5 Social Media Tips to Promote Your Next Event

Social media is the place to be for promoting just about anything these days. Promoting an event is no exception. You have to be on key with your social network outreach in order to appeal to a wider base. To help kick off your next event promo via social media, here’s a few tips to put you on the right track.

1. Share an Event Teaser

How do upcoming movies create hype? With a trailer of course. You can do the same with your event by creating a teaser with highlight of last year’s event. You can edit it to include background music, CGI, or whatever you think is necessary to give the video an extra bit of pow. The teaser can also be supplemented with a more formal, unedited video of presentations and speeches from past speakers.

Here is an example of an effective teaser video from fragrance company Diesel to promote its musical concert Diesel On Tour. It’s rather short, less than a minute, but it gets straight to the point, featuring interviews from musicians slated to perform.

Photo credit: Oslo Hackney

2. Create a Referral Program

For best results, consider a double-sided referral program. Don’t know what this is? This is basically a referral where incentives are given to both the person that made the referral and the person that was referred. So, for example, instead of offering a $50 gift certificate to the person who referred a friend, why not give a $25 gift certificate to both the referred individual and the person responsible for the referral?

Here’s an example of a double-sided referral program from the dietary supplement company 22 Days Nutrition:

Photo credit: Referral Candy

As you can see, the customer and his referred friend are both rewarded. Promote the event heavily on social media and really drill in the fact that both the person referred and “refferee” get incentivized.

3. Promote Your Event Hashtag

Promote the heck out of your hashtag. Mention it on your event website, emails, printed flyers, and any social networks you’re active on. Of course, you have to be strategic with how you select a hashtag. For the most part, though, the rules are simple: keep it short and decipherable. By decipherable, this means your demographic audience should understand it even if it’s abbreviated.

The Amsterdam Dance Event, one of the biggest music festivals in Amsterdam, always recycles its hashtag, which is #ADE(year). So, for example, #ADE15 for 2015 and #ADE16 for 2016. This hashtag is very effective because it’s extremely brief, easy to memorize, and is easily discernable for the targeted demographic.

Photo credit: Sergio Tee

4. Share Your Story

Relay your story on your social network sites. People aren’t just interested in a company and its products but also the people behind it. People also like a good underdog story, so especially be willing to share your story if your company was rooted in humble beginnings. Don’t make it into a sob story, but do be sure to mention some of the stumbling blocks that had to be overcame.

The Facebook post below is an excellent example of someone talking about his origins and how it shaped both his company and who he is as a person:

Photo credit: Gevme

If you noticed, the story also contains some valuable life lessons towards the end. Stories like these are what really helps connect with our audience at a deeper emotional level.

5. Create Sharable Content

In the days leading up to your event, begin creating share-worthy content. Of course, sharable content can entail a wide range of things. This can be a funny meme or GIF, or a full-length blog post. A few other posts that you can incorporate might include the following:

• How-to articles or video tutorials
• A fun-facts article
• A white animation video of your industry or company
• Highlight of past events
• A Q&A event or U-stream

The content should tie back in some way to the event. The more specific you can be the better. If you’re running a digital marketing conference, for example, and a speaker will be speaking on the current state of SEO, then content should be SEO-related rather than, say, social media marketing. While the latter is a related topic, it is still a different subject. Disseminate the content on multiple social networks and particularly on LinkedIn since the content is industry-related.

You have (or should have) plenty of material to share to build up anticipation for your event. Social media is the place for spreading your content and creating word of mouth. Be consistent, and eventually all those views, shares, and likes will translate to a bigger event turnout.

Dan McCarthy is an Event Manager at Ultimate Experience, an event management company based in the UK. Dan has 5 years of event project management under his belt. He has worked on many successful events, and currently he shares his knowledge by writing on the company blog. Follow him on Twitter @DanCarthy2.

Zero to hero #1

Growing a startup...the hard, but fun way

When we launched Mitingu, our online event registration and communications platform in January 2015, we were all super enthusiastic (we still are) about what we had created and how it could bring something new to the business events market.

There could even have been an element of "if you build it they will come" in the way we were thinking. Lesson 1 - that just doesn't happen if nobody knows about it!

We quickly realised that without money to support ongoing marketing communication programmes that you've got to do it the hard way and utilise the resources that you've already got.

There's a balancing act too. It's important to develop your product or service to a state where it's usable and sellable, but you need to tell people about it too. At Mitingu, the only investment we've had has come out of our own pockets, so we've had to manage funds really carefully. At this point, it's worth saying that we have gone out and found other income streams whilst we build Mitingu so that we can pay our mortgages and feed our families...there's no shame in that.

I'll get to the point!

I have decided to share our experiences in growing our start up, including all the high and low points from today. Here goes...

Our first target - £20k per month revenue by march 2016

How we get there and what we've learnt so far

We have a great product, we know that from user feedback. We just need to get it in front of more people.

We've tried a number of different marketing channels and I am convinced that a combination of them all is the way forward. I've read lots of stories about people no longer doing any outbound activities and getting plenty of business coming in via the social media channels. I take my hat off to them. In our case, it's definitely a combination of getting a consistent message out there and staying active to keep the pipeline growing. The best bit of advice I was ever given in my early sales days was to keep activity levels high and success will come.

Here's what we've used so far...

Emails - do your research and send out personalised emails which show the recipient you have taken the time to look at their business and tailor your message to show how your product or service can help them and their business. Talk about them, not you.

Blog - Blogging is new to me, but it definitely works. Don't expect a huge following or response overnight, but keep posting relevant and interesting stuff in tune with your market and you'll start to see some growth.

Ads - We've used Google Ads and Twitter Ads and we're going to give LinkedIn and Facebook a try. Google Ads are great, but if you're in a competitive market like us, they can get pricey. Make sure you've got your strategy right and keep a close eye on what's working and refine where necessary. Twitter Ads are more affordable and have shown some really encouraging results so far.

Networking - It can be pretty daunting walking into a room full of people you've never met before. This is something we're just about to start, so I'll feedback soon. It's one of the best ways to get your story out there, so bite the bullet and go for it. The few events I have attended so far have resulted in leads and actual business, so I am sold on it.

Demos - Selling the demo and not the product or service has also been a good route for us. There is no hard sell and if you've done your homework, then your prospect has a real need for your product or service and if you tailor the demo to that requirement then you'll win more than you lose.

Social media - We've focussed on Twitter and have seen some promising results. It has taken time to build the right following, but it's something we will be sticking with. LinkedIn is also something we plan to ramp up as it's one of the first places people in business refer to.

Those are just some methods we've used so far. We've also have some great referrals, face to face meetings, but the point here is to use what's available to you without spending money you don't necessarily have.

We'll keep this transparent, so at the end of the month I'll put up where we are against our target and what has worked for us and what hasn't.

Have a great month.

The importance of collecting and using the right data from event registrations

By inference, every event, no matter how large or small, is designed to deliver a positive and rewarding experience for those who attend it.

The motives behind why a brand creates an event and what their desired outcomes are from delivering a great experience vary from event to event. The balance that needs to be drawn is between the effort required in time and cost to create an event versus the benefit of creating a great experience.

The event registration is the organiser’s first opportunity to gather really accurate information about their attendees. It can help them tailor the event to deliver a great event experience for the attendees and also be used for ongoing marketing activities. In addition to that, it can make life easier for the event organiser, giving them valuable information to help them plan for catering, fine tuning event content and accommodation requirements.

Pulling the attendee data into a marketing automation platform is a really great way of getting added value from it. These platforms are designed to get the most out of accurate data, using personalisation across multiple communications channels to deliver the marketing message. Integrating your the registration platform with a marketing automation and/or CRM platform is a seamless way of pushing event attendee data and making use of it for other business and marketing activities immediately.

Planning what information is needed to deliver a great event experience and for ongoing marketing activities is essential. It's also really important to make sure the registration form is tailored to the attendee, so it's not asking them to complete fields which are not relevant to them. The Mitingu registration form builder can help with this as it gives the organiser the ability to filter questions based on registration types, known attendee preferences and how they have responded to a previous question.

As they say, "Data is the new gold".

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius

We’ve already discussed the importance and relevance of personalisation in previous posts. We’ll now tell you why we chose our preferred method of driving the data for personalisation, tagging.

Q. Why did we choose tagging?

A. For it’s simplicity

Tagging is a well established and arguably underused categorisation system that has seen prominence in blog use and more recently, social networks. It is all about assigning words or short keyword phrases to items to group them together. For example, items tagged as “event” would be grouped together if you searched on that tag.

Tagging is an effective and very simple categorisation system and by including it as one of the core features of mitingu we have leveraged this grouping to allow our users to create business intelligence based on the data they have.

One of the historical issues with tagging is that it places emphasis on the content creator to assign tags to their content and often laziness prevails and content is incorrectly tagged or not tagged at all. We’ve overcome this issue in mitingu as tags are automatically assigned to customers not events based on the information they give, not what is assumed.

Tags in mitingu can be used as filters for personalised content within web and email templates, ticket types and registration form questions. Email notifications can also be automatically sent based on an individual’s tag or tags.

Rather than having to write rules around different activities we use tags to simplify the process.

Here’s a simple example of tags used to create a personalised event site in mitingu.

Event name: The Good Wine Conference

Tags used: “red”, “white”, “rose”

Personalised elements: Main banner, intro text, agenda, registration type

Site 1 - John's personalised site

Site 2 - Jane's personalised site

Site 3 - Charles' personalised site

Print versus Digital - Who’s the winner?

Invitations to an event are often the first chance to make a great impression. Do you print them or email them out?

I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer. There’s a place for both and also a strong argument to send both printed and emailed invitations. Print is far from dead and is actually more of a premium product nowadays. I’ve also read some comments recently about the demise of email. Stats would argue otherwise!

Here’s a few pointers if you’re printing an invitation:

1. Personalise it - increase impact and response

2. Choose the right material - it’s an invite, so make an impression by printing it on a quality card (your printer can give you samples)

3. Make it easy to respond to - add something like a QR code so it can be quickly scanned to take the recipient to the mobile friendly registration page

4. Package it right - you’ve spent time and money getting the invitation right, spend a bit more to make sure it arrives in style and in the right envelope or package

If you’re sending an email invitation here’s some things to focus on:

1. Subject line - these stats from Campaign Monitor show including the word “Invitation” at the start of the subject line increase responses by over 9%. Avoid “spammy” subject lines

2. Personalise it - as with print, it increases impact and response

3. Make it snappy and quick to read

4. Add response buttons - make it easy for them by adding Register and Decline buttons

5. Track who’s opened, responded and bounced - follow up accordingly

So I guess there is no winner. My personal preference is to do both. They compliment each other and give your invitation two opportunities to be seen and responded to.

Right people, right event

Getting the right people to the right event might seem a pretty obvious objective for an event organiser however making sure it happens can be tricky….

It's all down to the data, (Information...it's gold dust), getting hold of strong data is the first challenge. Assuming you’ve been successful in that, the second challenge is using that data to tailor the content towards your audience.  Last, but not least, getting the subject line right for your emails provides challenge number three.

The good news is that you can do something about all of the above.

1. You can buy your basic data and build on it. There’s loads of places online where you can buy data lists, some better than others. The basic rule of you get what you pay for generally applies here. Research thoroughly and try and get some test data first to validate. If you’ve got some time and resource available then a combination of LinkedIn and web search makes it possible to build a fantastic database of prospects.

2. Once you’ve got the right information, it’s all about using it and making sure the recipient of your invite reads something that is relevant to them.

Having recently received an email from a health club where I have held a membership for 8 years, the opening gambit was “Dear Valued Member”! They know my name, I gave it to them all those years ago so have no problem with them using it!  This email then went on to ask me to vote for their Spa in a “Salon/Spa of the Year” competition. Although I’m a man who takes care of himself ( I moisturize, that counts right? ) I’ve never stepped foot into the Spa. However my wife, who is also a member, has several times yet they didn’t email her.  My point here wasn’t that they shouldn’t have emailed me as a member (I expect such emails), but if they’d used their data smartly they could have addressed the email to me and asked if my wife would vote for them and that would have engaged with me.

If you’re sending invitations to clients or prospects about an upcoming event, make sure you target those that may have an interest in what the event is about and don’t forget to use their name!

3. The good people at Campaign Monitor published a post last summer called The 15 most powerful words in subject lines. The subject line is all about making the right first impression and it was interesting to see that when “Invitation” is used as the first word, there is a 9.45% uplift in open rates and when used as the last word, a 7.69% uplift.

There’s no such thing as an exact science when it comes to subject lines, so it’s always worth creating a few and comparing the results to see which one is getting the best open rates.

Getting these three things right isn’t easy, but when you do, the benefits are well worth all the groundwork beforehand.

4 Ways Event Managers Can Use Personalisation to Impact ROI

Are you collecting data on attendees that register for events? Have you thought about and planned out how you might go about utilising this data? During the event registration and signup process, as an event manager or coordinator you have the opportunity to request information that you can then intelligently use to impact the ROI of an event.

These are just 4 ways that personalisation can be used to impact the return on investment for an event;

1. Dynamic, personalised event webpages

Once your attendee has registered for your event, the next time they visit the event webpage, information and elements of the site can be personalised specifically to their interests or motivations for attending the event. For example, the imagery could reflect the industry the attendee works in. You could include a call out box requesting responses to any additional non-mandatory questions they didn’t answer at signup in order to collect even more data. If they selected that they needed accommodation over the course of the event, you could include local restaurant ideas or things to do in the evening during the course of their stay.

2. Valuable meeting suggestions

Based on the attendees’ interests, role, industry and even where they are in their purchasing cycle, you could match-make them with your exhibitors, event partners or sponsors, inviting them to private meetings that will take place onsite during the event. By carefully profiling the data, you offer your attendees meetings highly personalised to their needs or motivations for attending. You will also solidify relationships with your exhibitors by connecting them with pre-qualified leads.

3. Personalised email marketing

It’s annoying to receive multiple and very apparent, generic email blasts in the lead up or during an event. Using the data you have collected, tailor emails based on the individual. Segment your attendees into defined profiles, sending them content or information related to their needs. For example, you wouldn’t send a sponsor email whose product and services pricing starts at £100,000 to an attendee who has indicated that they work at a company with a turnover of less than £100,000 per year.

4. Real-time interaction

During the event there are a number of opportunities to engage with your attendees. When attendees check in at the event you could automate emails containing the attendee’s personalised event programme, if you gave them the option to select and choose from different tracks or talks happening at the event. Even simpler still, but just as personal, you could pre-schedule emails following a speaker or sponsor’s presentation with further information including the slides from their talk to attendees who checked in to that specific talk. If you do not have the real-time checking in capabilities you can pre-schedule these emails to be sent to attendees who fit the profile for attending talks of this nature, perhaps basing your theory on previous event data.

These 4 applications and ideas for personalisation are just the tip of the iceberg with regards to what is possible. Uses for attendee data can be as simple or creative as you are willing to go. But no matter which end of the scale you choose, personalisation can be key to driving the impact on the ROI of an event, as well as creating lasting relationships with all event stakeholders; attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, speakers, etc. Personalisation enhances the experience for all those involved and can help in building loyalty and repeat business.

If you want to enhance personalisation to improve your event ROI, Mitingu is a user-friendly cloud-based platform that makes it simple to intelligently utilise attendee data and create a heightened event experience. We’d love to chat about more ways you could use personalisation for your next event. Or if you’re not much of a talker, you can sign up for a free account in minutes.

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Personalisation and Event Marketing: What’s the True Value?

We’re all in agreement that information is the gold dust of the business world. Yes? But how can you use this gold dust as an event marketer, coordinator or manager to see tangible value and results? And just how valuable can this information prove to be?

Targeted marketing, as a strategy, as you know isn’t ground-breaking. It’s been with us for a number of years and many marketers within various industries have adapted their tools, skills and knowledge in order to market to customers in this way. However, a recent article and survey demonstrated that, whilst marketers fully believe in the importance of personalisation, the number of those who feel that they are executing personalised marketing tactics and communication well, is astonishingly low.

Why? If your current event communications rely only on basic personalisation, you may be finding that your open rates, click through and engagement is steady and acceptable when compared against the industry standard. The saying, “If its not broken, why fix it?” may be true for your situation, especially if you manage a number of areas and elements for your events. You likely don’t have the time to become, what feels like, a data analyst in order to deliver highly personalised event communications or content to your audience. And don’t worry at all if this is you, two thirds of your marketing peers think this way too.

But what if we told you that a highly personalised event email results in six times higher transaction rates? Or a personalised website experience for your event attendee could improve sales by 19%? Pretty compelling stuff. But we know that there are challenges for event marketers to be able to create highly tailored event communications based on the information that an attendee submits when registering for an event. Challenges such as data quality, data saved across disparate files and systems, inability to link different tools or expertise.

With this in mind, especially those compelling stats we shared, our final question is; what if we said we could help you overcome these challenges and unlock the value that personalisation offers? As we said in our last blog, these are just some of the challenges that our platform is able to overcome in order to help you get the gold - the value - from your event marketing or communication activities in a simple way without a huge price-tag attached.

A personalised event webpage based on an individual registrant’s job title, conference programme choices and industry, could sound like a huge and almost impossible task to create without the right platform and tools in place. This is just one example of how Mitingu can take the personalisation of your event communication and marketing to the next level, seeing your registrant engagement rates, ticket sales and repeat/loyal event attendees increase.

Image Credit: ©Death to the Stock Photo CC

How to Increase Event Profit

Whether you are selling tickets for your event or holding a free event, there are simple ways for you to boost the profit of your event. How profitable your event is will likely be determined by the number of tickets you are able to sell. The same can be true for free events. The more free tickets that are ‘bought,’ the more people at your event and opportunities to sell merchandise or food and drink.

Driving registrations to sell the maximum number of tickets is the first step to a profitable event. A great looking event site, painless registration forms, simple payment and good promotion are all things we’ve talked about before to increase ticket sales. Typically someone will sign up for your event, months, weeks or days before the actual event date, so the key to boosting your event profit is working out how to keep them engaged until the day of the event so that they actually attend!

Communicating who else is attending, is the number one piece of information that boosts attendance. If you’ll have special guests, speakers, music acts or demonstrations at your event, send your attendees the details. If there will be an opportunity to meet the any of the above, include this in your email too, or use this an opportunity to up-sell to a VIP ticket where they can meet the music band, for example.

Only 35% of RSVPs will attend a free ticketed event. Over 95% will show up to a paid ticketed event. Free events can often have a high no-show rate due to the fact that the attendee doesn’t ‘loose’ anything in not showing up to your event. Are there trade-offs you can make to charge for the ticket? For example, you charge £15 for your event but for each ticket sold the attendee receives a £15 voucher upon arrival at the event, which could be used on refreshments or merchandise.

Sending a reminder 1-2 days before the event will boost attendance by 8%. This is especially true for events that you started promoting and receiving registrants for months or weeks ago. For those whose mind it slipped, a simple event reminder email can boost your attendance, seeing more people at your event. This could mean more food sold, more drinks sold, more giveaway tickets sold or whatever you are selling at the event.

Don’t forget about the opportunity to pre-write and schedule emails to go out at the time of the event. With almost all your attendees likely to have their mobile with them, sending emails with exclusive discounts or offers can encourage additional spending at the event. If it suits your event type and audience, offer free wifi and tell guests on arrival that exclusive surprises will emailed during the course of the event.

And finally, don’t forget to say thank you! Emails sent within 24 hours of your event are likely to get 150% more clicks than a thank you email that is sent out later. Use this opportunity to promote your next event, if there is one or even better, have the event site already set up so you can start taking early registrations.

Roughly planning out your email communication using these stats and ideas will help increase your event attendance and add to your event bottom line. Choosing an event registration platform that captures your attendee information and enables you to create email templates for you to schedule and track your email correspondence will help you stay organised. Our platform lets our users do just this, and is designed for everyone, no matter what your experience level is or the kind of event you are creating. Create a free account and have a snoop around.

Image Credit:

Currency

©epSos.de via Flickr

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What's your post event strategy?

You’ve just thrown a successful, sell out event. You couldn’t have imagined it going any better. Congratulations! But before you take a well deserved step back to relax have you thought about your guests and completing their experience post event?

The inspiration for this post came from a #EventPlannersTalk Twitter chat a couple of weeks ago. Post event engagement came up as being a crucial factor to extending an event lifecycle and building loyal relationships with attendees, however the focus is often on promotion and the event itself, and then engagement and communication following the event is almost non-existent.

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No matter what type of event you have organised, engaging with your event attendees following the event itself can be extremely valuable. Even if you haven’t got another event planned in the near future there are still huge benefits to reaching out to your attendees. Why? Communication and engagement following an event helps to make your attendees feel valued.

How can you continue engagement following your event?

Social Guests at your event most likely shared images, content and thoughts via multiple social channels. Take time to follow, repost/retweet and publicly respond to attendees who made a lot of effort to share during or after the event.

Email An email scheduled to attendees a day or so following your event that’s personalised to them can go a long way. Perhaps you could personalise it based on the ticket type they purchased (i.e. early-bird or VIP). If you held a community event, you could share the highlights, for example, money raised for the community, photos and details of upcoming events or activities. If you have another event coming up you could segment your attendee data and send details of this event to those who would be interested in it. Our easy-to-use tagging feature enables users to organise and segment their attendee data in this way.

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In this example, you could send only those in Customer Services an email for your next training event on handling customer queries.

Reports Did you carry out an on-site survey of some sort? Publish your findings on your website or blog, or keep it private to event attendees by emailing or mailing them your report.

Blog Write up an event summary and publish on your blog. Share this content across your social channels and even include a link in your email to attendees. If you held a music event, your blog will likely include lots of photos and maybe even a thank you or quote from your headline act. For a seminar or workshop, you might summarise key points from speakers and trainers or the top takeaways.

A mix of just 1 or 2 of these channels can heighten interest and extend your relationship with attendees. It can also be the stepping stone to finding advocates for your events or brand.

Choosing the right event registration tool can help make post event engagement much simpler. Many tools simply focus on the registration and payment collection piece of the pie. Mitingu provides its users with a full circle tool enabling event organisers to create and promote an event, register guests and collect payment, schedule during-event engagement, as well as create post-event engagement and build an insightful database of attendees and non-attendees.

Image Credit:

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©Drew Coffman via Flickr

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How to Promote an Event for Free

When was the last time you bought tickets to an event the old-fashioned way? Quite a tough question? Perhaps you bought tickets for your child’s school play. The reality is that, since nearly all ticket sales have moved online, event promotion has drastically changed. Whether you’re promoting a conference, music festival, training workshop or charity fundraiser, there are many free ways to promote events online.

These are our top tips and a few creative ideas to get you started;

Digital Media

Video can be expensive to produce but there are creative ways to whip up a video to draw attention to your event. Do you have footage from a previous event? If so, consider pulling out specific elements and freshening it up with a new background track. If you're hosting a music event, ask your acts for permission to use their footage to promote your lineup. Once you’ve got a video put together, embed on your event page, and share to your audience via social media.

Content Marketing

Create a unique content that ties into your event. If you’re organizing a conference, engage your speakers to answer a few questions for an interview style post or find out if they have content to share as a guest post. If you’re planning  a theatre show, ask actors to share their stories or engage your social audience to suggest questions. Tell the stories of those touched by your charity or cause, if you’re organizing a charity event.

Social Media

This is probably the most referenced method for promoting an event for free online. Just beware that over-promotion on social media isn’t well received. Promotional posts shouldn’t account for more than 10-20% of your daily or weekly updates. Find creative ways to plug your event by sharing a blog post like those mentioned above or an infographic related to the theme or topic of your event. If you’re managing a conference or business event, check out Evvnt’s post on using LinkedIn to promote events.

Get Fans to do it For You

Incentivize your audience and attendees to share the event with their friends. For example, if an attendee signups up 5 friends they receive a free drink, free ticket upgrade, free track of your headlining artist. Alternatively, you could giveaway tickets to your event to create shares and buzz around your event. Encourage your audience to share the contest in order to boost entries or chance of winning.

Email Marketing

Send event invitations to your existing database. If you don’t have an existing database, once you’ve started to receive registrations you can email them updates and news about your event as well as any special offers. If you are collecting personal information in order to create a tailored event experience, consider how you can start using this information through email ahead of the event.

We don’t profess to hold the secret formula to promoting events for free or argue that these ideas are revolutionary. We do however, focus on providing our users with the best possible, free-to-set-up platform, enabling them to create uncluttered, professional event sites, promote and sell tickets, register attendees and view the success of the event with at-a-glance analytics.

Create a free account and explore the platform in your own time. We’re just a click or call away to answer your questions and if you’re planning an event in January, don’t forget we’re still running our 50% off January promotion!