Promoting your company’s annual event is not for the faint of heart. How many times can you ask people to sign up? How many ways can you contact them? And in how many different ways can you ask? Please, please, please register, sign up, sign up now, you wouldn't want to miss out, pretty please …
With that in mind, here is a practical and proven strategy of how to approach a six-to-eight-month marketing plan that has increased event registration for every company that has used it. This approach yielded a 25 percent increase in registration from previous years with one of the companies I consulted with. The key is to provide high value-added content.
Step 1: Analyze data from past events and look for patterns.
Ask yourself these questions as you do your research:
How many people attended the conference?
How many people were local? How many were from out of town and how far did they travel?
What were their job titles and levels within the organization?
What vertical or industry?
How far in advance of the event did they register?
Why did they attend? Were they primarily interested in new technical knowledge, the latest products or networking?
In addition to this information, you can review suggestions made from post-event surveys if any were done. Once you have gathered all the data, you are ready to begin planning your marketing strategy.
As an example, we analyzed the registration information of an event we had previously hosted in Las Vegas.
Based on our data we found that there were three waves of registration, and built our communication outreach around those:
First wave of registrants (15%):These ‘Early birds’ secured their spot within the first 90 days and took advantage of a 20 percent discount off the registration price.
Second wave of registrants (45%): These attendees registered once the agenda and speakers were announced.
Third wave of registrants: (40%) These attendees registered in the last two weeks leading up to the event. In addition, we found many people waited until the day before the event to sign up or opted to simply walk-in the day of.
Anticipating that many of our participants would need to factor travel into their budget, we announced the dates of our three-day conference as soon as we were able to firm up a venue (eight months prior). We sent a “Save the Date” email invitation to past registrants and also sent an email to our broader database. I’ve seen vendors send the “Save the Date and Location” email immediately following the end of their yearly event, truly the work of a master-planning event team!
Between the announcement date and the first email invitation for registration we had approximately five months to create and gather content that would be appealing, engaging and enticing enough to register for the event.
While you’ve taken some early and necessary action towards creating content to help boost attendance at your annual event, you’re not done yet. In a follow up blog post (to be published Sept. 20th), I will provide more information on the keys to using data from past events to connect with participants and increase attendance and the remaining steps on how to increase attendance at your events.
Tiziana Barrow
Founder, Tilagia