You may hate it, yet you can't ignore it: marketing is the key factor in guaranteeing a higher attendance rate. Powerful marketing campaigns are crucial if you want to generate new leads and build relationships with your potential audience. Whether you need to sell more tickets or strengthen the community you've created around the event, a good marketing plan will help you achieve your pre-established goals.
Though the world today offers you an incredible number of marketing tools you can use to promote your event, designing an efficient marketing plan isn't always easy as it may seem. People (potential attendees) are constantly flooded with advertising and messages from countless brands and upcoming events.
Considering the incessant stream of news and notifications, it's becomes harder and harder to push through the noise and build efficient connections with your target group. Moreover, if you’re not working with a professional marketer, you run the risk of ending up with a poorly designed marketing plan that, instead of promoting your event, will diminish its relevance.
To help you overcome these challenges, we put together a list of mistakes you may commit when setting up your event marketing plan and what should you do to avoid them:
Mistake 1. Undermining the value proposition of your event
One of the biggest mistakes event professionals make is not knowing to the right way to promote their event. Yes, they may find the best marketing tools and apply powerful marketing strategies, yet they lack something more important: they don't know how to highlight the value proposition of the event.
Why should people attend? How is your conference, festival or workshop different from other events? What will the attendees gain from your event? The starting point in designing a marketing plan would be to define the value proposition of the event (a.k.a the awesomeness of the event) and then start to promote the hell out of it.
Mistake 2. Searching for potential attendees in the wrong places
The end receiver or the consumer of your marketing content is your target group. Are you sure you're aiming to attract the right people, and are you looking for them in the right places? For example, if your event topic is self-publishing, it doesn't make sense to promote your event on a gardeners' Facebook group page. Of course, you may find a few people interested in attending your event, but your best course of action would be to promote your event on a writers' group page.
Mistake 3. Using the wrong language with your potential attendees
To attract people to buy tickets and attend your event, you must talk in the language of their interests, needs, or problems. What happens instead? We all can see the generic advertising messages that try to convince people to attend an event. By launching content that lacks personality, you run the risk of getting drowned out by all the digital noise. Instead, you must find a way to differentiate your message from others by talking the language of your target group. What problems do they have? What are their biggest worries or passions? Having this information, you can build a strong message that you can connect with your potential attendees.
Mistake 4. Failing to highly personalize your messages
Continuing the previous thought, when it comes to email marketing, people are immune to generic messages. If you want someone to open your invitation, you can’t just send general information about the event and then sit back and wait for people to go to your page and buy a ticket. First, you should personalize the messages (specifying the name of the receiver). Second, you should let people know that you are aware of their activity, the previous event they've attended, or the city where they live. You can add a personal line in the email introduction such as "We were happy to see you at the last edition of the event ..." or "We hope you enjoyed the last night's game between ..." This will show your recipients that they aren't just numbers to you. Start by connecting with your mail campaign recipients. You won’t have to wait to see the results.
Call to action
There are multiple ways you can destroy your event marketing plan. However, you have one powerful solution that will help you avoid this: Whenever you are about to design or launch your marketing plan, always think about the end consumers of your advertising. Try to connect with those end consumers and be authentic in your desire to add value to their personal or professional lives. Always take how they'll feel into account when receiving your messages. And never fail to connect with them at a humane level.
