Organising an outstanding corporate event is only half of the climb that event organisers face every day. Planning, organising and running an event are only part of its overall success: without attendees, or without the right attendees, or without enough attendees, even the most interesting and best organised event cannot be called a success.
In a market increasingly crowded with quality proposals, and where resources are often limited, it is becoming harder and harder to be the one people choose, and above all the right people. That is why the marketing and communication work attached to every event weighs more and more heavily, both within each individual project and, as a result, in the daily work of professionals in the sector.
So do event organisers have to become marketing and promotion experts as well?
They certainly do. And in our view they should start from three essential elements.
1. The website
Every event needs a website. Almost nobody today would contradict that statement, but the answer to the question that immediately follows could be far less uniform: why should every event have a website? And “because it should” is not an answer.
Joking aside, the fact that every event needs a website is by now shared and uncontroversial knowledge. But the reasoning behind it carries a far more structured argument than it may seem at first glance. It has a great deal to do with the promotion and communication strategy you want to adopt for the event, which requires every element and every node of that network to be part of an ecosystem in which each piece has to work in synergy with all the others to produce concrete results. The event website must certainly be its first shop window and must present it in the best possible way, but it must also be structured so that it can hold a practical, functional dialogue with all the other communication tools (public relations, social media, the press office and newsletters, to give just a few examples). A website able to do all of this is far more than a business card: it becomes a genuine gateway to a universe of information and content that can help people find the answers to their various questions and guide them towards the actions that matter most to whoever built it, registration for the event above all.
Does this mean that organising an event necessarily requires a web agency behind you to build and run a website? Fortunately not, because today there are many services that let you build web pages without any programming skills, because they rely on editors that anyone can handle with minimal practice. These are the content management systems (CMS) behind the websites we all use every day, and we have built one of our own into SharEvent, so that you can create functional, attractive websites without becoming a developer and manage them easily whenever there are updates or changes to make.
2. Email marketing
The second lever of any event promotion strategy, and by now an indispensable one, is email marketing. Speaking directly to a known, profiled list of contacts means you can send only the information that matters to them, avoiding the noise that so often produces frustration and rejection. It lets you open a dialogue, when people can reply to your emails directly, calibrate the content and the frequency of your messages, and build content flows that go progressively deeper as the event date approaches. If the email system is backed by a customised CRM, you can also select the recipients of each individual message to guarantee the greatest possible relevance in the content and the form of every email.
In this way, the general communication a website delivers to everyone finds, in individual messages, a way to go deeper and to adapt to preferences, interests and — where a history of contact with recipients is also available — to the characteristics and the specific traits of even very small groups. That is a real advantage when what you want is the most personal relationship possible with your contacts, even when the numbers are large.
3. Word of mouth
Word of mouth is still, today, the best promotional tool for almost anything. Above all when the people passing the word on are considered worth listening to and worth trusting, the message immediately becomes more convincing and more interesting. Because people trust them, and rely on them.
If we set these obvious observations — which we all experience every day, playing in turn the part of the recommender and of the recommended — alongside a dynamic that belongs specifically to the events industry, we can see at once how effective this lever can be when promoting events of any kind and size. We have seen it several times already: people often attend events partly to meet those they consider important for building their network of contacts, or for widening and qualifying their network of relationships. Seen that way, bringing prominent figures on board as event “ambassadors” can be an extraordinary lever for encouraging attendance and, as a result, for increasing registrations. Are we necessarily talking about influencers? Not in the most common sense of the word. We are thinking of something closer to “early adopters“: people who can use their own network to amplify the reach of a message, or who can encourage attendance among those who want to meet them at the event. And if that is not enough, pre-event engagement activities such as surveys or discussions on related topics can help activate attendance, create interest and draw in ever wider audiences.
Of course, for all these tools to work they have to be applied to an event with a solid structure that runs well. But knowing how to bring them together as a system is often what turns a good event into a truly memorable one. That is why all three are among the tools we have developed on our own platform. You can see them at work for yourself, if you like.
Just request a live demo.