If you want to raise attendance for your upcoming event, there are a number of ways to market and promote. You might choose traditional, blanket efforts like local ads in print and broadcast or mailers, just for example. Or you might opt for more targeted efforts like emailing or calling past event attendees or approaching businesses that might benefit from sending employees to your event.
In this day and age, however, you’re making a big mistake if you fail to promote your event online and through social media channels. It’s true that online advertising can be expensive and risky, what with all the competition, but you might be surprised to learn the extent of return on investment when you focus your efforts on social media advertising.
When done right, social media ads have the power to reach an extremely precise audience and deliver a powerful message that boosts successes for your upcoming corporate meeting or event. How can you and your event company properly utilize social media ads to promote your next event? What benefits will you gain in the process? Here’s what you should know.
Work with Event Management to Pinpoint Your Primary Audience
Before you launch any kind of marketing or promotional campaign, you need a clear understanding of who you’re hoping to attract to your event. Are you interested in young professionals fresh out of college, experienced execs, stay-at-home parents, video game aficionados, or members of the media, for example?
Says Annie Fernandez, Director of Marketing at American Meetings. Inc., “The amazing thing about advertising through social media channels is all the options you have to narrow your audience to very specific groups. Facebook ads are probably the best example of this principle in action. In addition to pushing information to your followers, you have the opportunity to put ads in front of a target audience based on selection of features such as age, gender, economic status, job type, and even interests and preferences, among other attributes.”
In other words, you and your event management team can get very specific, so long as you have parameters in place to target the ideal audience. It gets even better, though, thanks to features that allow you to re-target users who recently visited your website or blog, or alternately, exclude website visitors that are likely already aware of your event.
You can also use the lookalike audience feature, or create separate ads for mobile and desktop viewing. There are endless opportunities to customize and reach a wider audience without undue spending.
Create and Test Content with Your Event Company
Once you have your target audience and ad preferences squared away, it’s time to work on the content that will compel action, such as clicking through to your event website, following your event social media pages, or signing up to attend your event. You and your event management team will want to work on the base message and then flesh out several different ad types to test against one another.
A/B and multivariate testing can help you to hone your advertising efforts well in advance of your event, before you make a big push, in order to achieve the best possible results. Naturally, different types of advertising are likely to work better on different platforms, so give yourself plenty of time for testing prior to launching your social media ads in earnest.
Understand What’s Working and Why
Online advertising platforms offer untold opportunities for tracking and analyzing the results of your marketing and promotional efforts. If you’re not experienced or adept with this form of advertising, you may need some help from your event company to determine what metrics to track, or to analyze the resultant tidal wave of data. At the very least, your event management partner should be able to recommend professionals skilled at managing social media advertising campaigns.
Gain the Benefits of Social Promotion
Let’s just start by saying Facebook currently has north of 2 billion monthly active users. Instagram boasts over 800 million, while Twitter claims more than 330 million at last count. That’s a lot of eyeballs looking at screens, which means a lot of opportunities to reach a target audience, especially with the right advertising tools at your disposal.
The main benefit event hosts will enjoy when working with an event company on social media ads is the ability to make every dollar count. Blanket advertising is a crap-shoot. Social media ads go straight to users that are most likely to be interested in what you’re selling, so to speak.
If your campaign is good, you might even encourage sharing, in addition to intended conversions like click-through and sign-up. When done right, using social media ads to promote your event can deliver unsurpassed return on investment.
Modern professionals work pretty hard, so when they’re able to break out of their normal routines, it’s only natural they’d want to cut loose and have a little fun. Unfortunately, more and more professionals are trying to squeeze vacation time into their work trips, and that can compromise their ability to soak up all the information you hope to provide.
How can meeting and event hosts and corporate event planning companies get attendees back on track and draw their focus to the task at hand? One great way is to make your meetings and events more fun so they don’t have to look elsewhere to have a good time. This not only keeps attendees interested, but also ensures an immersive experience, positive reviews, repeat attendance, and a growing list of attendees at future events. Here are a few ways you and your event management services partner can make your event vacationer-friendly.
Corporate Event Planning Companies Must Sell the Destination
What do vacationers look for when seeking destinations? Often, they won’t resort accommodations, area attractions, and access to local favorites like cuisine and cultural events. When you go to Hawaii, you stay at a beach-front hotel and go to a luau, right? How can you and your event management services partner incorporate this same principle into your event?
First, you have to choose an appropriate destination, one that offers the exciting and adventurous vibe vacationers expect. From there you can find ways to work the destination into the theme of your event to make every aspect of the affair unified and add the vacation aesthetic to what would otherwise be just another industry event.
Incorporate Area Locations with Your Event Management Services Team
All work and no play…well, you know the rest. Event attendees are going to want to sample the local flavors of your destination, and you can help them by setting up soirees that feature local foods and planning group excursions into the local environs to see area attractions.
The more you’re able to keep the group together, the greater opportunity you have to add value and impart your message. Experienced corporate event planning companies should have some ideas about how to weave together fun and education through destination-specific activities.
Switch Up Locations Annually
Sometimes, coming back to a place you’ve already been is like coming home, but well-traveled vacationers are always on the lookout for something new. Choosing a new location for your annual conference or event can maintain interest levels for repeat attendees, as well as draw new attendees that live closer to the current location.
Don’t Lose Your Core Focus
Says John Cotter, COO at AMI, “It’s true that more attendees are seeking the novelty of a vacation destination, but the main purpose of attending any event is still education, so you can’t skimp on content.” Corporate event planning companies can find ways to make destinations more inviting and fun without dropping the ball on hiring notable speakers and choosing relevant and engaging topics.
With an experienced event management services partner like American Meetings, Inc. (AMI) on your side, you should be able to make every event more like a fun vacation experience while still providing the educational resources attendees expect.
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AMI is excited to announce the roll-out of our newest attendee marketing solution. AttendeeBuilder.com integrates your direct mail and email campaigns with personalized landing pages, SMS Text, Survey pages, QR Codes and social media. Experience the power of AttendeeBuilder at www.attendeebuilder.com.
It gives a concise and easy-to-understand overview of how companies manufactured the demand for bottled water and how, as a result, we are faced with an environmental crisis. The video also does a good job of highlighting the issues we face in order to “take back the tap” and ends with the positive message that we are already moving in the right direction.
Although we do still see bottled water being served at meetings, the fact is that the movement is quickly picking up steam. Corporate, Association and Event Planners of all stripes have been moving away from bottled water for some time now but there are also a host of city and state governments, corporations, schools, clubs and others issuing bottle-free policies. No doubt during MPI’s annual World Education Congress which starts this week, green meetings and sustainability will again be hot topics. In fact, the Green Meetings Industry Council will present for the first time ever an introduction to the APEX/ASTM Green Meetings and Events standard which will surely include recommendations for dealing with the bottled water issue.
AMI is proud to be part of the sustainability movement. We make it our business to stay abreast of the green topics and to be constantly looking for alternatives and creative solutions. Below are some of the stories, movements and alternatives to bottled that we’ve found. Of course there are many more so let us know what cool and innovative solutions you come across! Through sharing and collaboration, we will make a difference.
Think Outside the Bottle– From Corporate Accountability International, this is a campaign working to promote, protect and ensure public funding for our public water systems. Through work with public officials, faith groups, restaurants, celebrities, campuses and individuals, this campaign encourages support for public systems by opting for tap over bottled water. Check out their PDF guide called Getting States Off the Bottle and the grid showing who is doing what by state.
Inside the Bottle.- The People’s Campaign on the Bottled Water Industry, a movement to create bottled water free zones in classrooms, school boards, student unions and clubs, union locals, halls and buildings, public spaces like community centres, City buildings, parks and more
ALTERNATIVES: (fyi, AMI can help you brand any of these items and more! Click here for information).
The Water Bobble– A re-usable recycled plastic water bottle with a built-in filter. Just fill it up with regular tap water, and enjoy pure filtered water straight from the snap-open spout. The replaceable carbon filter is built right in, and is good for 300 uses (40 gallons). BPA-free. Made in USA.
Ice Box Water– Yes, you got it, water in a box (from the Rustad Spring in Norway!). Madefrom planet friendly sustainable materials (97% from trees). The Box is 100% recyclable cardboard or pressed paper with water based ink (no solvents), no wax. According to their website, the Carbon Footprint of the Box is only 24% of the comparable size plastic bottle (even including transport from Norway!!!) and if it ends up in the landfill, the footprint is 1/30th of the bottle which bio-degrades over time.
Kleen Kanteen– the first ever BPA-free, metal water bottle ever released on the market. Founded in 2004 and based in Chico, Calif., Kleen Kanteen is very active in the environmental and sustainability efforts to do away with bottled water. They are also a sponsoring partner for the award-winning documentary, “Tapped” about the history of the bottled water industry and its repercussions.
TaylorMade Water– a provider of water purification systems for business and homes throughout northern California. TaylorMade partnered with the 2008 Slow Food Conference in San Francisco by providing water filter stations to the more than 20,000 attendees.
SIGG– These Swiss people have been making aluminum drinking bottles since 1908! This ultra-lightweight bottle is extruded from a single piece of aluminum and holds 1 liter of fluid (33.8 ounces) Sigg bottles are virtually unbreakable and are constructed with no seams, ensuring a long-lasting, leak-proof performance. They also feature Sigg’s proprietary baked-on inner liner, which is made from a non-toxic, water-based epoxy resin that exceeds FDA requirements for leaching (0.0 percent) and is independently tested to be taste- and scent-neutral. Every Sigg bottle is 100 percent recyclable at the end of its life, and is backed by a lifetime warranty.
BIOTA Spring Water– the World’s first bottled water/beverage packaged in a commercially compostable plastic bottle, manufactured from a 100% renewable resource, corn.
AMI is pleased to share this information on ways to reduce your carbon footprint and we welcome your comments and any additional information on the topic. Happy Planning! bd@americanmeetings.com
