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Make Spray and Pray Marketing on Event Listing Sites More Effective

Publishing to event listing sites has become the norm for many event marketers. Despite being considered a spray and pray approach, you just do it because everyone else does. And to some extent, it works. Well, there are two philosophical methods of event marketing, targeted marketing versus “spray & pray”. Without knowing more about either, you can probably guess which method is more effective.

Marketing an event is comparable to selling any product or service. The primary difference is your event is the product. You are selling an experience. Sure, an event may have ulterior motives such as selling more records for a music artists, lead-gen for a business, or fundraising for a non-profit. In all cases though, people are buying tickets out of self-interest because they perceive your event will provide them some personal benefit.

Whatever event experience you are selling, their exists a target market. As a result, if you guessed targeted marketing to be more effective, you’d be right. Here’s a good example to illustrate target markets:

If you’re throwing a Food Event called “Micro-Beers and Ribeye Steak-Off”, then you proceed to market to non-drinking vegetarians, expect ticket sales to be slow. So what does this have to do with event listing sites?

Most event listing sites that have high volumes of unique visitors are general in category. Think about Zvents, Yelp, Eventful, Upcoming. They cover a broad spectrum of event categories including Food, Film, Performing Arts, Sports, Non-Profit, Music, and the list goes on. Therefore when promoting an event on these sites you are inherently taking the spray and pray approach. You hope someone, looking for something to do, will stumble across your event listing. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, through our consulting with many event organizers, these sites continue to perform by generating click-throughs to their ticket page. But…let’s not be disillusioned about event listing sites, they fall under the spray and pray methodology. So what can we do to make them more effective? Just a few extra steps.

Tip #1 – Use Short URLs to Track Results

You can create short URLs for your ticket page to track click-throughs. Google has a short URL generator that is quick to set up and easy to view referrer sites. There are many out there, pick the best for you. This will help you understand where your traffic is coming through and which event listing site is generating the most traffic for you.

Tip #2 – Spend Time on the Sites the Matter

There are hundreds of event listing sites out there. Spend time publishing to the sites that matter. By tracking your click-throughs from your short URL, you’ll save valuable marketing time spent on future events. The more data you have on specific channels, the more effective a spray and pray approach becomes.

**BONUS TIP: One of our clients, an event organizer who throws ten local food tours per week, sells 50% of his tickets on a weekly basis from listing on TripAdvisor. Depending on your target audience, this is a hidden gem.

Tip #3 – Understand Who’s Really Attending Your Event

Events are all about the people. If you don’t understand who they really are, how can you market to them? Oh that’s right you can spray and pray. Let’s get to know your attendees instead. If you know detailed information about your audience (age, sex, occupation, interests, etc.), then focusing your event marketing efforts becomes easier. Many local publications list event calendars, but they command different audiences. Understand yours, so you can market to theirs. You can accomplish this through three primary ways.

Request more detailed registration information. Eventbrite and other ticket management companies enable you to add additional fields to the registration process. Actually setting it up is easy, the hard part is determining the right questions. Pro: ability to gather pertinent data in advance of the event. Con: adds friction to the ticket purchasing process, possibly discouraging buyers.
Conduct attendee surveys. Surveys can be administered before, during, or after the event. Some helpful tools include SurveyMonkey or Wufoo, both have free versions. Pro: ability to gather more substantive data. Con: no one really likes filling these out, and often times blow through them with inaccurate responses.
Website analytics. Tools like Google analytics and Quantcast can tell you the demographics of your website visitors. By integrating these tools into your ticketing page, you can learn a lot about them. With deeper integration, you can discover not only who visited your ticketing page, but track them through the registration process. Pro: more passive method of gathering data without annoying your attendees. Con: requires a little technical knowledge to integrate.

Conclusion

Some event marketing channels are inherently spray and pray, such as publishing on event listing sites. This is absolutely fine as long as you’re managing your time most effectively. Don’t rely on one marketing channel. A good event marketer leverages multiple marketing channels to achieve maximum return on investment (both time and money).

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

attendee analysis, event listing sites, event marketing, eventchocolate, short URLs, target audience, understand attendees

Event Planning Like a Boss [Infographic]

October 2nd, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Best Events | Infographics - (7 Comments)

If you’re going to be an event planner, you might as well do event planning like a Boss. Not the kind of boss that’s the master jerk, that nobody likes working for, but rather someone who is the leader. Someone who runs the show, who gets things done against all odds. Someone who is unusually “awesome” or “cool.”

We came across this funny infographic from the famed Julius Solaris, author of the Event Manager Blog. Our team enjoyed it so much we wanted to share it with our readers. If you can relate to this image, you are likely event planning like a boss. Hats off to all those event planners who bust their butts to put a great show on for the rest of us.

Check out the original infographic about event planning.

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

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Find the Right Blog to Boost Your Event Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

September 20th, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Event Marketing | Event Promotion | Infographics | Tips and Tricks - (7 Comments)

Drive serious traffic to your event by getting coverage on the right blog. Event marketing on blogs is usually reserved for large national campaigns promoting major events, but it doesn’t have to be. With the proper research, a great event marketer can unlock the power of blogs and travel the path to sold out events. We’ve summarized some key tools and steps to take for event marketing on blogs.

Need an Event Website

Before you start promoting your event, you need a website where your interested audience can register. It could be your event website, your ticketing page or event your Facebook event page. The important part here is sending them to the site where they can take action. Event marketers sometimes make the mistake of sending traffic to their company website, leaving the visitor to hunt for the obscure link in the bottom right that reads “register”. Send them to the juicy details, where they can take action to immediately register or buy tickets.

Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

Quality of content creation plays a big role in the extent of your reach. Explore many different mediums such as videos, photos, banner ads, slideshows and more. Don’t hesitate to repurpose content. Some people may prefer to flip through a slideshow on slideshare others would rather watch a video on youtube. Get that content ready to feed to those hungry bloggers.

Find Blogs to Promote the Event

There are more than 160.8 million blogs on the internet. Blogs are such an effective channel because they target a loyal, niche focused audience. You can research relevant blogs on technorati or google blog search. You have a couple options to market on Blogs. Send the author a brief email introducing yourself, actually scratch that, you should already have relationships with the influencers in your industry. If you don’t, start that process today. Introduce yourself on social media or via email. Get on their radar, so when it comes time to market your event you are a friend not a stranger. Send the author some ideas for a potential blog post, submit copy for a sponsored blog post, advertise directly on the blog, or advertise via a 3rd party ad networks such as Blogads.

Explore Event Marketing on Local and National Blogs

Events are geographically constrained, unless you’re throwing an online event like a webinar. Therefore, unless you’re throwing a major event, think local. When using an ad network, blog advertising can be geographically targeted based on visitors’ IP address. This way your paid impressions are being published to the audience that matters.

We love info graphics and have to share them. Enjoy!

The original info graphic was published on Ramussen College’s blog which can be found here.

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

blog, blog advertising, event marketing, event promotion, eventchocolate, how to promote your event online, promote your event

4 Worst Ideas for Event Twitter Hashtags

September 11th, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Event Marketing | Event Promotion | Social Media - (8 Comments)

All too often we’re told what to do, when so much knowledge can be gained from what NOT to do. So we figured we’d outline the 4 worst ideas for event twitter hashtags as a warning. If anyone writes a story about your ability to choose event twitter hashtags make sure it’s used as an example, not a warning. Think of this aspect of event marketing as the “creative” sauce. Everything you put out there as an event marketer, from event descriptions to photos to twitter hashtags, demands a level of creativity. Let your mind wander through the creative abyss of event marketing. You will find those hours spent up front will pay off with positive results.

4 Worst Ideas for Event Twitter Hashtags

1. Don’t make it short

If you’re only given 140 characters to share your message, it’s not a good idea to utilize 22 of them with a name like “#ChocolateFactoryTour“. Despite how delicious that chocolate tour will be, not only does it chew up space, but nobody wants to type that entire hashtag every time. This is worst idea candidate #1 because it will discourage people from using your hashtag. Particularly when much of this engagement will occur via mobile phone. People’s thumbs will be working over time. Consider an abbreviated tag to the above, “#CFT” or even “#CFT2012″.

2. Don’t research it before hand

We all saw what happens when you happhazardly tweet about the latest trending hashtag. Despite being an honest accident, what was originally intended to broaden your brand’s reach can result in damaging community backlash. The point is to research your hashtag before hand. Type your proposed event hashtag into Twitter’s search bar to see if others are using it for other discussions. An extra 10 minutes spent doing a little research will save you weeks of crisis control.

3. Don’t make it relevant

Ever seen a hashtag that you have no idea what it’s about? Yeah, us too. Compliments to the “#eventprofs” hashtag. Not only is it short and concise but it’s pretty darn clear what it’s all about. Apply this same principle to your event. Include at least one keyword or abbreviation pertinent to your event. Another great example is South by Southwest “#SXSW“. When you read it, you get it.

4. Don’t tell anyone about it

That would be silly and selfish to not share your hashtag with anyone. They want it. They want to know where all that sweet dialogue is occuring. Let the world know what your event hashtag is by making it official. Post it on your website, blog, ticket page, and social profiles. Make it very visible to your audience. It’s a problem if people have to google search “what is the twitter hashtag for YourEventName?” Twitter provides some great examples of how twitter hashtags have been used in the wild.

All these warnings you may think are easy to avoid, but in reality, they’re not. It’s easy to get caught up in the flurry of event marketing and neglect to allocate an appropriate amount of time for creativity. But..attention to the small details, executed effectively, will accumulate into a brilliantly executed event marketing plan. Omit the word DON’T from the 4 worst ideas above and you’ll see the forest between the trees.

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

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Are Event Marketers Keeping Up with the Times on Social Media? [INFOGRAPHIC]

September 6th, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Event Marketing | Event Promotion | Infographics | Social Media - (9 Comments)

An event marketer not using social media is like and artist still selling vinyl. There’s been a change in the medium of distribution, it’s digital. Clearly not everyone is on board yet, but that’s the direction we’re headed.

This infographic is a throwback to 2010, feels like yesterday. You may be asking, why are we posting this infographic now? The answer is to emphasize that social media and event marketing have been a match made in heaven since inception. The difference now, is that the social media tools are becoming more sophisticated and more user friendly. As event marketers, we are now in an environment where social media is a necessity, not just another marketing channel.

You can see the evolution of facebook’s statistics below. In 2010, the social network had 500 million users and now they have nearly 1 billion. If they were their own country it would nearly be the size of India’s population. With increased adoption across the top social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Meetup, we can better identify and target our event audience. Social networks provide rich user profile data that enables savvy event marketers to spend more time talking to the people that care.

The infographic below highlights the opinions of industry experts polled on their use and experience with social media event marketing. We’ve highlighted the intriguing statistics that stand out to us:

69% met their event marketing objectives through social media
21% indicated their corporate objective for social media was to increase event attendance
22% spent more than 10 hours per week on social media marketing

The writing is on the wall. Are you keeping up with the times?

Thanks to Echelon Design for providing the original post here.

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

event marketers, event marketing, event promotion, social media

10 Best Event Marketing Tips Your Teacher Never Told You

August 30th, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Event Marketing | Event Promotion | Tips and Tricks - (10 Comments)

This is the moment the event marketing grasshopper becomes the master. The moment where the student becomes the teacher. This is your moment. Turn your speakers up, do a little dance, and say “I’m going to use these 10 event marketing tips because I’m the BOSS!” Go ahead. That’s office friendly.

Now sit back down and let’s go through this. Many of these event marketing tips never existed 5 years ago. With the rapid development in technology, event marketers now have the ability to reach their target audience more efficiently at scale. Offline channels that used to be the norm are becoming less attractive than their online alternatives. When a broader audience can be reached at a lower cost, it’s hard to ignore the online opportunities for event marketing.

To be clear though, offline event marketing is still an integral part. That’s why they call it an “event marketing mix”. Ultimately, events are all about people. Relationships established online thrive on a healthy diet of in-person interactions. Take these 10 tips to heart, but remember what happens on your keyboard should be translated into real-life relationships.

10 Best Event Marketing Tips

Search for your audience online. Use tools like Google Alerts, Twilert, Technorati, and Facebook Pages to perform general searches with keywords representing your target audience.
Reach out to past attendees. Research tells us, the best way to understand our customers is to ask them. Find out where they congregate online. Ask how they prefer to receive communication. And give them a reason to share your event within their circles of friends.
Spy on competitors. Look at your competitor’s events to find your potential audience. This is also an opportunity to gain perspective on effective and non-effective communication with your audience. Check out their sponsors, marketing channels, and creative copy. See what they do, and do it better.
Connect with media hotspots. Look to relevant tradeshow/meeting/event websites and magazines within your industry and connect with their communities. Depending on your event, the more locally, niche focused, the better. Spend your time wisely to reach the largest audience with the most targeted profile.
Leverage your speakers and sponsors. Ask both your speakers and sponsors to promote your event within their networks. Let’s not forget they are benefitting from your event too, so it’s ok to ask them to do a little work.
Publish across free event listing sites. List your events with online community calendars. This is an industry norm when throwing public events. It’s not necessarily the most effective method but it’s a must do.
Market on social networks. Based on industry surveys, only 60% of event marketers are using social media to market their events. This is surprisingly low considering the persistent data that supports its huge benefits. Promote your event across the big three: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you have time and resources, use others, but only if you can be effective at it. A detailed social media best practices infographic can be found here.
Publicize your event attendees. As you continue to browse the web, notice the prominence of social influence across websites. You’ll see different forms of social pressure and persuasion through the law of association, such as “4 of your friends already like this, join them”. Let your audience know who else is going, who are the sponsors, and who is the talent. Feed their desire to associate with others.
Get your team members involved. Any one working at the event, ask or incentive them to leverage their own online social profiles to share the event details. Make it clear who you’re targeting to attend and encourage them to begin engaging with potential attendees and prospects.
Make your event name unique. Research the name of your event to make sure it’s unique relative to others. People need to be able to easily find it. Also think about how others will perceive it. You might think you have a clever name for your contemporary art event by calling it “Speed of Art”, but when you buy the domain it looks a little funny (www.speedofart.com). Be mindful.

Start using these event marketing tips to improve attendance and increase your loyal following. We were inspired by and included excerpts from BusyEvent’s original post called “16 Things to Drive Traffic To Your Event“.

DISCLOSURE: These are not quick fix tips. They still require a lot of work and dedication. Throwing events is about the relationships you share with your audience. It takes time to build trust before your audience can be confident that your event is the place to be. Give it that time, but take the necessary steps to get there.

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

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Event Marketing, What’s Working and What’s Not

August 28th, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Event Promotion - (7 Comments)

Let’s get to the bottom of what’s working and what’s not with your event marketing. If we can identify what’s not working, then we can focus time and resources on what is working. We’ve highlighted three primary areas of focus: writing promotional copy, getting the word out, and considering your audience. We think of event marketing as formulaic to some extent. Once you identify a successful strategy, then you’ve got to put all your horses to work to capture your audience. We strongly believe these three components of event marketing are most critical in accomplishing your goals. Take a moment to learn what’s working and what’s not.

Below is an excerpt from a great article by Mac McIntosh on MarketingProfs.com, which can be found here.

1. Effective Promotional Copy

What’s Working

Generate excitement with benefits built into your headlines and promotional copy: Write long copy. Make sure your promotional copy is long enough to spell out all the details and benefits of attending your event. However, long copy needs to be easy to skim for those who want to get right to the bottom line: use subheads, bold fonts, bullets and call-outs.
- “Six mistakes that can cost you big bucks… and how to avoid them”
- “Evaluating new suppliers: how one company did it right”
- “Avoiding inventory nightmares—or 10 tips for getting your inventory under control”
Sell the event, not your company. You need to focus on selling the benefits of attending your event, not on selling your company and its services. Be sure to include information about what they’ll “take home” in terms of new knowledge or something tangible, such as workbooks, white papers or checklists.
Provide certificates of completion and continuing education credits for technical people and professionals like lawyers and CPAs. It gives them another reason to attend.
Ensure that your promotional copy includes all the following information: location, date, time, cost, how to register and how to get additional information.

What’s Not

Assuming your audience knows why they should participate. When copy is short on details, it doesn’t give people enough reasons to attend.
Not understanding your audience and their problems or pains. People will not respond to a thinly disguised commercial for your company or products.
Grammatical errors, incomplete information or broken hyperlinks (in email announcements). No excuses. Ever. Invest in proofreading.

2. Getting the Word Out

What’s Working

Using an integrated marketing communications approach that includes postal mail, email, telemarketing and your Web site.
Persistence: Hitting your audience more than once with event marketing messages. Test for yourself, but three times seems to be the magic number. First, well in advance. Second, two or three weeks in advance. Third, as a last-minute “last chance” reminder.
Buying text ads in the e-newsletters your customers and prospects read, and posting event information to online event calendars and industry or other relevant business publications.
Following up with key prospects via telephone (if your budget allows).
Sending last minute “See you there!” reminders to registrants.

What’s Not

Relying on one method of communicating—i.e., only direct mail or only email. Sometimes direct mail won’t get the message through, or emails will get filtered out before being read.
Poor timing: Promoting your event too far in advance, or waiting until the last minute to promote your event. You need both to promote well in advance and to remind prospective attendees again shortly before the event.
Using “wedding-type” or formal invitations and postcards. Generally, response plummets when these types of communication pieces are used, because you don’t have room to list all the details and benefits of attending.

3. Considering Your Audience

What’s Working

Short “Executive Briefings,” “Executive Breakfasts” or Webcasts for C-level and other time-pressed executives.
“Lunch and Learn” seminars or half- or full-day meetings or conferences for technical and administrative types.
Holding your live events at new or “in” restaurants or hotels, or at an interesting location such as a client’s factory or party boat for an “Executive Briefing and Harbor Cruise.”
Mixing happy customers with prospects. Happy customers will often sell your prospects on why they should do business with your company.
Timing your event for Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday—days people are more likely to attend, and days that give you time to deliver last-minute reminders to attendees. Friday morning events also work well because people then will take the afternoon off after attending your seminar, to get an early start on the weekend.

What’s Not

Holding live events on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons. Doing so will usually cut your attendance dramatically.

So what are they key takeaways? Know your audience, get the word out to them, and use the best creative copy you can conceive. You have the tools and the skills, it’s time to apply them. If you’d like to keep reading the full event marketing article continue here.

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

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Event Marketing with Social Media – Best Practices [INFOGRAPHIC]

August 23rd, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Infographics | Market Statistics | Social Media - (7 Comments)

The best way to learn event marketing with social media is to do it. The second best way is through an infographic. That’s why we had to share these best practices for the big 3 social networks: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. There’s also some juicy statistical data at the bottom. Thanks to Cvent for providing this great infographic. We’ve summarized the key points below. After you’ve read the article and visually experienced the infographic, take a moment to think about how these best practices apply to your events.

Event Marketing with Social Media – Best Practices

Twitter

is best for reaching industry influencers, marketers, media professionals, tech-savvy audiences
works best with a large audience (over 1,000 attendees)
keep your event hashtag short, sweet, relevant, memorable and unique

is best for promoting corporate events, reaching business professionals, marketing to a specific industry, targeting by job title
don’t forget to fill in all the details, website, event type, industry, and targeted job titles
get your speakers, colleagues, and highly-connected people to click “Attending”

Facebook

is best for social events: concerts, sport events, festivals, reunions, fundraisers, parties
add pictures and details to increase RSVPs
invite attendees to RSVP to your facebook event via email

To learn more about event marketing with social media, check out their free Event Marketing eBook here.

EventChocolate helps you find new people to attend your event. The right message, to the right people, at the right time.

event marketing, event marketing best practices, event promotion, infographic, marketing events, social media

Here’s 3 Quick Ways to Improve Event Ticket Sales

August 17th, 2012 | Posted by EventChocolate in Event Promotion | Tips and Tricks - (9 Comments)

Improving event ticket sales is like leading a bear to honey. It can be hard at first, but once they get a whiff they’ll be chasing you down. We’ve compiled some effective ideas for ways to improve event ticket sales.

3 Ways to Improve Event Ticket Sales

Offer Promotional Discouts

Here we go. Provide discounts according to the actions you want them to take. For example, your goals could be any one of the following: have them share your event with a friend, purchase tickets in advance or buy in groups. Whatever your particular goals are, run promotional ticket discounts to motivate them to behave accordingly. Share with 5 friends get 20% off, tickets cost $20 in advance but $35 at the door, or buy 4 tickets – get 5th one free. Be creative and think about incentivizing your audience to act in ways that will directly help improve event ticket sales.

Give Them a Chance to Share

It’s amazing how excited people get to share with others. Most people don’t like to share their cookies or their ice cream, but give them a chance to share information and content they love and wooaaaa baby watch those ticket sales climb. Social media is so powerful, use it. Give them a chance to share your event by providing social sharing buttons, widgets or icons at every touch point. Don’t be obnoxious about it, but put it out there and when appropriate ask them to “share this with your friends!”

Start Promoting Early and Often

A surefire way to improve event ticket sales is to start promoting early and often. Start marketing the event 4-6 weeks in advance of the event date. This tends to yield best results for most, but really depends on the size and scale of your event. By starting early, you allow yourself more time to get in front of more people. Give the buzz about your event a chance to grow. Use a classic event marketing drip campaign leading up to the event. Send periodic messages/communication in the beginning, then as the date approaches, increase frequency.

And if none of that works, then just call and email all your family and friends to see if they’ll at least show up!

EventChocolate is automated online event promotion – promote your event across the web in one-click.

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