3 Event Marketing Tips and Tricks for Associations

Whether you’re hosting a keynote speech or a conference, your association can leverage engaging events to build member loyalty and make connections in your industry. That said, planning an event is one thing, but getting attendees through the door is another. 

1. That’s where event marketing comes into play 

Strategically promoting your event to appeal to target audiences can boost your RSVPs and, potentially, your return on investment (ROI). However, effective event marketing campaigns require careful planning and adherence to proven best practices. In this guide, we’ll explore how to execute an event marketing strategy with these steps:

1. Create detailed audience profiles
2. Embrace interactive marketing ideas
3. Leverage event marketing automation
4. Take a multi-channel marketing approach

These best practices will help you optimize your event marketing efforts and spread awareness of your brand. Keep your association’s unique brand and marketing approach in mind as you employ the following steps.

1. Create detailed audience personas

Your association likely already targets specific audiences for general marketing efforts, and event marketing is no different. However, your audience for your event marketing outreach might differ based on the event’s purpose. You can make detailed audience profiles based on factors such as:

• Demographic information. Knowing basic information about your target audience’s age, location, income level, and educational background helps you establish a baseline foundation for your event marketing approach. 

• Interests and values. Once you have demographics down, develop your personas further by gauging their interests and values. They can be related to your event, industry, and association, but remember to include personal interests and values as well to get a comprehensive picture of their motivations.

• Pain points and challenges. Your event should present a solution to a challenge your audience members face. Map out why your audience feels these pain points and how your event can help them.

• Preferred communication channels. When picking your event marketing channels, prioritize those that your audience uses to maintain efficiency and get results faster. For instance, if most of your audience prefers to communicate via email, spend your resources developing digital marketing content.

• Relationship to your association. Understanding your target audience’s relationship with your organization helps you determine the specificity and subject of your marketing messages. For example, are you targeting existing customers or people who haven’t heard of your organization?

To ensure you create these personas with updated and accurate information, conduct a data append. Once you create your personas with this information, you can optimize your marketing messages for the marketing funnel, which is a way of visualizing the specificity of a marketing message in relation to the audience’s motives. Take a look at Fifty & Fifty’s funnel diagram:

Developing these insights in detail allows your organization to create highly personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience and hit the right funnel position. 

2. Embrace interactive marketing ideas

Remember that quality is just as, if not more, important than quantity when it comes to marketing. Making campaigns as engaging as possible is important for maximizing your return on investment and getting attendees excited about your event. Plus, word of mouth can be a great tool for spreading the word to members’ networks, too. Try Getting Attention’s interactive membership marketing ideas for your association’s next event:

• User-generated content. Social media is a powerful marketing tool, but the sheer volume of content posted can make it challenging to organize your marketing posts into a comprehensive campaign. However, hashtags have made it possible for user-generated content to support your association’s event marketing efforts. Challenge your members to post photos under a relevant, unique hashtag and repost content to your feed to keep the momentum going.

• Pre-event contest. Take your user-generated content approach to the next level by implementing an element of gamification. For example, you could ask your members to compete to see which post under your hashtag gets the most likes. The winner will be announced at the event and will win a prize. This idea not only spreads the word about your event but also raises the stakes for your members, boosting participation.

These are just a few examples of interactive marketing ideas to get you started. The best ideas energize your members to get them excited for the event, so appealing to their personal interests and tying them to your brand identity is crucial.

3. Leverage event marketing automation for associations

Effective event marketing campaigns for associations are dynamic and adaptable, responding to real-time updates during the campaign rollout. Using event management software with automation allows you to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and address issues immediately. Here are some ways marketing automation can benefit your association’s event marketing efforts:

• Manage registration. Manually sending emails after every RSVP response is tedious and time-consuming. Configure your event management software to automatically send registration confirmations, reminders, and more follow-up communications to free up bandwidth for your team to focus on event planning. 

• Schedule content blasts. Maintaining a consistent content calendar is necessary, yet can be challenging for busy marketers. Marketing automation software allows you to schedule posts ahead of time so you never miss a deadline in your marketing plan.

• Audience segmentation. If you’re targeting multiple audiences using the aforementioned persona criteria, segmenting your communications based on data is a large undertaking. However, marketing automation software makes it simple and can even provide recommendations of which segments to target. 

• Generate reports. Having access to your key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the campaign helps you make important data-driven decisions. Marketing software automatically tracks your priority KPIs and stores them so you can view your progress at any time.

From registration to follow-up, a robust event management system with automation features will improve your marketing results and yield a better event experience for everyone.

Implementing your event marketing strategies for your association

Once you’ve conceptualized your event marketing strategy for your association, it’s time to implement your strategies. First, ensure you’re set up for success with an event management tool on your side. Then, experiment with different approaches until you’ve found the best one. Finally, after the event wraps, use your software to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts so you can expand upon your success in the future.