How effective is event marketing?

Event marketing is one of the most crucial elements of success. The more people who see and hear about your event, the better right?! While we know that it’s best to diversify our marketing message on various platforms, how do we know how effective our marketing message is?

Too often, I see unclear marketing messages about WHAT an event is and WHO it is targeting. Even if your marketing message has a huge reach on social media, it will not matter if the marketing material is not clear or exciting to the reader!

From my experience of organizing dozen upon dozens of events, I can tell you that effective event marketing starts with a clear & strong marketing message that evokes excitement and wonder to potential attendees. And by all means, it’s success formula is measurable!

Think about how clearly you can convey your event message in a few short sentences, with an exciting description and theme built into your marketing materials. Then read over your msg from the perspective of attendee-or better yet, ask a friend or colleague to read over the marketing message.

Then ask: is the event info clear, does it look exciting and intriguing? How about the cost or ticket availability? Would you actually want to attend this event if you saw it advertised on social media or in your inbox? Why or why not?

We all know how short attention spans are these days, so make the marketing message about your event concise and effective. This will leave readers intrigued to then check out your website for more details and frequently asked questions.

Another crucial element for creating an effective marketing message is to have an email sign up newsletter. You can measure success here by viewing how many subscribers you have at any given time and how many people are opening the email and clicking on the links! Try constant contact or mailchimp for hosting.

This way you will be able to measure your email open rate and click throughs. Over time, you will see patterns of what emails are opened more, based on various catchy subject lines! Play around with the subject line, make it fun!

For example, one of my best open rate messages was for a year end fashion event and the email subject I chose was “We’re going out with a bang!”. Exciting and intriguing-you want to spark excitement and curiosity to your reader.

The best part about having someone join your event newsletter is that you will capture their attention for future events as well!

When they initially sign up to subscribe to information about your event, you can ask: how did you hear about the event? This will give you a measurable idea of what marketing materials are working in your favour (i.e. a friend, facebook ad, poster, etc).

If you choose to do a paid promotion with a local newspaper/event company, ask how many email subscribers and social media followers they have, and how often your msg will be displayed. If this is costing you $1000, yet tickets to your event are only $10, you would hope that at least 100 people are buying tickets from this conversion, if not more!

Bottom line: Event marketing is absolutely crucial for success!

Once you know your target audience, shout it from the roof tops! Not actually-but go after that market in every way you can. Whether that means joining local facebook groups with huge local reach that allow business posts once a week (like my local moms group with over 40,000 members in my city!) or dropping off hand bills and making tic toc videos to attract the college crowd.

By pursuing your target audience in diverse, fun and intriguing ways, you will ensure great success of your next event!