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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Are you looking to attract more people to your event and want some handy event promotion ideas? Whether your event’s at a physical location or online, it’s challenging to get people to sign up. That’s why finding creative ways to promote attendance is a smart idea.
With that in mind, we’ve done the research and found the best event promotion ideas you can use to attract more attendees and grow your business.
Event promotion uses multiple marketing strategies and channels to spread the word about your event and increase registrations.
Without effective promotion strategies, people won’t know about your event or know where to sign up.
There are many benefits to promoting your event. With the power of excellent event promotion, many businesses can achieve the following marketing goals:
As you can see, it makes sense to promote your event. So how do you do it?
There are tons of ways to promote any kind of event. In the following sections, we’ll explore how to promote your event through your website by creating excellent content, paid ads, and social media.
Let’s kick things off with event promotion ideas that utilize your current business website. You’d be surprised what you can achieve from a single site.
Your event registration page is where people sign up to secure a spot at your event, so you must optimize this page for maximum sign-ups.
Think about the elements on the page and how you can improve them. Here are a few optimization ideas to get you started:
When you’ve optimized your page as much as possible, test everything! A/B testing essential elements on your page help you find areas you can improve to get more conversions. To help you test your event registration page, check out these A/B testing best practices.
Something else that helps with on-site event promotion is being able to answer questions before people register. Think about using a live chat service on your registration page to answer queries and provide extra information.
When you add live chat to WordPress, you can solve people’s issues in real-time. And instant customer support can help convince potential attendees to register for your event.
Another idea is to create an event agenda page. An agenda page makes it easier for attendees to learn about what they can look forward to after they’ve signed up.
Try to keep the design of your agenda page clean, simple, and easy to navigate. And include a straightforward timeline of what’s happening when throughout the day. That way, attendees can better schedule their time between speakers, workshops, and other events.
In the lead-up to the event, publish content on your blog from your event speakers. It could be teaser content about their workshops or talks or even content around the events’ theme.
Getting your speakers involved at this point builds excitement for the event, which can encourage people to register. This type of content is highly shareable on social media to further boost registrations.
Make sure you include a clear CTA to register for the event on the blog post for even more of a boost to sign-ups.
What if your website has a VIP area for paying members? Here’s an event promotion idea that rewards your members while encouraging them to register.
Why not offer members exclusive discounts in return for their loyalty? Member discounts will make your members feel valued and as if they’re part of a select group while still encouraging them to attend your event.
If you don’t already have a member’s area, you can learn how to create a membership website here.
With your members taken care of, how can you promote your event to non-members? A limited-time offer is a perfect opportunity.
Limited-time offers for event tickets can build excitement and give people the fear of missing out on a fantastic opportunity. If the offer runs for a short time, people need to act now to secure their spot.
You can create a limited-time offer for your event using OptinMonster, the most powerful lead-generation software for marketers. OptinMonster makes it super-easy to create almost any type of campaign so you can target your ideal audience and convert them into paying customers.
With tons of lead capture campaign types, you can run promotions in minutes, and with powerful Exit-Intent® Technology, you can capture people’s attention right when they’re about to leave your site.
Try creating a countdown timer popup to increase registrations, or if you’re looking for more ideas, check out these scarcity marketing examples.
Hands up if you love getting free swag! Swag bags are like the ultimate perk of attending events. But why make attendees wait for the big day to get their hands on it?
Why not sweeten the registration deal by offering swag to people when they sign up for your event? They can arrive at the event decked out in branded t-shirts, custom lanyards, and much more. It gives those attendees something tangible to remind them of why your event is worth going to.
Here are a few more ideas to include in your registration swag bags:
Besides offering physical swag, there are many ways you can promote your event with digital assets.
When people register for your event, offer them a badge to display on their blog or website. If you build HTML into those badges, you can link the badge to your registration page to boost sign-ups.
Make sure your badge graphic is attractive enough for people to share on social media to reach even more people.
Another event promotion idea that’s ideal for your website is to run a giveaway offering lucky winners free tickets to the event. Not only do you get to allow someone to attend your event for free, but giveaways can also attract massive interest and traffic.
You can easily create an online contest or giveaway with RafflePress. RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin for WordPress, allowing you to build stunning giveaways in minutes.
Pre-built giveaway templates make it easy to design your contest in a way that drives traffic to your website, grows your social media followers, and even boosts sign-ups to your email list.
Then with powerful entry options, you can encourage word-of-mouth marketing with viral refer-a-friend actions.
To make your giveaway even more exciting, try offering a discount to everyone who enters, even if they don’t win. That’s sure to maximize your registrations.
If you haven’t got analytics reports set up for your event website, you’re missing out on crucial information. The more you know about how people find your site, the easier it is to decide how to promote your event in the right places.
Website analytics gives you valuable data on how people get to your website, what makes them stay, and what makes them click away without registering.
You can easily set up analytics tracking for your event website using a tool like MonsterInsights. As the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, it lets you track everything from site traffic to affiliate traffic and enhanced eCommerce tracking.
Then you can make data-driven decisions on how to improve your event promotion tactics. All this information is available in reports right inside your WordPress dashboard.
Amazing content should be the cornerstone of your event promotion strategy. Without the content for people to learn more about your event, you won’t be able to get them to register to attend.
In the next section, we’ll look at ways to promote your event using excellent content.
Did you know that YouTube is one of the most significant search engines next to Google search? It’s true! With over 5 billion videos watched every day, YouTube is the ideal platform for helping people discover your event.
One way to utilize YouTube is to upload teaser videos of your event to give people a sneak peek at what they’ll experience on the day.
Here are some ideas for what to include in your teaser videos:
To maximize exposure and registrations, don’t forget to embed your YouTube videos on your event website.
Another way you can use video to promote your event is to hold a webinar for people interested in attending.
Webinars are an excellent way to answer questions about your event. Plus, they give attendees a preview of what to expect on the day. You can also use webinars to offer people who attend a discount on the price of event tickets to increase registration sign-ups.
Take a look at the best webinar software for WordPress users to get started.
Did you know that 67 million Americans tune into podcasts every month? That’s a massive audience you could be tapping into for your event!
Running a podcast is a creative event promotion idea that’s often overlooked. Try launching one for yourself based on a theme relevant to your event. You could invite speakers for your event to join episodes so attendees know what to expect.
Alternatively, you could become a speaker or sponsor of a popular podcast in your niche that attracts a similar audience.
Paid advertising methods are always good ways to promote any event. But you need to be smart with spending your advertising budget to get the most success from your efforts.
The following section highlights the best ways to get more from advertising.
Social media is a central place to promote your event because there’s the potential to reach a massive audience. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram all have paid advertising functionality to help you reach your target audience.
Let’s look at each social media ad platform in more detail:
Another way to promote your event with advertising is to run retargeting ads. You’ve likely seen it before, where you look something up online, then see ads for it wherever you go on the internet.
You can use retargeting ads for your event so that when someone looks at your registration page, they’ll see ads reminding them to register elsewhere online.
You can learn how to create a successful retargeting strategy for your event here.
There’s a wide variety of online guides and apps that show people fun things to do with their time. And often, those guides list events tailored to their users by category or interest.
You can reach those people by promoting your event on those sites.
Here’s a list of event discovery sites to help you get started:
Now let’s look at how you can effectively promote your event on social media.
All the speakers, partners, and sponsors have engaged audiences waiting to hear about your business event.
Tap into that audience by providing your partners with information and imagery to share with their audience on social media so they can promote your event to their followers.
Just make sure you also give them a tracking link so you know exactly where new registrations are coming from.
Remember the last time you ran an event? How many people attended, and how successful was it? If you saw a great turnout, email the people you know who attended last time to encourage them to register for your new event.
You can also segment your email lists into different demographics within your target audience. Then you can build email campaigns speaking directly to those smaller groups with specific messages.
Not sure which email marketing service to use? Check this guide out.
Hashtags are an excellent event promotion idea that helps users find you on social media. And not only does creating a branded hashtag help you engage more with users, but they’re also easy for users to remember about your event.
Branded hashtags should be unique to your business and interesting enough to stick with your audience positively.
Let’s look at the key features of a well-branded hashtag:
When you’ve created the ideal branded hashtag for your event, include it in all your messaging.
Word-of-mouth marketing is when customers are so interested in a brand they actively encourage people to check them out for themselves. And it’s a brilliant way to help more people register for your event.
You can encourage word-of-mouth marketing for your event by including ways for people to share the event with others, like social sharing buttons.
If you choose to run a giveaway for your event with RafflePress, you can easily encourage word-of-mouth marketing with the viral refer-a-friend option, which asks people to share your giveaway in return for a chance to win.
Since your fans are your biggest advocates, chances are a few who are particularly influential, with an audience hanging on to their every word.
Using tools like Buzzsumo, you can identify influencers related to your business and motivate them to spread the word about your event. That way, you increase your exposure to a relevant audience and could secure more registrations.
And since we’re on the topic of using influencers to encourage bookings, it’s worth looking at hiring brand ambassadors for the same job.
Look for people with massive online influence, like celebrities, YouTube stars, industry experts, and bloggers. Then you can sponsor them to create and post timely content about your event that’s shared with their audience.
Stories are a growing feature on many popular social media sites. Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook have them, and YouTube is primed for storytelling.
While you prepare for your event and during the big day, keep your social media audience engaged with insider storytelling. That way, people will feel more connected to your event and more inspired to attend.
Geotagging is the new favorite way to reach audiences through location-based targeting when marketing your event.
You can easily geo-tag your social media posts on all the major platforms by tagging a location. Then when people search for that location, they’ll discover your content in location-specific feeds, highlighting your event to users who might not know it exists.
Building a community around your event is one of the best ways to promote it to your target audience. With so many platforms available that encourage community building, like Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Reddit, and more, it’s easy to gather like-minded people around a specific topic or interest.
When you’ve created a community around your business, you can share past events and updates and future ones to get people interested in attending. It’s also the perfect place to share teasers and promotions for attendees.
And that’s it!
We hope this article helped you find loads of creative event promotion ideas to increase attendance at your next event.
When the event is over, learn how to get more reviews so you can encourage registrations for the next event.
Don’t forget to follow us on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for more great tips to grow your business.
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