How to Promote an Event With In-bound Marketing – A Step-By-Step Guide
From BIZ media partner PinkBanana.com
Most event marketing focuses on sending messaging out to potential attendees through brochures, programs and postcards, all of which have proven track records in attracting event participants. But did you know that some of the most effective marketing could occur with in-bound marketing?
Hubspot.com, a business-to-business marketing specialist, has created a step-by-step guide for in-bound marketing, basically your efforts to draw potential attendees to your Web site, and adding online scale to your off-line events.
1. Set up your event Web site.
Your Web site will be key in building up content around the event and giving people a place to learn about and register for your event. A few tips:
Do it early. Even if you don't have a lot of information about your event, you should "launch" your Web site with some basic content. This will help you build up your reputation in Google so that when you do finally want to promote your event, you won't be starting at ground zero.
Post content and get a link. You'll need some content (even just a basic description of the event) to get Google to index your page. Also, Google needs a way to find your event Web site, so make sure to have at least one link to the site. It can be inconspicuous to humans, as long as a search engine can find it.
2. Leverage your network.
You're likely not starting at absolutely zero when you launch an event. You will hopefully have a network of followers on your blog, in social media, your email list and your address book. Let them know about your event!
3. Get great people involved and leverage their networks.
On both the content and on the promotion side of event planning, it helps to involve great people. I'm talking about speakers and sponsors. A great speaker will draw more attendees and a great sponsor will add legitimacy to the event.
Once you've got great people involved, leverage their networks as well. Encourage sponsors and speakers to blog about the event, tell their networks and email their contacts.
4. Reach out to relevant communities.
Figure out where your audience hangs out and reach out to those existing communities. This includes relevant Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, and online communities specific to your industry.
5. Create a community around your event.
Allow your community of attendees, speakers, sponsors and organizers to interact before, during and after the event. There are a couple ways to do this:
Use a Facebook group or page as a place for your community to meet, interact, ask questions and share ideas.
Create a Twitter hashtag for the event so that the community can follow and contribute to the Twitter conversation around the event.
Use blog posts as an opportunity to introduce some of the conversations around event topics.
6. Publish lots of content and encourage others to create content.
Content is the key to success, especially for SEO (search engine optimization), branding and PR. The content of the event Web site and the event itself is a main driver of traffic, interest and registrants for your event. Keep in mind that you (the event organizer) do not need to be the sole content creator. Encourage your speakers, sponsors, and attendees to create content for you. Some ideas:
Invite speakers to write guest blog articles relevant to their session topics.
Encourage speakers to blog about their sessions ahead of time, and encourage attendees to blog about what they're looking forward to learning at the event.
Take photos and videos at the event, and encourage attendees to do the same.
7. Remember to tag all event-related items published on your site to allow for easier searching by potential attendees.
As noted in step #5, create an event tag for all media published about the event. This expands beyond Twitter conversations and on to blog posts, photos, videos or any other media published anywhere related to the event.
Designating a single event tag helps people find all content associated with the event. Consider building a "stream page" that aggregates all the content tagged for your event so that people can go to a single site to see all event-related content.
The more content you have, and the easier you make it for people to find, the higher the engagement of attendees as well as non-attendees, and the more links (essential for SEO) you will receive.
Story provided by PinkBananaMedia.com, a BIZ media partner. PinkBananaMedia.com helps companies reach gays and lesbians on the Internet, using traditional means (banner ads and e-mail) as well as more specialized means, including blogs, You Tube videos, Facebook and more. This article originally was submitted by www.hubspot.com
