8 Free & Paid Ways To Promote Your Event Online And Increase Registrations
Are you not getting enough online exposure for your events? Are you not getting enough registrations? Then this post is for you! I will discuss 8 excellent ways to help you get the word out about your event and get more registrations!
When planning an event, you have to be strategic with your event marketing and promotion to attract your target audience. Your event will compete with other events targeting similar audiences. Therefore, in combination with your marketing strategy, you should have a strong and unique value proposition to make your audiences consider your event ahead of others.
This article will consider how you can use free and paid event promotional strategies to attract target audiences to register for your event.
1. Create an Informative & Eye-Catching Landing Page
A successful event marketing strategy starts with building an attention-grabbing event landing page. There are many ways to create a landing page be it free or paid. Landing pages are not only essential but also powerful to encourage conversions. Therefore, create an event landing page with attractive elements and superb Call to Action (CTA) to direct your audience towards the desired action. An event page should have a good design and layout with content that provides page visitors with information that encourages them to register for the event.
The content of the event’s landing page is critical, it should be able to give a snapshot of the event. Don’t overload the page with content as it can easily overwhelm the page visitors and cause them to leave without converting. So keep it simple and only include the important information. Some basic things to include on the landing page are:
- Event title
- Event UVP (Unique Value Proposition)
- Date & Time
- Countdown
- Event details; what is it about? What will be covered?
- Speaker/s information and bio
- Special promotions for early registrations
- Tickets availability, cost, and tickets sale closing date
- A CTA; Call To Action button.
Event Landing Page Design
While you can ask a good designer to design your event page, it will be good to also find great event landing pages for inspiration. Another option is to use ready templates and customize them to suit your needs.
Event Details
What should attendees expect? Highlight the key features of your event and provide a redirect page, if possible, so that attendees can learn more.
Past Events’ Stats
If your event is a recurring event, you can feature event stats for past events. The stat can include the number of attendees, speakers, sessions, C-level executives who attended, networking hours, partners, sponsors, etc. You can also have the images of your past event speakers and testimonials from attendees.
The Speakers
Remember to highlight the speakers for this event, including their images, and current job titles. Ideally, each speaker should have an individual page where visitors can read more details about the speaker, his/her bio, and a description of what he/she will cover. Giving additional information about each speaker can help add more credibility to your event. When people see the crop of speakers you assemble and their areas of expertise, they will be motivated to register.
Event Sponsors and Partners
Events are an opportunity for attendees to discover relevant products, services, and solutions. Therefore, highlight the names and logos of your event sponsors, partners, and exhibitors so attendees can know what to expect. Besides, familiar and well-known sponsors add credibility to your event.
Registration
Close the page with a clear call to action; CTA; include a statement that excites the visitor to attend your event. Remember to make this a smooth process because complicated registration processes cause frustration and people end up leaving. Among other things, you could try to minimize the number of clicks to make it an easy and hassle-free user experience! The below image is a good example of an event landing page.
2. Leverage SEO For Event Marketing
After setting up your event page, you need to explore different marketing strategies such as SEO to get the word out. SEO helps you to target people searching for content relating to your event so that you can drive organic web traffic to your event page.
Optimize for High Volume Keywords
To make the most of SEO, you need to optimize for high-volume organic SEO keywords. That’s because the higher the volume of a targeted keyword, the more potential traffic you can attract. Therefore use SEO tools to analyze different keywords related to your event and pick the one that will yield the best result.
Create Content Around Your Event
Content marketing can boost SEO for your event, including creating blog posts, videos, and even images around your event. You can post the content on your blog or other pages on your site, and you can also send guest posts to other blogs to generate backlinks to the event page. The backlinks can boost your website’s domain authority and improve the ranking of your event page in search results.
Submit Your Event to Local Listing Sites
You can submit your event to industry-based event listing sites, and that can help to boost awareness, generate leads, and also boost SEO to your event page. More pages with links redirecting to your event site will further boost your page ranking.
3. Use the Power of Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool for marketing your event. You can use social media as a free as well as paid strategy.
Free Social Media Strategies
Create posts, images, videos, and hashtags about your event on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media where your target audience can be found. You can use social media publishing tools like Hootsuite to schedule and manage your posts.
Create Event on Facebook
Facebook has an event feature that makes it possible to discover events on the platform. When you create an event, you can share some details about your event and include the link to your event page.
Encourage people to share
You can encourage people to share your event and posts on social media and offer incentives for posts that get the most likes or shares. Such incentives could be a discount on event tickets or an additional event experience.
Ask Event Speakers to self-promote
Encourage your event speakers to self-promote your event on their social media accounts to expand reach. You can create event-branded visuals for each speaker and post them on your social media pages. Send the links to your event speakers, and ask them to share them on their timeline while including the event’s hashtag.
Paid Social Media Strategies
You can use Facebook ads, Instagram ads, sponsored posts, and ad retargeting to reach your target audience on social media. Social media ads are served to the people you target in their news feed. It works similarly to search engine marketing, but this one is not based on user search but based on user profiles, demographics, interests, and activities.
If you have previously used Facebook for your events then you can use the custom audience feature to target those who showed interest in your past or future events. Also, you could use the lookalike audiences feature to reach new prospects who have similar characteristics to your current customers.
Once a Facebook user, for example, falls within the demographics you targeted in your ad, there is a high chance that they see your ad. You will pay when a user stops viewing your ad (impression), likes, comments, or shares (engagement), clicks the ad, registers, or the CTA buttons such as learn more, register now, and so on.
To maximize Facebook or Instagram ads, you should also consider ad retargeting. This works by showing your ads to those who responded to the original ad and visited your page without taking any further action. The ad keeps appearing to them if they forgot to go back to the page to sign up.
4. Use Hashtags in your Posts & Stories
Hashtags have superpowers; they do indeed increase exposure and engagement! Now, this might be very obvious to many of you, but it is worth mentioning.
You could use branded hashtags and trendy ones for your event, but there are some best practices. For events, it is beneficial to create an event hashtag to build awareness, engage with the audience, and use the hashtags stats to gather insights to help you evaluate your reach and measure success.
First things first, do your homework! Research hashtags that are not only trendy but also relevant. Pay attention and make sure that the selected hashtags are not being misused by other users. If you’ve decided to create your own hashtag, remember to use unique and short ones that consist of letters and numbers only (no special characters), and feel free to capitalize words if necessary.
So when promoting your event in posts or stories, be careful to not overload them with hashtags. One might think, Instagram allows 30 hashtags, then why not use them all. There are many opinions on this; some argue with and some argue against using the maximum number of hashtags. For example, if you want to use more than 3 hashtags in an Instagram post, you could hide the rest of the hashtags so your post will appear neat and not spammy. But then again, it is best to use fewer but relevant hashtags; see the below image for some interesting stats on Twitter hashtags usage.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective tools because when you send out an email, you are communicating directly with a contact.
Your goal should be to get the recipient to open, read, and follow through to your event page. Emails should be short and to the point. Leave the details for your event page. Therefore, create powerful email subjects that generate enough curiosity to open the emails. Right in the emails, waste no time to talk briefly about what your event’s value proposition is. Then introduce a Call to Action to learn more or click a signup button.
One of the challenges with email marketing is that you need an email list. If you have an existing list, you can swing into action. Otherwise, you should have a plan on how to build your list.
You can’t send emails to people who did not opt-in! So you have to allow enough time for building your email list. One way is to ask your website visitors to subscribe for updates or blog post alerts or download a white paper or fill a contact form in exchange for their email. But remember you have to inform them about the purpose of storing their emails and follow regulations according to your location and your target audience location such as GDPR for Europe.
6. Organize Free Webinars
Organizing a free webinar is a very effective marketing and list-building strategy. It also helps in building the initial relationship that leads to trust. Before your main event, organize a webinar and discuss a topic around your event. It should be as interesting and brief as possible. To participate, get people to sign up with their emails.
Deliver value during the webinar and promote your upcoming event at the end of your presentation. Then follow up with a thank you email where you will also mention the possibility. Subsequently, send them well-crafted emails at intervals until they take required actions. Some of the free options include YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Google Hangouts, and some of the paid options include Zoom and GoToWebinar.
7. Event Listing Websites
There are many event listing websites, both free and paid, where you can list your upcoming events. My personal favorite is Eventbrite which has over 15 million users worldwide. Other platforms include Universe.
Let me speak from experience. I think that Eventbrite is an excellent platform to list and promote your events and sell tickets. I’ve been using Eventbrite since 2017, and I’ve planned and promoted over 100 offline and online events on the platform using the free version. I’m not saying that this platform is better than others, I’m just speaking from experience.
8. Google Search
Last but not least is having your event visible on Google events. Why? There are billions of daily searches on Google, So we’re talking more exposure here for your events. Many might be looking for events in their town or nearby or in a specific location, many searchers type things such as ‘events near me’ or ‘concerts near me’. Let’s say you search for concerts in Oslo on Google. The results shown in the image below are interactive and they appear on the top of the page. When you click on the results, you’ll get more information about the event and the possibility to register. This is a brilliant way to promote your event and get more registrations. Unfortunately, I will not get into the exact technicalities of getting your event listed on Google Search in this post. Perhaps in a future post.
Final Thoughts
In your marketing campaign, pay attention to the results you are getting. You can monitor results from web analytics, email analytics, and social media page analytics. When results are not favorable, identify the areas that need adjustment, and focus more on the strategies that are producing the best results.
