Organizing the best, most awesome and ass-kicking event is no longer enough. What you need is marketing and what you need is turning your event into a must-attend occasion of the year in that field. So, how does one do it?
1. Get your people talking about it
These “your” people are people that you usually do business, your friends, your colleagues, everyone who is involved in the event alongside you. Everyone needs to talk about your event and they need to do it as soon as possible and as often as possible. You should also check with past attendees, your fans and people who played a part in your past events and have them talk about your event.
2. Promote your location
Of course, this one will only work if your location is actually something to be proud of. For instance, if it is in a luxury hotel with all kinds of sexy and elegant amenities, mention them, tell your attendees that they should expect luxury and fanciness. If it is an event at a beach or next to some other attractive location, play that card, at least visually with pictures and/or videos.
3. Promote your guest speakers
When you invite your guest speakers to your event, you do this because they are either successful, great speakers, funny as hell or because they have some other quality that your attendees will love to hear from, or a combination of few. It is therefore very logical that you will promote your guest speakers and let your potential attendees know that they will get the chance to hear from Mr. Funny and Successful.
4. Tell people about all the cool stuff
An event budget can be quite limited and it is not always possible to go as big as you wanted. Still, there are tons of things you can do on even a limited budget; you only need to be creative. And if you do that, you should let everyone know about this cool thing that you have planned, maybe some new cool type of high-tech exhibition stands that have iPads in them or something like that, or a vintage bourbon tasting or something like that.
5. Flood the internet
Marketing your event on the internet is one of the cheapest ways to promote your event and also one of the more effective these days. When approaching internet promotion of your event, you need to make sure to go all-out. You need to flood people’s timelines with news about your event; you need to invite bloggers to write about your event; you need to tweet the living hell out of it and so on. When it comes to social media, you should also continue to promote your event because people often miss something.
6. Reach out to media and industry
Once you set the date for your event, make sure to contact your trade and industry associations who will most likely put you in their calendars and thus indirectly promote your event. You can also reach local media and let them know about your event. It is more likely than not that they will be willing to cover or at least report on your event briefly.
