Event Marketing 101: How To Keep Attendees Engaged Before, During, And After Your Event
No doubt, hosting a brilliant event is important for engaging the audience; however, marketing is even more important. For example, suppose people are not aware of your event. In that case, no matter how superbly hosted it is, you won’t meet your business objectives.
Now since event marketing is essential, you need to understand a fundamental element, and that is you need to do consistent marketing before, during and after the event. This guide will help you attract more & more audiences to your event.
How To Engage Audience Before An Event
Reveal Guest Speakers In Style
Guest Speakers are an important reason why people register for an event. They want to get up close with their favourite speakers and learn from him/her face-to-face. Humans are emotional beings, so if you present the event’s guest speakers in style, it will make them excited about your event. You can use blogs, teaser videos, or images to hype the guest speakers. This excitement will lead to your potential guests converting into guests.
Post About Early Bird Registration
Generate ticket sales through tickets. Since people walk in a herd, your attendees will share their tickets with friends to bring them along. Use early bird ticket registration to your benefit by asking people to share about their tickets on social media. This will enhance your event awareness, and you will receive more ticket registrations. Set an early bird ticket registration countdown timer on social media, reminding people about the time remaining for early registration.
Offer Giveaways
Giveaways before an event are brilliant for attracting an audience. People like things that can get a discount. Social media contests for tickets or travel awards can be made, or discount codes can be distributed to followers. A VIP access giveaway would be an excellent opportunity to go above and above. To further increase your reach, make sharing your post a requirement for entering these giveaways.
Share Behind-The-Scenes
Photos from the backstage area are excellent for revealing what goes on there. But, in addition, they are essential for observing what occurs before the stage is even constructed.
An excellent method to increase conversation and engagement is to share these behind-the-scenes images and anecdotes before the event starts.
According to our research, brands and attendees were engaging in some interesting behaviours, such as sharing vacation itineraries for destination events, publishing outfit photos from music festivals and sharing training schedules from marathon runners.
Also, to display behind the scenes available on different social media platforms you can use a social media aggregator tool. This type of tool will help you collect and display your related content on a single screen in the form of a live social media wall.
How To Engage The Audience During The Event
Photo Booths
It’s impossible to imagine an event without a photo booth. People love clicking photos they can later share with friends on social media. Photo booths give them a chance to click pictures creatively.
Install photo booths at your event with different themes and flavours. For example, you can set up a photo booth on superhero themes such as Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk or Thor. Apart from the superhero theme, you can also use a popular web series or movie theme to engage your audience.
Share Content From Speakers
You can tweet or share significant statements from speakers at events, including conferences or fundraisers, to promote sharing. The hashtag for your event and a @mention of the speaker in the post can help this content go viral among event attendees and home viewers.
It can be beneficial to plan in advance if you want to produce content like this for your event so that you can share your quotes in real-time as it happens.
Give A Glimpse Of Behind-The-Scenes From The Event
You can also make compelling multimedia posts to encourage sharing during the event. For example, share images and videos that take viewers behind the scenes at the event or that feature special interviews with attendees. Photos work well on all social media platforms. For example, Facebook Live video is a fantastic real-time resource, and Instagram or Snapchat stories are appropriate for sharing spontaneous experiences.
At their recent conference in Amsterdam, The Next Web did an excellent job utilizing Snapchat and cross-promoting content to other networks like Twitter.
Interact With Audience Through Polls
To find out which performance, exhibit, or lecture was the most well-liked by guests, employ interactive content like questions or surveys. Have a staff member who will respond to any queries, problems, or remarks that people send your way.
It can be beneficial to consider the queries you’d like to pose and the kind of content you’d like to make in advance if you’re planning to develop interactive content. This will help you produce far higher-quality content while lowering stress levels on the hectic days when your event is live.
How To Engage Audience After The Event
Ask For Feedback
The post-event discussion is split between compliments and criticisms about the event. Share your thoughts and enjoy the compliments, but don’t disregard the critical ones. Thank critics for their input in return, and remember to keep their suggestions in mind while organizing your subsequent event.
Share a post-event survey with followers to get feedback on improving your next event to make this feedback more valuable. In addition, they’ll be more eager to purchase tickets for the following performance if you’re honest with your fans about how you used their feedback to make adjustments.
You might even provide discounts for your upcoming event to appease anyone who is very irate.
Send Personalized Emails
After the event, emailing your participants is an excellent method to maintain and boost user engagement.
Use the recipient’s name to create personalized and relevant emails while sending a sincere thank you.
Remember that emails with the recipient’s name are more likely to be opened. You can show gratitude by making a quick video of yourself, sending it to them via email, and informing them of any additional relevant activities you may be involved in.
Wrapping Up!
Marketing about an event is an integral part of every event. You must keep doing it before, during, and after the event. This blog contains all the necessary information about how you can brilliantly do this. If you are holding an event in the future, you can use this step-by-step guide to engage the audience.
