If you’re hosting an event to wow a crowd, marketing it beforehand is crucial. Great event marketing will grab your target audience’s attention and get them excited to attend—but organizing and managing promotions can be challenging. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, fear not! We’re here to provide guidance and support.
No matter what kind of event you’re promoting, there are core strategies you can follow to attract as many attendees as possible. We’re taking inspiration from our Eventbrite experts and event organizers to offer this complete guide to making your event a hit.
Table of Contents
What is event marketing?
“Event marketing” has multiple definitions. For instance, it can refer to using events themselves to promote your brand, service, or product.
But in this guide, we’re digging into event marketing as the tactics you use to promote an event and drive potential attendees to buy tickets. Promoting your event includes a variety of inbound and outbound marketing techniques, such as:
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Event-discovery sites
- Audience retargeting
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
I’ll also dish on why marketing your event is crucial to its success and offer tips for streamlining your marketing plan. As a bonus, I’ll share creative event marketing ideas to jumpstart your efforts.
First, let’s look at the obvious and not-so-obvious benefits of marketing your event.
What are the benefits of event marketing?
No matter the size of your event, you should conduct outreach to ensure people hear about it. From intimate concerts to large conferences, all events benefit from marketing.
Why invest time and attention in marketing your events?
Events aren’t just a way to throw a fun party—though, let’s be real, that’s part of the magic! They also help you meet important goals, including:
- Creating memorable experiences
- Increasing brand awareness
- Building a community
- Increasing customer loyalty
- Driving sales
But you can only unlock those benefits if you market your events successfully, and that means focusing on the quality of your marketing, not just the quantity. You need to ensure you target the right audience at the right time with the right kinds of marketing.
Targeting the right audience with your marketing efforts
You might have several different profiles of people you want to attend your event. You can target those audience segments with campaigns on different platforms, so the right mix of people hear about your event.
For example, you might be looking for senior directors of companies in specific industries to attend your trade show. By targeting that audience across social media or via ads on events search engines like Eventbrite, you can ensure your event will be full of the people you’re looking for.
But before you start spending time and effort on marketing, you need to be clear on what you want to achieve.
Fun fact
Events are a popular form of entertainment, and 69% of people would rather spend on an experience vs. material goods. People browsing Eventbrite are already looking for an event to attend—this is an ideal audience to get in front of.
How to identify your event marketing goals
Goal Setting for EventsBefore you start planning your event, make a list of your trackable goals, aka key performance indicators (KPIs). These provide a yardstick to measure your event’s success after the show is over.
Even if your event isn’t revenue-focused, you can still utilize KPIs, such as attendee satisfaction, to gauge whether you met your goal of everyone having a fabulous time.
Having the correct event metrics can help fine-tune your event marketing strategies, improve sales, and increase attendance turnout. If you’re not sure where to start, here are some different ways to identify objectives worth tracking.
Start with your “why”
First, identify what you’re trying to achieve with your marketing.
A few goals to consider:
- Building a strong community around a common interest
- Educating people about a topic they care about
- Raising brand awareness
- Generating revenue from ticket, refreshment or merch sales
- Driving leads to nurture for your business
All those goals might sound appealing for your event, but prioritize the ones most important to your customers and business. Then, you can decide which metrics to track for success.
Identify the metrics you care about
Now that you know why you’re hosting your event, you’ve laid the foundation to measure your impact. Which metrics matter will depend on your goals, so keep your reasons in mind as you look at the different metrics to track.
1. Registrations
Registrations are the most-vital metric to consider for overall marketing success. Look at peaks in registration to determine if any particular marketing effort drove the spike, and use the final number of attendees as a benchmark for your next event.
2. Attendance
Compare the number of registrants to the number of attendees who showed up. A large percentage of no-shows could indicate that your event was marketed well, but people didn’t feel invested or interested enough to actually attend. (Fortunately, there are ways to avoid no-shows.)
3. Lead generation
Many entrepreneurs choose to use events to promote themselves and their services and generate leads. So an important metric here would be to measure how many leads your event brings in. (Tip: Establish the quality of those leads pre-event, such as the average sales you hope to achieve per attendee.)
4. Attendee feedback
A post-event survey is a valuable opportunity to get feedback directly from attendees about their experience at your event. KPIs from surveys can include attendee satisfaction, intent to return, and net promoter score (NPS).
Feedback is helpful for events of all kinds, but make sure that the questions you ask target the goals you had in the first place, such as whether your attendees had fun or met other people in the community.
5. Brand impressions
Develop an event hashtag, so your attendees can use it when sharing on social channels. Monitor the hashtag to see whether your event was worth sharing, and whether your event brand is reaching a wider potential audience through social sharing.
6. New customers
Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you can track how many of your event leads turn into customers. This might not be the most immediately measurable KPI, but it’s helpful in demonstrating the longer-term financial value of your event.
7. Information retention
If your goal was to educate people about an important topic, you can speak with attendees or send them a form to see what information they retained. That can help you improve your next event and understand whether your setup and resources were effective.
Whichever goals you choose, having people at your event is crucial to reaching them. So let’s take a look at the different ways in which you can promote your event.
The Only Event Marketing Plan Creators Need
Finding your promotion channels Optimizing for SEO
Creating FOMO and demand Choosing your ticket types
Create a marketing strategy
Event Marketing StrategyOnce you know your goals and how you’ll measure them, develop a marketing strategy to help you achieve them.
Different marketing strategies are better suited to different events and marketing goals. If your goal is to have as many event registrations as possible, your strategy should include marketing tactics that appeal to a wide audience. That might include:
- Non-targeted and targeted social media ads
- Traditional advertising on TV, radio or billboards
- Sending mass-marketing emails
On the other hand, you might care more about attendee feedback and information retention, which will see improvement if your attendees are already highly interested. For that, you’ll need a highly tailored marketing strategy, such as:
- Reaching out to an existing online community
- Spreading news of the event by word of mouth
- Using targeted Eventbrite Ads
Making an event promotion timeline where you outline the marketing strategy you want to follow and the concrete steps you should take to make it happen will help clarify your actions at each step.
Download our Event Promotion Timeline Checklist to keep your marketing strategy on track.
Following your strategy is easier once you familiarize yourself with the different event promotion channels you have available to you.
Event promotion channels and how to use them
Social Media for EventsMarketing is not a one-note song. You should use a variety of channels to reach your target audience and entice them to attend your event.
Event promotion websites
An essential first step in gaining traction for your event is to get it listed on a reputable event promotion website.
This listing acts as your primary online event page to drive invitees to when you send them emails, texts, or social media messages asking them to attend.
But there’s a secondary benefit. By listing your experience on an event-discovery platform like Eventbrite, you immediately take advantage of the site’s reach and its captive audience of eventgoers.
Let’s say you’re a social media whiz looking to help small business owners maximize their presence. You’ve decided to run a conference-style event with some impressive speakers.
By listing your event under categories like business, marketing, and career on Eventbrite, it automatically shows up in search results when potential attendees browse for upcoming events in those categories or with those keywords.
Now that your event page has appeared in the search, you want people to click on it, read the details, and feel compelled to buy tickets. So aside from important basic information like the event name, date, and location, your listing should motivate those potential attendees to purchase tickets and turn up. The way to accomplish that is to focus on how they will benefit from attending.
This listing below by NWP Events is a perfect example of presenting the benefits and value of an event to participants:
Event social media marketing
People are constantly on social media, and they’re using it more and more for recommendations from people and sites they follow and trust. To maximize your social media marketing, promote your event on a few different platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, so that you’re reaching a variety of potential attendees where they’re already looking for things to do.
When promoting an event on social media, your biggest challenge (and, therefore, goal) is to cut through the noise.
People are already oversaturated with content on social. So your post needs to get straight to the point and illustrate why your event is compelling. Include the following in your social media posts:
- Name of the event
- Location
- Date and time
- What the event is about
- Who the event is for
- Why people should come to your event
- Instructions on how to join with links to your event page
- An attractive image, video or photo carousel to capture attentions
- Your event or company logo
- Your event hashtag
Check out this ad below for a U AID Foundation charity event.
In their Charity Art Fair Instagram ad, U AID Foundation captured all the necessary information and created a compelling invitation for people to unite through art and support the people of Ukraine.
You can apply these tactics to both paid social media ads and your organic social media strategy. The main difference in their reach is that organic traffic is more likely to come from your existing audience, whereas ads can bring you views and engagement from a new audience you want to attract. Which one you lean on depends on your event goals.
To amplify your message through organic social, you could create a sequence of posts that drive urgency as you approach the event date. For instance, your first post would introduce the event, while a later post might be an update on ticket availability, newly announced performers, food and drink options, swag, etc.
The more you use social media, the more you’ll be able to get a sense of what’s working and resonating with your followers.
When you make these tweaks, make sure to measure these key metrics:
- Engagement rate: Are your followers engaging with the content you post? Look for trends and repost your top content to improve your engagement rate and show up in more feeds.
- Clicks: How many social media users are clicking on the links to your ticketing page?
- Sales: If you use Eventbrite, you can see how many sales each social media channel has garnered in your event reports.
- Return on investment (ROI): If you’re using paid advertisements, be sure to monitor your ROI to make sure your spending is paying off.
Listing your event on an events platform like Eventbrite and promoting it through social media are great short-term strategies. However, if you repeatedly run events or if you’re organizing a large event and you can start your marketing early, you may want to consider how you’re going to get your event to turn up when people search for them through their chosen search engine.
Search engine optimization (SEO) for events
Your event page needs to be optimized for specific keywords relevant to the event to make it easy for search engines to find you, as well as people when they search on platforms like Google.
Start by using a keyword research tool to find the words and phrases that get the top results on Google, Bing, and other popular search engines.
For instance, if you want your event to show up in the search results for “networking events in Seattle,” the words “networking event(s)” and “Seattle” have to be present in your listing.
While it’s smart to optmize your listing for keywords, just remember that SEO is a little more complex than that. It can take time for a page to rank (sometimes months, which isn’t very helpful when your event is in a few weeks), and pages with what’s termed “domain authority” are likelier to rank.
So if your event is soon—or your website is very new—rather than listing the event on your own site, choose an authoritative and established partner to host your event listing. The higher your partner’s domain authority, the better chance your event has at ranking in search results.
That’s why listing your event on Eventbrite is so helpful. It’s the only ticketing or registration page with a high enough domain authority to rank alongside sites like Yelp.
Check out this Google search for “networking events in Seattle:”
See? The first results are all Eventbrite events. Cowabunga!
Learn more about event SEO
Email marketing
To properly market your event, you’re going to need a strong email marketing strategy, too. Not only is email a direct line to potential attendees, but it’s also an optimal channel to build your audience.
To be effective, your email invite should:
- Clearly detail the event’s time and date
- Provide an easy way to attend (linking to your ticketing page) or RSVP
- Explain in detail what attendees can expect to walk away with
Like your social media event promotion strategy, the email strategy for your event should be scheduled and sequenced. For example, you might use a tool like Eventbrite to design a series of emails that gradually applies urgency, so that your final email looks something like this:
A sequence like this will help maximize email performance and drive more attendees to your event.
Speaking of performance, to make your event email marketing effective, you need to pay attention to key metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Maximize your results by doing the following:
- Make your email subject line exciting and actionable to entice recipients with the promise of solutions to their most pressing needs or desires
- Include multiple links in the body of your emails, placed on descriptive words and phrases that highlight the content of the linked webpage
- Place your unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email, so recipients will first have the opportunity to see your email’s contents
Tip: Stand out in an eventgoer’s noisy inbox with these event email templates written for us by the experts at MailChimp.
Word of mouth
Don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth in getting more attendees to your event.
Think about it: If every person currently attending gets just one other person to come, you’ve doubled your attendance.
To encourage this spontaneous, organic outreach, you’ll need to find a way to incentivize those who already have tickets or are about to buy them to invite others. For example, you might run a cash-back offer, where for every successful invite an attendee makes, they earn a small amount of cash in return. If they bring enough new people in, they could end up getting their tickets for free!
Bring it all together with these seven tips for successful event marketing
Event Planning Tips1. Establish your event’s marketing budget
Without an understanding of every dollar you’re spending, you’re setting yourself up to go over budget.
To establish your marketing budget, you need to:
- Clarify your event budget strategy
- Map specific expenses in your marketing budget
- Master budget best practices and how you’ll calculate ROI
- Craft your event marketing budget template
2. Start your SEO event marketing efforts
If your event is far enough in the future, leverage SEO to market your event. There are six concrete steps you can take to implement SEO in your marketing:
- Keyword research
- Optimize your event title and description with keywords and need-to-know information
- Create quality content like blog posts, interviews with speakers/performers, behind-the-scenes looks at your event
- Build quality backlinks. Reach out to influencers, industry blogs, local event calendars, and partners or sponsors to get links to your event page.
- Leverage social media to help increase your visibility and drive traffic to your event page
- Monitor your results through tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Look at metrics like organic search traffic and rankings for your target keywords to evaluate your performance and adjust your strategy as needed
3. Create targeted ads
You have a solid list of people who’ve purchased tickets to your events in the past. You want to find more people just like that on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
These platforms have the technology to help you find lookalike audiences — people who match your buyer profile in terms of demographics, geography, stated interests, and online behavior. Using their algorithms and automated tools, you can create event ads targeting those exact people.
4. Leverage influencer marketing
Partnering with influencers in your industry can help you reach a wider audience and build credibility for your event. Engage them to promote your event on their own social media channels and even speak or participate in the event itself.
But reaching a new audience won’t help if their audience isn’t your target audience, so you need to choose wisely. You need to make sure they have a track record of engaging their audience, so check that they don’t just have thousands of followers but also quality engagement (check out comments on their posts, shares, etc.).
Get expert insights on using micro-influencers to supercharge your event marketing.
5. Maximize PR opportunities
PR stands for “public relations,” and good PR is essential to spreading the word about your event. While advertising on social media and other platforms can be effective, there’s a whole network of news outlets and publications that you can use to inform people about your event—and, simultaneously, your brand.
6. Follow up with attendees
Once your event is over, don’t be lulled into thinking your work is done. This is the time to follow up with your attendees to find out what marketing efforts they responded to, and determine which campaigns you can skip next time. Surveys are a convenient and unobtrusive method—be sure your guests include an email address when they register for your event, so you can communicate with them afterward.
7. Track your event marketing efforts
Once you’ve planned your event and rolled out promotions, it’s time to gather data and track your progress. So where can you find the information you need? Here are three places to begin your search:
- Event technology: Your ticketing partner, event app, and CRM can help you capture information like the number of tickets/registrations sold, revenue from sales, and more.
- Social media: Pull data from each platform’s metrics dashboard to help you determine the effectiveness of your campaigns, and decide which social media platforms are yielding the best ROI.
- Event surveys: Send out pre-and post-event surveys to gauge satisfaction and to learn more about your attendees.
Advanced marketing techniques if you’re ready to level up
Experiential MarketingReady to move past the basics and dig into even more advanced ways to market your event? You can increase your marketing efforts’ impact with these advanced marketing techniques. They might require a little more elbow grease but can pay off in the long term.
- Remarketing: When creating ads for people who have visited your website, including ad copy that references their prior visit creates a more personal connection, fostering greater brand loyalty.
- Video: Record panels, speakers, and interviews that you can repurpose and reshare afterward to keep the event and brand front-of-mind for attendees and potential customers.
- Co-creation: Get attendees involved in the process of planning event content and creating content. This gives them a greater connection to your event and can reduce no-shows.
- Space planning: Use near field communication (NFC) and mobile apps to track the movements of attendees, and find out what they visited and engaged with the most, so you can make adjustments to your next event.
- Experiences: Work on planning an immersive experience that attendees can lose themselves in—something they won’t forget and will talk about for years to come.
