The Best Conference Marketing Strategies
If you want to host an event soon, you must be ready with everything from the list of keynote speakers, to the scheduling of food trucks, and the hotel block’s reservation. Now, all you have to do is to convince people to attend your marketing conference. You must also know that with a good deal of financial investment, you also need an attentive audience for your speakers. In order to boost your event profile, sometimes you need to think beyond your standard marketing strategies. Here are five of the best conference marketing strategies to add to your promotional arsenal.
Know Your Target Audience
The best marketing strategy is to find out who is your target audience. Do you want to attract older professionals or teenage professionals? If you are clear with the answer to this question, you can easily convince people to attend your event. Always keep in mind that these target demographics affect your marketing strategies.
Social Media Promotions
Once you find your target audience, you can easily interact with them through various social media platforms through the creation of multiple groups and accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. On these groups, you can share registration links to confirmed speakers, several attendees, past participants, industry articles, and publications by your speakers to maintain engagement with your audience. Don’t forget to put your “conference hashtag” in any post that you upload on social media for conference promotion. Furthermore, if your event budget allows, then social media ads are a great way to connect your targeted audience.
Send Emails to Your Target Audience
Emails are undoubtedly a key to conference marketing. Create a schedule for sending emails and paper newsletters to your target audience. Include the following to emails and newsletters.
- who attended your last event
- Who has shown interest but have not yet registered
- who has signed up for your previous event but has not attended
- your existing customers
You can schedule three to five emails in a week at different times to announce events, constant reminders, and follow-ups. Don’t forget to include links in emails and newsletters to direct all traffic to your conference landing page for online signup.
Sponsors & Speakers
If you’re working with sponsors, speakers, or influencers, don’t forget to tag them and thank them for your event’s official social media account. Share your hashtags on the post and tag them frequently so that they can also share the event on their social media channels. For further promotion of the event, tactfully ask them to share the information with their audiences.
Do Not Forget Your Existing Customers
While you’re busy making connections with your new audience, don’t forget about the customers who already have shown interest in your brand. Marketing to them should be your priority. Here are a few practical ways to market your event to your existing customers:
- Offer them a discount on registration
- Offer them early access to the conference hotel reservations
- Send them regular newsletters, thank you emails, reminder emails, etc.
- Offer exclusive VIP access to long-time clients
- Ask your existing customers to refer an auspicious sign-up in exchange for a chance to win VIP access or free registration
This brings us to the end of our discussion on the best conference marketing strategies. Now do let us know some of your thoughts on the topic.
