How to Promote an Event Online

Event marketing can be a straight-up daunting endeavor. It encompasses a wide variety of disciplines, which can require a lot of work across multiple teams within an organization.

Promoting a new event—and especially one that is large or rather formal—sometimes feel like a Herculean task. But with the right tools and strategy, you’ll be navigating your promotional waters like a pro!

Let’s look at some of event marketing strategies and tools you can use to create buzz and increase attendance at your company or organization’s next event.

As we do, you’ll quickly see that the best way to do this is through a multi-faceted approach.

Getting the Word Out (Multi-Channel Style!)

What this means is promoting your event by using a variety of marketing disciplines you are probably already using for your normal marketing anyhow, such as:

Website

In addition to being the keystone of all marketing activities, a compelling website is a crucial component of event marketing.

In fact, it should be the home base for all related information. Whether you host it on your existing website or build something new, the goal remains the same.

This should be where you’re driving all your promotional work, so make sure your event’s landing page includes all the necessary information to drive optimal results.

Don’t forget your social share buttons to help spread the buzz around town.

Social Media

 Make sure you set a dedicated hashtag for your event for all your social media promotion, checking first to ensure it’s not already in use.

Use engaging visuals, videos and animations to draw attention to your tweets promoting the event. Be sure to pin your posts as well.

You might also want to take advantage of paid social to extend the reach and awareness of the event.

Email Marketing

Develop your communications plan for emails well in advance. Different types of emails will work best for different audiences.

Reminder emails to those already RSVP’d will not be pertinent and people you are still selling tickets to will require these frequent updates to maintain buzz.

If you establish your email plan and messaging strategy ahead of time, you’ll be better set up for success in the long run.

Make the Most of Existing Marketing Activities

It’s important to not forget about leveraging your existing marketing activities to promote your event.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel here—what’s important is that you work to align your activities to aid in promotion.

If you keep a  blog, cater a few posts to help promote the event. You might recognize this as something we’ve been doing right here on our own blog.

If you’re involved in, or attending other events during your promotion period, share information about your own event and encourage other people—and especially employees or fellow coworkers—to get involved.

If you send out a regular newsletter, be sure to highlight your event as often as possible. Even better, drop some sneak peeks of the agenda to help create buzz!

Depending on the nature of your event and your existing activities, you may want to add slides or event information to webinars. This way, you’re guaranteed a relevant audience who will likely be interested in other learning activities your company offers.

Let’s Talk a Little More About Social Media

The ROI for promoting an event through your social media accounts can be insane. Since we want you to get as much value as possible, let’s take a closer look at a couple of key social media platforms.

Twitter

Twitter is a great promotion medium, and the key to its potential are hashtags. Every time you tweet about your event, make sure to always use the same hashtags.

At the same time, be consistent and use the same hashtags across all social media. Your audience will recognize the hashtag and associate it with your event. Moreover, hashtags are great for real-time engagement during your event.

You can also use already existing hashtags or conversations and relate to them, bringing the news about your event to new audiences. If you have sponsors or cohosts for your event, make sure you follow them. This is a smart approach because they will be more than happy to retweet your tweets—which expands your social reach in promoting the event.

Facebook

Some people think that once they set up a Facebook event and just invite people, the event will become popular on its own. This is a mistake.

To make the most from this promotional opportunity, you’ll need to keep your audience engaged—otherwise, even if people have RSVP’d, they might simply forget about your event.

Be sure to mention the event on your Facebook page. If you’ve got an event poster or flyer, place a copy of it in your cover photo. This will further keep the event prominent and in the fronts of peoples’ minds.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a surprisingly valuable resource to use for all kinds of business events promotion. Set up a group for participants to help them interact and exchange opinions about subjects that will be taken up at the event.

You should always add a social media feed and inspire connections to share the news about your event to their own networks with the use of strong, interesting content (related to your event).

After Everyone’s Gone Home

The event might be over but your work still isn’t done. It’s important to take all your promotional efforts and close out the event in a way that can be used for future events.

You’ve likely collected a metric ton of photos, videos, feedback, testimonials and more during your event. Perhaps you’ve even boosted your email marketing list by getting new addresses from event attendees.

These are all valuable elements you can compile into a promotional tool for your next event. Be sure to take stock of what you have and find ways to market it.

Don’t dismiss what you have in your back pocket. Take stock of what you’ve got and use it to help you in your future endeavors.

Promoting an event or conference is an enormous task, crossing multiple disciplines and requiring a good amount of foresight and strategic thinking. But if you follow the steps above, you’ll be that much closer to a successful, popular event.

No matter if we’re talking about marketing events or your own business, it can be very helpful to have a team of experts working for you—and this is exactly what you get when you hire CP Solutions. For more information about how we can take your business or event to the next level, simply give us a call at (833) 622-0907.

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VMD Services, LLC. and 2nGage, LLC. are subsidiaries of CP Solutions