6 Ideas For Event Marketing on Budget
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There is no better way for a company to present its products or services than to go out and directly approach potential customers. (Hello, trade shows, exhibitions, and live events!) According to the report, most marketers (31%) believe that events are the single-most effective marketing channel.
Why is that so? Well, people obviously love to meet in person and talk to company representatives face-to-face. A study reveals that 74% of attendees say they have a more positive opinion about the company, brand, or product being promoted after the event.
Most people are struggling to organize successful event planning on a budget without spending a lot of money. If you are a marketer, check out this post to learn six ideas for event marketing on a budget.
OPTIMIZE EVENT WEBSITE
Potential attendees will likely use Google to explore the coming event, which makes your website a starting point of event marketing. Search engine optimization (SEO) becomes paramount in such circumstances because it enables users to find you online among dozens of similar pages.
It all starts with the keyword strategy, so you need to detect all terms and phrases that the target audience will be searching for. Google’s Keyword Planner is the easiest solution to this problem, but you should also brainstorm different ideas with your team, and check out the biggest competitors in your niche to see how they optimize event sites.
CONTENT CREATION
Speaking of SEO, we cannot overestimate the importance of content creation for event promotion. Quality content is the basic component of optimization that proves the credibility of your marketing efforts.
Mark Ridley, a content creator at Career Booster, explains this process: “Event blog is critical because it helps you to display professional authority and knowledge. Besides that, you can tease website visitors by posting simple but effective industry analysis or by letting speakers write pre-event introductory notes.”
In case you really produce a lot of interesting content, you can expect a higher search engine ranking, increased website traffic, and finally more attendees.
UTILIZE EMAIL MARKETING
Email is probably the oldest channel of digital marketing, but it’s definitely not obsolete. As a matter of fact, it still has by far the biggest ROI potential - for every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38. Email campaigns have multiple effects on event marketing:
- Announcements: Use email to inform the target audience about your events.
- Anticipation: Create compelling headlines to inspire user interest and build pre-event anticipation.
- Content delivery: Add URLs to your emails to encourage receivers to visit your website.
- Reminders: Keep your audience updated about the venue and timing.
EXPLOIT SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media such as Facebook or Instagram give you the opportunity to strengthen relations with event attendees and attract more visitors. The trick is, however, to avoid generic content like empty venue photos or behind the scene videos.
Such posts are alright on some occasions, but most of the time you’ll need a more convincing content. For instance, your goal should be to show images including previous speakers or participants. That way, you can build trust, particularly if you add attendee testimonials to support your posts.
Although you’d like to avoid spending money, social media marketing enable low-cost campaign that can reach the audience successfully. With no more than $20, you can target potential attendees by age, gender, location, or any other feature that matches your needs.
USE VIDEO STREAMING
Videos represent by far the most popular type of digital content, with 80% of users claiming they would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog. You should seize the opportunity to address the audience via Facebook Live, a tool that perfectly suits the style of event marketing.
First of all, video streaming takes place in real-time, just like your events. The audience can ask questions and post comments, thus making the whole process interactive. Secondly, Facebook followers can see the real face behind your page, getting the notion of meeting you in person.
WORK WITH LOCAL INFLUENCERS
By definition, live events require a venue, so you can hardly expect people to travel around the world to attend your presentations or lectures. The goal is to attract locals and people who live relatively close to the event location. This is where local influencers step in to help you.
You can find and address local/regional industry thought leaders, inviting them to your show (free of charge) and asking them to share this information with their followers. It’s a power of word-of-mouth marketing that rarely goes unnoticed, so you should take advantage of it to attract more participants.
CONCLUSION
An average marketer is really struggling to promote an event while staying on the budget. Although it’s a difficult process, it’s not impossible. All it takes is to implement the right event marketing strategy using the most effective solutions.
In this post, we showed you six ideas for event marketing on the budget. Make sure to test them and you’ll realize that ideas make a great event, not money.
Guest Author Bio: Silvia Woolard is a freelance writer and novice entrepreneur from Phoenix. In her free time, she writes and works in a field of popular psychology and marketing. Read Silvia at her Twitter.
User-friendly software for anywhere and everywhere you want to take your event experience: