Chapter 11. Event Promotion
Promoting events such as concerts, seminars, conferences, classes, and workshops requires a slightly different strategy from other ecommerce categories. For non–speaking events such as concerts, games, or tournaments, it’s simply a matter of designing great ads, spending enough money on the campaign, and doing extra-fine-grained targeting.
Speaking and teaching events (conferences, classes, etc.) involve more work to prove the value and importance of the content. People are going to spend a lot of money not just to attend your event, but probably also to travel there. This chapter deals mostly with four kinds of events:
- Digital (virtual)
- Local
- Regional
- International
Each requires a different approach to ad targeting when you’re trying to attract the largest audience.
Within the digital category, there are three subcategories that you should keep in mind when thinking of your marketing strategy:
- Automated (seems like it’s live, but it’s actually prerecorded)
- Prerecorded
- Live
Establish Thought Leadership
The first thing you need to do is show that the event is going to be worthwhile—interesting, engaging, and valuable. To do that, you’ve got to establish the thought-leadership status of the people who are speaking at the event. This is true even for virtual events.
Your speakers should be doing a certain amount of this (as well as promoting your event) on their own. Check with them to make sure that they’re mentioning the event on social media, and ask if they can contribute an article or podcast that you can post on your event website. Podcast-type interviews are fairly easy to do; just send three questions relevant to the topic, and either ask the speaker to record them, or set up a call or video conference to record the answers. I taught a two-day SEO workshop for the American Marketing Association, and to promote it, AMA and I partnered on a short podcast that was marketed to prospective attendees. You can find that example at https://cc.readytalk.com/play?id=9au7h. You can also host a short panel-type discussion and record it as a podcast.
If you’re hosting a panel discussion, you might want to concentrate only on the most well-connected panelists. Market your biggest names. If you aren’t sure who the top people are, use the research tactics mentioned in Chapter 13.
Record a preliminary thought-leadership conference as a podcast in the style of a group conversation with one moderator. Create a transcript from it to use as promotional material later.
It’s also helpful if you, as the event host, are known in the industry. Everything public you do creates thought-leadership status. So any articles, podcasts, videos, or other content you can post around the Web will help draw attention to and give relevancy to your event. Don’t just post on your own pages and sites; try to get in as a contributor on prominent industry blogs and in magazines. Most commercial content sites will not turn down free content as long as it’s excellent. You can also try to get invited as a guest speaker on other people’s podcasts and radio shows. Two sites to look into for this are:
If you have the time and speaking ability, you can even start your own regular podcast or online radio show. James Schramko uses his weekly podcast “SuperFast Business” to supplement his blog and business training course. His end result is around 23,000 subscribers.
Add Hashtags
Go to Twitter and Facebook and create relevant hashtags for your event. Use them whenever you post something about that event, and encourage your speakers to do so as well. See Figure 11-1 for a good example.
During the actual event, make sure you let all of the attendees know about your hashtags so that they can use them in their social media posts. Assigning someone the task of live-tweeting from the event is also a great way to get discussion going around your event. And if you plan to hold regular events, using the same hashtag for each can generate buzz around future events.
Create Virtual Badges
You can get some extra reach by creating graphical badges that speakers and attendees can add to their social profiles, blogs, and other sites. If you need some inspiration, a good example is the SES conference.
Establish a Basic Ad and Content Strategy
Your event ads should be progressive—they should build up to the event. Have a countdown series of ads for every major interval (“One month until,” “One week until,” “Two days until,” etc.). Offer an early-bird price, with a hard date for a deadline.
In terms of ad design, use a photo of the location as the image in the ad. If the event is in Los Angeles, use a photo of a building in Los Angeles, and be sure to use the words Los Angeles in the ad or the title so that you can more effectively reach your demographic. People who view ads don’t know that they are targeted specifically to view them.
Giving away tickets in the weeks prior is a great way to get a buzz going about your event. People will begin to envision themselves possibly attending the event, and if they don’t win, they’re more likely to sign up. Jairek Robbins had a great promotion for his Rapid Results Retreat (Figure 11-2). The promotion involved 7 possible ways to gain additional entries in a giveaway drawing for a free ticket to the retreat, a cruise that spanned 16 days and 7 countries. Additional vote opportunities included sharing the promotion on a social media platform.
There are apps that will enable you to give people multiple giveaway entries if they share the giveaway on social networks. Definitely take advantage of this if you can. If you don’t have the budget to use contest/giveaway apps like that, then at least ask entrants to share the event on Facebook or Twitter as part of their entry requirement. Similarly, you can give discounts for people who share the event on social networks.
Ask people to submit questions about the event and the content you’ll be presenting at it. In the weeks leading up to your event, putting out a call for questions is a great way to get people thinking about the event, which increases the chances of them attending while also giving you ideas that you may not have considered. You can also livestream Q&A sessions from the event to give people a vested interest in coming up with questions or comments beforehand.
In addition, another successful tactic for event promotion, particularly for local events or “expert” events, is to find influencers in the local market who have large followings and offer them free attendance to the event in return for their promoting the event to their followers.
Leverage Social Networks
In this section, we discuss some tactics for specific social networks.
If you’re having trouble thinking of good content, then lean on your speakers or presenters. Get some snippets from them that you can share on social media. Do they have previous content you can share? Leverage the existing fan base of the people who are speaking whenever possible.
If you’re a one-person show, then use snippets from your event content. Give part of it away for free. Talk about related books and current events related to this topic.
Regardless of which networks you participate or advertise on, you must build an audience before you can announce the event—if you have time to plan, that is. Event promotion is a long-term strategy for a long-term business.
Multiple Events
If you run more than one event, then start a topic-based group on Facebook and/or LinkedIn so that you can maintain a list of people who may be interested.
Slideshare
Slideshare is a site for hosting and sharing PowerPoint-style slide presentations. In general, it is a great site for raising your professional profile as a speaker, presenter, thought leader, or manager.
If you can, create a virtual version of one of your event talks by uploading the slide deck and adding an audio voiceover. Then share the presentation on all of your social networks.
Lanyrd
Lanyrd is a social network entirely dedicated to conferences and speakers. It’s practically a necessity to have an account here if you want to build your profile as a host or speaker for a technology-themed conference.
Regardless of your industry, having an active Lanyrd account with good content is a great way to build your online reputation as a speaker or conference host. A decent amount of engagement here is social proof of your speaking and organizing skills. Content on Lanyrd that is associated with you will also increase the volume of positive Google search results involving your name, your brand, and your company.
Portfolio Sites
If you have a significant body of work spread out across multiple publications and events, then you should establish an online portfolio. This makes it easier to find and review all of your work without doing a lot of searching. Some sites we like for writer and speaker portfolios are:
AllConferences
AllConferences is a social network dedicated to conferences of all kinds. You definitely want to register here, and participate appropriately.
YouTube
If you have the resources to create a three-minute promotional video, then by all means do it and post it on YouTube. You can do an interview with some of the speakers, you can give away part of your presentation, or you can just talk for a few minutes about the event and how it will help attendees be happier, more successful, or more effective. For an example event promotion video, check out Next Level Experience.
Use YouTube ads to promote this video to people who are fans of the event’s topic or of the people who are speaking there. Share the video everywhere you can.
Meetup
You should have an account on Meetup (Figure 11-3) even if you’re not promoting events. As explained in other chapters, it’s a great way to network and to increase your search visibility. Meetups often feature speakers who have mastered a professional skill. Speaking at these can bolster your credibility in the local area, and even lead to partnerships or consulting gigs. In addition, if you are looking into giving talks at conferences, this is a great stepping-stone.
Create a Meetup group for your event. You can make this the main site for the event, if you want, or it can be a complement to your event website. This is particularly effective for local events, since Meetup is primarily a local service. Or, mention your event at a local meetup group that is relevant.
In the event description of your Meetup, be sure to use good keywords so that it’s easily found through Google and the on-site search function. Don’t do keyword stuffing, though; the description should make sense to a human reader.
Meetup has limited utility for international events, but if you have the resources to put into it, you can definitely attract a larger local crowd.
All of the previously explained tactics for Facebook apply. Create a page for your event, post good content, engage, promote, and so on. Certainly also create a Facebook event for your event and promote it to your fans, but make it clear to attendees that confirming their attendance on the Facebook event isn’t sufficient to save their spot—they must register at your official event page to confirm their registration.
You’re also going to want to create your own Facebook group dedicated to the topic that the conference covers, and leverage your Facebook fan base to participate in it.
As already mentioned, create a custom hashtag (or hashtags, if appropriate to do more than one) for your event on Twitter.
You can take this one step further by using Twitter’s API to create a custom widget for your site that displays tweets with this hashtag.
Create Your Own Social Network
It’s possible to use a service to create your own social network. However, you or your event needs to be extremely popular, and you must dedicate a lot of resources to maintaining a custom social network and engaging with the participants. In most cases, it’s better to create a Facebook group or Google+ community so that you can take advantage of an existing infrastructure with which your fans are already familiar. When existing networks don’t have the features or control that your community needs to be successful, then you have a good business case for a custom social network. These are some services that we recommend:
If you take this route, you’re going to want to promote your custom social network everywhere—Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Do whatever you can to get speakers and attendees to sign up here and participate on the site. Here are some examples of successful custom social networks:
Taki Moore is the creator and trainer behind Million Dollar Coach Intensive, a two-day bootcamp-style training intensive on Internet marketing for coaches run by his coaching and group consulting business Coach Marketing Machine. He teaches coaches to use webinars and automation to supercharge the sales funnel. To attract his clients, he uses a mixture of networking and social media/search engine marketing. Because they are so essential to interest client prospects, Million Dollar Coach Intensive places special importance in testing and running calculated and enticing Facebook ads. Below, Taki reveals a few of the insights he has found most valuable while testing targeted ads and landing pages. To learn more about Taki’s Million Dollar Coach Intensive, check out Coach Marketing Machine.
How do you use Facebook ads?
Taki: We use predominantly newsfeed ads with some retargeting (see Figure 11-4). Some is righthand sidebar stuff, but mostly its News Feed link post ads. The main reason for me is that eyeballs are on the News Feed. People have been trained to ignore the other stuff. You can actually get great click-through rates on the righthand side, but the News Feed shows up better on mobile. I’m pushing people towards content, so it just makes more sense that way.
Sometimes we use News Feed ads to promote blog content to create engagement. But most of the time we are sending people straight to an opt-in page, usually to a free report or checklist (see Figure 11-5). We’ve gone straight to webinar, and our show up rate isn’t as good. We’ve found really great show-up rates on the Facebook ads if they’ve clicked on the ad that day or the day before, but too much before that and it’ll be about 20% show up, compared to our returning audience, which is around 50%–55%. For that reason when we go to webinar, we usually go to something else first, and make the webinar the Thank You page strategy.
Any surprising strategies you’ve found useful?
Taki: I typically think the more value that I can give people the better. I sent people to this killer video course, but our conversion on the landing page was lower. I believe in part it is because people think it will be valuable, but know they are going to have to sit through a bunch of video content to get the value. On our second video in the video series there was a 27-point checklist with a 3×3 grid of some steps on how to run a webinar that sells really well and how to market it. It turned out that the checklist was a hotter offer than the video course. So we just put that front and center and made the landing page just mail out the checklist. That page doubled our conversion rate, and in some cases almost tripled it. The video course was giving us around 11% conversion on the video course, depending on targeting; I think it ended up averaging around 28% for the checklist. People want it because the checklist is like a quick win or a magic pill, something that you can get big value from without having to work too hard for it.
How do you market differently for events?
Taki: We’re doing a look-a-like audience on Facebook ads. We take our client base and upload them to Facebook. Facebook then looks for people who have six data points in common with our current clients. Then, we overlay that with the likes and interests that we are targeting, say “coaching and this person and that person.” This creates a much more targeted list who are almost certainly the right type of people. Obviously, we’ve done custom audience, and we’ve done a look-a-like to our prospect list as well. We targeted LA, California, West Coast much heavier than we did East Coast because of travel time, because we are driving people to a live event.
We just had 58 people in the room this weekend, at least half from Facebook. The ticket price wasn’t the big obstacle. The big obstacle is “I’ve got to get to LA and take two days out of my life. And maybe pay for accommodation.” Upside, the room was nice and full; we sold a lot of stuff. Downside, we managed to attract a few people who weren’t my ideal, just because of the likes and interests we targeted. Of the 58 people in the room, we sold it to 18 of them at $18,000 a piece. We’ll call the total between $270,000 and $329,000.
What do you use for landing pages?
Taki: We use LeadPages. I love it because you can get a page up quickly and test things out. If something works out really well, but you want a little more control over how it looks, you can take your page to a designer and say “I want this, but Like us!" or something.
The great thing about LeadPages is that you can go to a page type like an “opt-in page” and then sort by conversion rate. The top 3 or 4 layouts are usually the ones we’ll pick. Then we split-test them against each other and run them for a few days until it is statistically 98% guaranteed to perform better or worse than the other. Then we just ditch the loser. We’ve tested four different landing page templates with probably 40 different designs, and run Improvely to then track the sales funnel.
Q: I’ve got some great material for a webinar, but I have no idea what software to use. Can you make some suggestions?
A: Sure. Here are some webinar recording and delivery services that we’re aware of:
In general, webinar software and services used to be very expensive, but they have reduced in price quite a lot, and continue to get cheaper with time. Google Hangouts, for instance, is an excellent tool for giving webinars, and not only is it free, it’s also connected directly to a major social network (see Figure 11-6).
Q: I had a whole plan for a traditional marketing campaign, but you’ve talked me into abandoning it all in favor of social media. Should I do that?
A: Maybe. If you have already had success with your previous traditional marketing efforts, then absolutely don’t abandon them! Rather, select some of the things we’ve talked about in this chapter that you can easily add to that strategy, and see what happens.
Now, if you’ve seen rising costs and diminishing returns in traditional advertising, then you should think about cutting back on the parts of it that aren’t working, and ramping up your social media efforts. The world in general is moving toward social media and away from old-style media.
For products and services that have a long or detailed sales process, or are very complicated and/or expensive, webinars tend to convert very well to sales, more so than a plain old landing page. Definitely go for the sale during the presentation, but don’t show or provide the “buy” button until you get to the “bonuses” for fast-acting buyers.
The strategy for promoting a webinar is pretty universal, no matter where or how you’re doing it. It’s just a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper online if you focus on social media. When you’re promoting your webinar, foster a sense of urgency and scarcity. There are only so many seats, slots, or tickets. Show a countdown timer, or show the exact (low) number of available free tickets. Offer people the chance to win something extra by signing up early (“The first 20 people to sign up get this extra”), such as a free ticket to another event, free access to bonus material or other recordings of expensive events, or free product giveaways.
LeadPages has premade templates for webinar registration pages that are incredibly quick to fill in (see Figure 11-7).
Q: In the beginning of this chapter, you said that there were three types of digital events. Why is that important?
A: It’s just something to keep in mind for marketing purposes. A live event is going to generate more interest than a prerecorded event, so you’re going to want to advertise that fact. You also don’t want to mislead people; if you advertise something as live, but it is actually automated, it could backfire and generate a significant amount of negative buzz for future events if you’re found out.
If your event is prerecorded or automated, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you’re going to have to focus on a good value add. The recorded content is only part of the value. It may be prerecorded, but there is still someone there to field questions afterward, or there is some other interactive element to it that makes the fact that it’s not live a nonissue. Or maybe the content is so good and so unique that you can do it live once and resell the recording a few times for people who couldn’t attend the first event.
Another way to advertise or set up a prerecorded webinar is to tailor it for new customers or qualified prospects. Tell them that you have a webinar coming up in the near future, and then arrange to deliver it at that time. This can be done on an ad hoc basis, or you can schedule the events regularly.
Even though you’re not going to lie about a webinar being prerecorded, you probably don’t want to make it obvious that it is—you still want to give the appearance of it being live. Even if your attendees are aware that it’s prerecorded, a well-configured presentation will still put them into the same mode of thinking as if it were live. For instance, if an attendee is late, don’t let him start watching from the beginning of the presentation; make him miss the beginning and pick up where and when he joined, just as though it were live. The Q&A portion of the webinar should always look live, even if it’s not. This may require you to handle the Q&A in a separate service or session. You can also allow new questions to come in during the prerecorded Q&A session from the original live event, and say at the end of the session that you will reply to all other questions via email. If you offer to do that, though, make sure you collect those questions and reply to them personally.
Q: I’d like to start a local LUG (Linux User Group), but I don’t have any good promotion ideas. It’s not something I want to spend a lot of money on, but I would really like it to be successful. What can I do for little or no cost?
A: First, make sure the event is worth going to. The launch event of a weekly or monthly group meeting has to have some spark and incentive in order to get off the ground. If you can affordably cater the event (offer free food), that will help quite a lot. In your case, one of the signature events of a LUG is an installfest where Linux experts help Linux newbies install a desktop distribution on their computer in a dual-boot configuration, or they set up a USB drive to provide an alternate boot option. If you can afford to cover the cost of pizza and soft drinks for the attendees, and offer to perform free data backups to DVD (bring a spool of blank DVD-R discs), those would be two excellent, inexpensive incentives that would drive participation.
Think about the subject of an installfest. You need people who know Linux, and people who want to learn Linux. Where would you find people who have interest on both sides of that operation? Computer repair shops, perhaps. Can you post a sign or flyer there? What about at computer stores? Perhaps the owner of a small local shop will even offer to cover the cost of the refreshments if he’s allowed to bring some demonstration models and service flyers to the event.
It’s possible that you can leverage an existing technology-oriented group on Meetup.com as well. Search through the site and see if you can find related groups, then contact the group organizer and see if she’s amenable to your hosting your own event through that group.
In general, local events have gotten a little tougher to promote because local periodicals have lost a lot of popularity and relevance. You can’t take out an ad in the newspaper and expect results from it anymore. However, there’s Craigslist—that’s free, and has a lot of reach in the metropolitan areas that it serves. Post an ad there and keep it current right up until the actual day and time of the event. Then for the next meeting, post a different ad with photos and praise from the attendees of the inaugural event—social proof that this is a fun and interesting group that real people attend.
Also try to reach out to local bloggers; search all of the blogging services (e.g., WordPress, TypePad, Blogger) for people who are in your area and might have an interest in your event. For technical events, look for local blogs through Technorati.
Create a Facebook group for your meeting, and on the night of the event, take pictures and short videos and post them to that group. While you’re among the attendees in person, go around with your smartphone or tablet and invite each of them to the Facebook group and ask them to post something and invite their friends. After the first event, you should have enough momentum to see a benefit from spending a little bit of money ($20–$50) promoting your Facebook group to continue to improve attendance. Remember: you’re always looking for new members, even if you feel that you’ve achieved your attendance goals!
Summary
Events should definitely have a place in your professional life, even if you’re not hosting them. We’ve explained in this and other chapters how attending industry conferences and relevant webinars can help keep you up to speed with a changing ecommerce landscape and put you in touch with powerful allies.
If you’re just starting to venture into speaking or presenting at conferences, we’ve given you some excellent tools and tactics to get you on your feet. With motivation and practice, you will absolutely be able to work your way into major industry events and build your reputation as a speaker, industry expert, and author.
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