9 Actionable Strategies on How to Promote Your Events

Event promotion plays a vital role in ensuring the success of an event. Without effective promotion, your event may go unnoticed.

Event promotion involves creating awareness, generating interest, and attracting the target audience to attend the event. By highlighting the key features and unique selling proposition, promotion helps to maximize event attendance by reaching a wider audience.

The global event industry is expected to reach $1,552.9 billion by 2028, with different events such as conferences & exhibitions, corporate events & seminars, promotion & fundraising, music & art performance, sports, festival, trade shows, and product launches.

The key to event branding is to check all the boxes in your event promotion plan, drive engagement and achieve your event goals.

Here’s why event promotion matter for your event’s success:

• Builds brand awareness
• Generates buzz about the event
• Attracts the right audience
• Maximize event attendance
• Enhances sponsorship opportunities

Therefore, to succeed, you must understand how to promote your events.

In this blog, we will be discussing:

9 Actionable Strategies to Promote the Events

Event promotion aims to get people to talk about it and achieve the desired result. Think of promotion like any other form of advertising with the aim to get in front of potential attendees and know what they think.

It’s time to start thinking out of the box and look for creative ways to promote an event.  Here are the 9 best strategies and ways to promote your events.

1. Laying the Foundation: Preparing for Event Promotion
2. Building the Blueprint: Crafting an Event Marketing Strategy
3. Optimizing Event Landing Pages for Search Engines
4. Leveraging Content Marketing to Drive Event Engagement
5. Harnessing the Potential of Event Partnerships and Collaborations
6. Maximizing Local SEO for Location-based Events
7. The Power of Email Marketing Automation
8. Social Media Promotion
9. Virtual Event Marketing

1. Laying the Foundation: Preparing for Event Promotion

Today the event promotion landscape has become pretty crowded as more businesses like yours compete for people’s time and attention.

You must know how to advertise events to capture your target audience’s attention to register for and attend your event.

Event promotion is all about strategies and finding ways to promote an event. Driving event registration and attendance starts with having a firm grasp of your event goals and target audience.

Promoting an event can be overwhelming. Therefore you must start with the basics and lay the foundation to begin. Consider these tips:

• Define event goals and objective
• Know your audience
• Align sales and marketing teams
• Keep in mind timelines for promotion

Once you’ve aligned the essential elements for event promotion, it’s time to move forward and plan your strategy.

2. Building the Blueprint: Crafting an Event Marketing Strategy

An event is a more significant project than marketing a product or service. There’s a lot to be covered. A plan will be your guide to event marketing, a roadmap to where, when, and how to engage with potential attendees.

Here are 6 steps to create a great strategy:

• Set goals and establish the basics: If you know the purpose of your strategy, you better target your audience. You must align your plan considering details, budget, and lead time.
• Plan out your content: You must organize and structure your content strategy and know the formats that you need to consider, such as videos, images, social media posts, press releases, testimonials, affiliate marketing, and featured podcasts/interviews.
• Prepare promotions: Craft your promotion strategy by aligning the message and consistency you want to maintain across the channels and platforms.
• Create an email marketing plan: Email marketing campaigns help you earn good results. Segment your audience and define outreach cadence.
• Leverage event speakers and sponsors: As a social proof and way to engage more people, speakers, and sponsors must endorse your brand.
• Set KPIs to measure success: While KPIs vary according to the event type, align your goals with the right KPIs to track progress and make improvements throughout the funnel.

While there is no single best approach, there are different ways to promote an event. It would be best if you put great effort into compiling your event marketing strategy. When done right, it can do wonders.

3. Optimizing Event Landing Pages for Search Engines

Everyone has heard about SEO for websites, but did you know you can promote an event online through landing pages?

An event landing page allows you to attract your target audience and provide information regarding date, time, venue, highlights, and key features. It is essential to optimize event landing pages to rank them higher in search results.

Benefits of landing page optimization

• Increase rankings
• Brings more traffic
• Improves experience
• Brings more conversions

Search engine optimization for events doesn’t need to be complicated. Here are five easy ways to optimize landing pages:

• Keyword analysis
• Optimization
• Link building
• Page speed
• Responsive
• Result analysis

For example, the Tech Summit event landing page is fully optimized with good usage of keywords, image optimization, text formatting, mobile responsiveness, page title, and proper headings.

Source: Tech Summit

4. Leveraging Content Marketing to Drive Event Engagement

Content marketing is one of the best ways of promoting an event in today’s dynamic world, where attention spans are limited. From storytelling to informative articles and captivating videos to social media campaigns, content marketers can create a buzz like no other.

Powerful content that resonates with the audience and enables desirable actions fuels event registration and drives ticket sales. 

Here are some benefits of leveraging content marketing for events:

• Increase audience engagement
• Build brand awareness
• Improves audience targeting
• Generate high ROI
• Enhanced customer loyalty
• Increases conversions and sales

Content with an impact can engage, inspire, and drive the results that you want. Here are the steps to help you create an evening content marketing strategy:

• Know your audience
• Establish your goals
• Research your competitors
• Keyword research
• Review and repurpose existing content
• Create a roadmap
• Plan your content production schedule

Map out a content strategy that aligns with your overall marketing and promotion plan. So be mindful and proactive, and make sure you don’t have content just for promotional activities and 

5. Harnessing the Potential of Event Partnerships and Collaborations

Partner up early – it will bring you incredible results. It helps you gather the new audience’s attention, adds credibility, and increases reach. 

Add value to your event by understanding how to advertise events through partnerships. Firstly you need to assess your goals, conduct a benchmark, find the right marketing partner, research formats, and pitch your promotion idea to a potential partner.

Follow these four simple steps to partnership collaboration:

• Send an email about the event, including details such as target market, objectives, and activities.
• Get them on the phone, and ask them questions to create a pitch.
• Provide them with event details and outline the key elements.
• Create a one-page information sheet with details about what’s in it for them.

Brands align their objectives and have a shared goal that can be achieved by leveraging the power of collaboration. Here’s why collaboration is essential:

• Provide the best expertise
• It saves time and money
• More data analysis
• Improve event experience
• Drive attendee engagement
• Generate higher ROI

Also, collaboration allows you to involve two brands with similar target audiences to co-create, co-promote and co-brand your event.

For example, Impact 2023 virtual conference that featured 30 sessions in 3 days partnered with Dell Technologies, Broadcom Mainframe Software, and others for their event.

Source: Impact 2023

6. Maximizing Local SEO for Location-based Events

With 164.6 billion USD in search advertising spending worldwide, it is imperative to maximize local SEO. Local SEO refers to optimizing your website and enhancing your visibility, increasing your ranking on the search engines. 

Google search market share worldwide has reached 84.69%, providing an opportunity to improve reach and conversion rate.

Benefits of local SEO for location-based events:

• Enhanced traffic
• Better Conversion
• Low advertising costs
• Continuous growth
• Increases ranking
• Edge over competitor
• Gain more reviews
• Get links with local businesses

An expert event marketing agency can help you leverage the power of local SEO to the best, as they understand the market dynamics and have a certain edge against competing online.

Here are some critical steps that you can follow to do local SEO local:

• Include the right keywords
• Use event schema
• Tap into ticketing sites
• Add timings
• Track and modify your listings

The good part is that local event-based SEO gives the right amount of exposure and puts you ahead of others.

7. The Power of Email Marketing Automation

There are 4.37 billion email users worldwide. And regardless of your opinion, email marketing is the best way to increase ROI. Email automation for event promotion helps you eliminate repetitive tasks and save time. 

For example, when prospective attendees subscribe to your email list, you can set up an email to respond to the subscription.

Benefits of email automation

• Automate repetitive tasks
• Lead nurturing
• Personalized emails
• Can be set in advance
• Reduce the potential for error
• Increase conversions

To make sure your email marketing is fully optimized for an event, follow these five tips:

• Know your email automation goals
• Humanize Content for email campaigns
• Series of emails along the event registration funnel
• Make the sequence logical
• Designated landing page to ensure a seamless experience

Emails can also be integrated with event registration software to nurture and convert the target audience into sales. However, choosing the best email software for your events is important. And for that, you can consider the following factors:

• User-friendly software
• Doesn’t require technical expertise
• Automation features 
• Affordable with key functionalities
• Third-party integration

8. Social Media Promotion

Whether you’re hosting an in-person or virtual event, social media is the best way to promote events.

Effective social media event marketing is an information hub for prospective attendees. And among the other social media platforms, most businesses promote an event on Facebook due to the highest number of daily active users worldwide, reaching 2.04 billion. 

Here are 9 steps you can take to promote your events on social media:

• Create a hashtag
• Choose your social media platform
• Develop social media promotional content
• Start promotion at least eight weeks in advance
• Create and update the Facebook event page
• Promote user-generated content
• Post countdown stories on Instagram
• Share sneak peek and behind-the-scenes video
• Make your partners and collaborators advocate the event

Put some strategy behind your event social media plan and maintain consistency to receive maximum results.

For example, Accenture created an event page for their event, Connect 2018, on Facebook to promote it.

Source: Accenture US

9. Virtual Event Marketing

To promote virtual events, you need precision to stay on top of your game and stand out. Maintaining a track to reach your goals requires the same attention to detail.

While there are different ways to promote the event, a virtual event marketing strategy involves a landing page, email campaigns, social media marketing, blog posts, guest posts, and Google ads.

Looking for some creative ways to promote your virtual event? Consider these strategies:

• Attention-grabbing event landing page
• Use keywords to boost search engine rankings
• Curate email list 
• Leverage social media
• Provide a peek at what’s to come
• Self-promotion through speakers and collaborators
• Send out a press release

A built-in event registration form and website that impresses your target audience can help you promote your next virtual event.

Final Words

Event promotion has undergone a digital transformation. And in this blog, you must have understood how to promote your events seamlessly.

With the use of the most effective event promotion strategy, you can interact, engage and convert your potential attendees. Event promotion creates a buzz and ensures that many people are aware and excited to attend the event.