Looking at Your Event Through a Marketing Perspective

Events are one of the top marketing channels for organizations worldwide. Yet despite their association with marketing, event teams oftentimes neglect to apply basic marketing practices to their events. What would happen if you applied marketing techniques to your event strategy? 

How to Leverage Marketing Practices for Events 

Define Your Target Audience

As you’re preparing for your event, consider who you want to attend. What is the best way to communicate with them? Consider using a mix of channels such as email, social media, direct mail, or targeted ads to communicate with your desired audience. 

Outline Your Key Messages

Determine your primary topic and which products and attributes are most closely associated with that topic. 

Remember there are two types of key messages, messages that inform and messages that persuade. Informative messages will determine what attendees will retain of your brand and how they will feel about your event after it’s ended. Persuasive messages are the driving force behind action. A good persuasive message will encourage attendees to interact with your brand in the future. Both types of messages are crucial to planning an event. 

Align Your Content with Your Key Messages

Once you’ve outlined your key messages, determine where those messages best fit into your event. Should they be shared during your keynote sessions, or rather in demos or 1:1 meetings? Strategically placing key messages throughout your content ensures prospect conversion. 

Visualize Your Ideal Outcome and Set Goals

Consider the best possible outcome for your event. What actions do you ultimately want your attendees to take?  Set goals for the things that will make the greatest impact, for example, achieving quality leads rather than reaching a high number of registrations.  

Apply Basic Conversion Models 

With your goals in sight, think of the different steps that your attendees will need to make to help you reach those goals. You can manage these steps in a marketing funnel similar to the one below. Using a marketing funnel will help you determine conversion rates (i.e. of those who registered for your event, how many scheduled sessions). These rates teach you where your attendees are losing interest or getting lost.

Know Event Benchmarks 

Benchmarks are a standard or point of reference against which things may be compared or assessed. In events these benchmarks include metrics such as the average number of attendees, leads gathered, sessions attended, or surveys responded to. Knowing how your event compares to others of the same size will help you more adequately measure your goals and demonstrate your event value to stakeholders. 

Applying Digital Marketing to Events

Digital marketing is the use of actions to convert an individual from a prospect to a buyer. Whether it’s opening a set of emails or clicking on a certain number of ads, marketing engagement is determined by the little actions prospects take to learn more about a brand. 

Luckily for event professionals, RainFocus has been built to catalog the actions of each attendee at any given point during the event lifecycle. The tools for understanding attendee engagement have been created for you, now it’s time to use those tools to convert your attendees into buyers. 

To learn how RainFocus can help you simplify your event marketing request a demo here.