While every event—its organizers, its topics, and its audience—is unique, most follow a similar path of promotion in the months preceding the event. In this article we will describe our recommended steps along that path, with campaign ideas that will boost growth, attendance, and partnerships.
We will divide them by use case: audience expansion, exhibitor/sponsor sign-ups, attendee registration, and post-show engagement. Each serves a useful purpose on the event marketing timeline and will contribute to growth.
Audience Expansion
These are campaigns that build awareness of your event and drive new traffic to your website. Unlike retargeting campaigns, those who interact with audience expansion campaigns need not have ever visited your website to see your ads.
It's important to note that the goal of an audience expansion campaign is not to have a new prospect immediately register for your event, but rather to drive them to your website. Once a new prospect has joined your website traffic and become a member of your full site Group, you can target them with more specific campaigns to continue moving them down the conversion funnel towards registration.
Exhibitor / Sponsor Sign Ups
Audience expansion campaigns and retargeting campaigns can both be used successfully to generate interest from event partners such as exhibitors, sponsors, speakers, and more. To increase awareness among potential new partners, use geofencing and search keyword campaigns, then follow with retargeting campaigns once you’ve collected new audience data.
To reach previous years’ partners, or organizations with whom you have a relationship but have never partnered with your event, use email list, geofencing, and retargeting campaigns. These work in this case because you already have usable data from them, such as cookies, email addresses, and street addresses.
Campaign goals for exhibitor and sponsor targeted campaigns are harder to track, as the final conversion almost always comes through during a direct sales conversation with a member of your team. However, exhibitor and sponsor facing campaigns play an important role in boosting the visibility of your event, and if your exhibitor prospects see the effort you're making to get them to the show, they can be sure you're working hard to make sure the right attendees will be there.
Attendee Registration
Retargeting campaigns offer robust options to drive attendee registration. Using audience Groups, you can run attendee registration campaigns as unique as your event, and you’re only limited by your imagination.
Keep in mind that the above only scratches the surface of the campaigns you can run for your event. For example, you can combine campaign ideas as well to create early bird cart abandonment campaigns or last chance special event campaigns. If you have a dedicated Feathr Customer Success Manager, schedule a strategy call for a more in depth conversation about what might work well for your event.
Post-Show Engagement
Want to keep your Attendees, Exhibitors, and Sponsors engaged after the show and ensure your business stays top of mind for next year? Post-show campaigns are a great way to drive email sign ups, event recap downloads, or other year-round content. You can also utilize post-show campaigns to retarget exhibitors from this year's event and urge them to re-book their spot early for next year.
Common Questions:
How many campaigns should I run?
There's no magic number of campaigns to run--it will be different for each unique event.
How do I determine each campaign's budget?
If you've worked with Feathr before, it's a good idea to take a look at what you spent on your campaigns the year prior. That's always a good place to start. Another good strategy to use is to plan on spending at least $1 in media per attendee to be able to serve enough ads to make an impact. However, this varies based on the size of your event.