Welcome to the event manager blog series. In this article, we are going to take a look at some major mistakes planners are making when it comes to event marketing. While the internet makes it easy to put together a website, create an event on one or more platforms, send out a few e-vites, or put out some updates on Social Media, but planning events as a job is not an easy task. What you need is a well thought-out marketing campaign, one that will help you create excitement about your event, engage with your audience before, during and after your event. And sell tickets of course. So, be aware of these four marketing mistakes that event planners make.
- A Bad Website
Your business website is a portal of sort to your events. You want your website to make a lasting impression; whether that is a modern, beautiful website, or something that’s a little more simple yet playful, you need to make sure that your website is communicating the message your event attendees need to hear. Is your website mobile responsive? If it doesn’t look good on a smartphone, this is something you need to address.
- Being Anti-Social
Social media marketing is essential to being able to engage with your audience on a long term basis. Sure, your planned events do have an end date, but the relationships that you are building with your attendees should never come to an end. Event marketing works in three phases: Pre-event, Live, and Post Event. During the pre-event phase, you’re really looking to build up excitement and engagement with your audience. There’s a couple of ways you can accomplish this – posting questions or polls or Facebook and Twitter. During the live phase, you really want that audience online to realize that they made the wrong decision by not attending your event. Finally, during the post-event phase, you should be featuring content that was created at your event, things like video clips or pictures, sponsor recognition or shout-outs to your super fans or any major influencers in attendance.
- Not Driving Content
An event provides the perfect stage to create digital content. Whether it’s interviews or a quote from attendees, speaker presentations, or simply a walk around the event space itself, you should be sharing all of this content with your fans. If you are concerned with the time it would take you to create all of this content, hold that thought for a moment; because you don’t. Sharing posts or tweets from your attendees, or thoughts from your speakers, you can pull vendor and sponsor social media posts as well, so that you’re constantly providing value and staying in front of your event attendees.
- Bad Registration Process
There is nothing more off putting to an event attendee than trying to go through a registration process that is difficult or clumsy to complete. If your attendees are trying to give you their money, but the process is making it hard for them to do so, you’re going to have a very bad time. Thankfully, there is no shortage of great ticket sales and registration platforms out there for your consideration. Try testing out two or three of them out and see which one works best for you. Just make sure that by the time you are ready to sell tickets, that platform is ready to go.
Final Thoughts
A successful event marketing campaign is really about careful thought and wild abandon to share whatever you think is relevant with your attendees. A great deal of that strategy consists of low hanging fruit that you just can’t afford to miss. Keeping up with current marketing trends is a great way to get fresh ideas and learn which strategies deliver better outcomes is one of the better ways to get maximum results from your next event.
Leave us a comment, tell us your story, share your passion for organizing events, or get in touch by email and we would be happy to help you plan and host your next fund-raising event.
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