be the first SIGNIFICANT impression that you’ll make on your customers. So, make sure you make a good one. When you register with Yapsody, we don’t just give you a platform to sell tickets – we give you an online ticket store with a customized URL (e.g. www.yourevent.yapsody.com) where your customers can

• Interact and connect with you in your local language (Click Here to check if your local language is supported by Yapsody)
• Add multiple events to the Shopping Cart so that they can Check Out with a single transaction
• View entire history of their past transactions, and of course
• Buy tickets!

You can also have a customized section for FAQs to answer possible queries of your customers.

Social Media

Social Media is just never enough promotion. Never. Enough. It is the easiest way to spread word about your event and reach a large audience. Plus, it’s much easier for someone to simply click the “Share” button to let people know about your upcoming event or concert, than actually talk and explain. Yapsody provides you with Social Media widgets that help you with your promotion. You can embed these buttons in your Facebook page, your blog, your Tweets and divert traffic to your website, registration page, or online ticket store. And there is no known job that can’t be done with a few buttons set loose, is there? *wink*

Because Sharing is Caring

Get out there, be a good kid, and share your event on social event sites like www.eventful.org and www.upcoming.org. These websites allow you to publish your event details in order to drive more traffic and increase your target audience reach. Thankfully, a lot of them are free and let you put up your description, event date, time, venue, pricing, and website address.

Did someone say “free”?

The moment you read that the social event sites are free, you’re already Googling your way through twenty of them. So, why not give back some free stuff to the virtual world as well? Discounts, promotional coupons, freebies – they are little packets of happiness. People love free, no matter what it is. Yapsody lets you add different types of discount offers to your tickets: early purchase, group discounts, promo codes, and a lot more.

The “E” in “Email” stands for “Evergreen”

Emails always work. And when I say ‘always’, I mean it. You can easily import your customer list into your MailChimp contact list with our easy-to-use integration tool. Use it to send across event updates, newsletters, and interact with your customers easily. Frequent emails show you care, and that you are active. With blue ticks and ‘Seen’, people have grown used to instant responses.

Many of them might be old-school knew-that-one-already tips, but they still work. And I’m sure they always will. Just like my jokes. My jokes don’t work? Maybe because I don’t pay them enough! Okay, maybe I should take that one back. *facepalm*

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