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 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!