Top Conference Marketing Tips For Your Next Conference

Whether a conference is in-person or virtual, planning it is difficult, and if you don’t adequately market your conference, all of your efforts will be in vain. Even one-day conferences are significant endeavors with significant risks. Not only does organizing a conference need a large financial commitment, but your presenters also anticipate an attentive, engaged audience. Furthermore, conference participants will almost certainly write about your event on their social media accounts, including positive and negative aspects. To stand out in a crowded market and make sure that the proper individuals can find their way to the registration page, we have listed some of the finest tips for conference marketing in this blog.

What is Conference Marketing?

Conference marketing refers to the various strategies and activities employed to promote a conference or an event to a target audience. It involves a range of marketing techniques and tactics to create awareness, generate interest, and encourage attendance at the conference.

Conference marketing typically encompasses the following elements:

Branding and Positioning: Establishing a strong brand identity for the conference and positioning it effectively in the market. This includes creating a unique name, logo, and visual identity that resonate with the target audience.

Target Audience Identification: Identifying the specific group or groups of individuals who are most likely to be interested in the conference. This could be based on their professional background, industry, interests, or any other relevant criteria.

Promotional Materials: Developing various marketing collaterals such as brochures, flyers, banners, and digital assets to communicate key information about the conference. These materials highlight the conference’s value proposition, agenda, speakers, and benefits of attending.

Online Marketing: Utilizing digital channels such as websites, social media platforms, email marketing, and online advertising to create awareness and engage with potential attendees. This includes running targeted ad campaigns, creating event pages, sharing updates, and leveraging social media influencers or partners.

Content Marketing: Creating valuable and relevant content related to the conference theme or industry to attract potential attendees. This could involve publishing blog posts, articles, videos, or hosting webinars and podcasts that offer insights and showcase the expertise of the conference organizers or speakers.

Public Relations (PR): Reaching out to media outlets, industry influencers, and journalists to secure press coverage and generate buzz about the conference. Press releases, media kits, and personalized pitches can be used to attract media attention and gain visibility.

Partnerships and Sponsorships: Collaborating with relevant organizations, industry associations, or influential individuals who can help promote the conference to their networks. This could involve securing sponsors, establishing strategic partnerships, or engaging with key industry influencers.

Top Conference Marketing Tips For Your Next Conference

If you want people to come, you must market the event, even if it is a conference, and make your event marketing strategies a little creative. This article will cover a few fresh, original ideas to increase your event’s awareness.

Understand Your Market

The first and most crucial step in conference marketing is understanding your target. Your message will be most effective if you can target your typical customer by grasping detailed demographic information! And who prefers to avoid getting the best possible return on their marketing investments?

Customize your advertisements, social media posts/ads, and other marketing tactics to at least five customer personas. Buyer personas focus on your marketing message to make it more appealing to a particular person.
You’ll have a limited number of buyer personas who make up many of your participants at a regular event. The quantity and complexity of customer personas will differ depending on the scope and cost of your conference.

Use Social Media

One of your most effective methods for promoting conferences is social media. Most platforms include a “share” option, so if you post an offer to a conference, many people will see it, along with anybody they want to share. Social media is among the most crucial elements to consider while organizing and marketing a conference. Setting it up and gaining visibility are simple processes.

Although gaining those initial few followers and likes could be challenging, it enhances your business name and gives you a buzz. It would help if you worked with a social media specialist to establish yourself for this reason. Enroll your business on several channels to get maximum exposure and interaction.

Create a Hashtag

Creating your hashtag is one of the finest methods to involve your audience and promote conference-related material. Any hashtag you generate should be legible and associated with your conference. It should be generic enough to be readily recalled while being precise enough to be related to you.

A good place to start is with the name of the conference and the year. Once you’ve chosen your hashtag, use it whenever you publish a post about the conference. Encourage all members of your event organizing team to include it in their social media posts.

Using hashtags provides something that can be searched for and used by your target audience. They may use the hashtag when they post about the event to their social media accounts, and they can look for material about your conference by searching for it on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Use Influencers

Your event marketing strategy should include influencers. In most cases, you would get in touch with someone with a large following among your target audience and utilize them to plug in and advertise a good or service. Influencer marketing ideas still hold even if you aren’t selling a good or service directly.

If applicable, get in touch with influential people in your business and ask them to promote your event on their social media pages. Alternatively, employing your keynote speakers as influencers is the best action. Keynote speakers will be extremely powerful in the sector and resemble industry celebrities.

So, request that they use your hashtag for marketing your event. They could even produce videos for their fans to watch in which they discuss their participation at the conference. You can reach a larger segment of your target market by employing speakers.

Run a competition

Hold a contest using your social media platforms; be inventive! Run a caption contest for the photo, or motivate people to share, like, and tag their friends in the post. Make sure to remind them to use the hashtag for your event.
Give away complimentary seats or VIP access to your conference. Similar social media competitions have appeared in the feeds and are very popular. Give folks an incentive to spread the word about your event if you want!

Make registering simple

Making it simple is one of the finest things you can do to advertise your conference and increase registrations. People are not interested in putting forth extra effort for you or your conference. If registration is manageable, even the finest conference planner in the world will experience a decline in conversions.

Use online registration instead of paper registration forms. Make sure your online registration form is brief. People are prone to give up on anything if it is too long and challenging to use before finishing.

Use online registration instead of paper registration forms. Make sure your online registration form is brief. People are prone to give up on anything if it is too long and challenging to use before finishing. By merely requesting the essential information you require, such as:

# Name
# Address
# Contact Information
# Job title
# Organization

For consistency, be sure you trademark the online registration form. You may prevent misunderstanding by making your forms consistent with the remainder of your sites or messaging. People are more inclined to fill out a form if they trust it. Additionally, it’s a wonderful idea to maintain your form mobile-friendly.

Conclusion

Improve your yearly conference marketing plan for the following event by adding creative elements to raise awareness of the event and increase registration and sponsorship revenue. Using one or more of these event marketing ideas, you can ensure that everyone knows how fantastic your conference will be. Be creative, think outside the box, and reach your target audience only by incorporating these ideas into your work.