6 Tips To Enhance You Pre-Event Content Marketing Strategy
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Experienced planners understand that great events are only a jewel in the crown of carefully executed preparations. The final result has to be amazing, but the majority of work is done before the actual event day. Planning is essential because:
- Most marketers think that event marketing is the single most effective marketing channel.
- 75% of marketers claim that live events are becoming increasingly important to their organization’s success.
Despite the importance of pre-event strategy, a large portion of planners still don’t know how to prepare and ignite a spark of interest among target audiences. They use obsolete tactics and fail to design captivating content to attract attendees.
If you want to ensure the success of your event, you cannot make such mistakes. In this post, we will show you 6 tips to enhance your pre-event content marketing strategy.
COMMUNICATION CHANNELS
You could be delivering superb content, but it will be useless if you don’t distribute it through the right channels of communication. You need to know where to find the target audience and when to publish pre-event posts. For this reason, you need to understand how each communication platform works.
For example, more than a third of Facebook users in the US are 34 and younger. On the other hand, LinkedIn is perfect if you are trying to approach people with above-average education as almost 40% of users have a college degree. At the same time, more than half of Twitter users earn over $50 thousand a year.
You obviously need to know these details and dig deeper into each channel of communication before you begin publishing pre-event content. It will help you to reach more people and maximize the potential of the marketing strategy.
BUILD ANTICIPATION
Ricky Churchwell, a content marketing specialist at UK Best Essays, recently noted: “The best way to create pre-event excitement is to design a teaser campaign and release small portions of intriguing content over the longer period of time. The point is to inspire excitement and expectation among target attendees, making them more and more interested in your event.”
It’s an old psychological trick that still works well, particularly in the sales business. And since you are trying to sell your event, you should take advantage of the same tactic. In that respect, you can:
- Create daily countdown: 10 days to…
- Design engaging calls to action: Book me a seat now!
- Highlight scarcity: Only 12 places left!
PUBLISH SPEAKERS’ SNEAK PEEKS
The power of events lies in their speakers. After all, people will come primarily because they want to hear what industry thought leaders have to say. You should make use of this fact and publish pre-event sneak peeks created by the speakers.
It could be a simple image with textual content, a blog post, or a report from one of the previous events. In each case, it’s a great opportunity to let people get the basic notion of the happening and inspire them to take part.
CREATE VIDEOS
Another way to grab the attention of your audience is to create fun and educational videos to announce main event topics. As the content is going more visual, a video became one of the most efficient promotional tactics. According to the study, video marketers achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness.
This fact is more than enough to convince clever planners to shoot pre-event video content. A 2 or 3-minute video is quick and dynamic, but long enough to present key points of your gathering. Besides that, people remember images much better than plain text, so they won’t forget your event.
MIND THE LOCATION
By definition, an event is a local thing and you should optimize content so as to fit local search queries. This doesn’t mean you should neglect nation-wide awareness if there is enough interest, but most events aim at smaller and territory-focused audiences.
Make sure to add all details relevant to the event – date & time, venue, address, agenda, etc. Include location-driven keywords and don’t be afraid to add longtail phrases to describe things even further. This way, everyone who sees your content will immediately understand where to go and how to find you.
OFFER PERKS
Event attendees look forward to hearing what key opinion leaders have to say, but sometimes it’s not enough to make them engaged. You can change that by offering free perks to all participants. For instance, it could be a new research or eBook you designed specifically for this purpose. Or you can promise to record the event and send them the compilation of best moments. This might seem like a too much effort with all that regular work you are doing, but it is often the secret ingredient for successful event planners.
CONCLUSION
Content marketing strategy is one of the key elements of pre-event planning. You must design it carefully and precisely, respecting the needs and expectations of target attendees. In this article, we revealed 6 tips to enhance your pre-event content marketing strategy.
What do you think is the single most important tactic for your company? Do you have other content ideas to share with our readers? Feel free to leave a comment - we’d be glad to discuss this topic with you!
Guest Author Bio: Warren is a marketing enthusiast and a blogger at UK Best Essays, who loves music. If he doesn’t have a guitar in his hands, he’s probably embracing new technologies and marketing techniques online! You can meet him on Twitter and Facebook.
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