Looking for ways to maximize event attendance?
Here are six great tips that work.
Events are a great way to create brand awareness, network, attract new prospects and establish industry connections. (Tweet This!) For that to really succeed, you’ll need your ideal clients to learn about, and attend, your event.
Here are some great strategies to promote your event and ensure that people are aware of what you have to offer.
1. Use Social Media
Besides posting your event on social media, it’s important to encourage those who’ve registered to share with others that they plan to attend. Create an easy-to-remember short event hashtag for them to use and inform them of it.
Facebook Events boost event promotion by exploiting existing social networks: every time a supporter indicates that they’re attending your event, most people in their network will see that they plan to attend and can then check out the event for themselves, which increases the exposure to your event.
In addition to Facebook Events, Twitter also allows supporters to invite friends to the event. Twitter is seen by many marketers as the optimal social media marketing tool for events because it’s where many people, including your ideal attendees, get their news and find out about possible events to attend (Tweet This!)
In the lead up to your event, post images and videos to create a buzz around your event. Consider the times that you are tweeting – where is your audience geographically? Will they see your tweet if you post at 11 am?
If you are hosting a B2B (business-to-business) event, LinkedIn is the platform that will expose your event to more corporate companies and employees.
Instagram is also a great event promotion platform. You can leverage Instagram Stories with photos and videos that speak to your potential attendees. Promotion can get personal, exciting and inspiring with Instagram. What’s more, it’s a platform that most people love to interact on.
2. Offer Tiered Pricing
During these times of uncertainty, businesses are getting a lot of last minute signups. To help alleviate this issue, offer a lower price for early registrations and raise the price at certain intervals as the event gets closer. This was a widely-held practice for in-person events and can also work just as well for virtual events.
3. Explain the Benefit
When promoting your event, be sure to highlight the benefit of attending that is compelling to the target audience. How will this event solve a particular problem they may have? What will the key takeaways be that they can use right away?
4. Change Up the Schedule
An event that lasts for eight hours may work fine in-person, but this is not the case for a virtual event. It is too challenging for a person to sit in a chair in their home office, with multiple distractions, and little interaction, for a full day. Break your all-day event down into multiple 2-3 hour segments over several days or weeks.
5. Make Your Event Engaging
For a virtual event, audience engagement is key, but also the most challenging. Think outside of the box and let your creativity flow! First, make sure you have powerful, relevant content that is tailored to your particular audience. Include engagement opportunities such as polls, Q&A times and chats. Second, offer activities during 
breaks that allow your audience to engage. For example, yoga sessions, breakout rooms for networking, an acoustic guitar player who takes requests, gamification, prizes, etc. Third, schedule something surprising and exciting. One conference surprised their attendees with a live stream of the band Spazmatics during their closing ceremony and another did a live session with REO Speedwagon during a break. Both bands took requests from the audience in the chat box and played the songs with the most votes! You can advertise snippets of what will be happening during the event to generate interest, but don’t give away all of the secrets. Keep the element of surprise!
6. Use Retargeting Advertising
Retargeting, also called remarketing, is ideal to target people who’ve looked at your event website and started, but didn’t finish, registering or purchasing tickets.
People get distracted easily online and you don’t want to lose these potential customers. According to RETargeter, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Retargeting can help you reach a much higher percentage of users who didn’t convert right away.
Here’s how it works. When someone visits your website, an unobtrusive piece of code, a cookie, on your website tags the person. Later, when this person visits another unrelated website, the cookie will tell that website to show your retargeting ad to that person. These ads will only be served to previous visitors of your website, reminding them about your event.
According to Eventbrite, you can expect to see a 6x return on investment (ROI) with retargeting ads. Well worth considering.
Conclusion
An optimized event page, a well-planned social media campaign and retargeted advertising are some of the most tried and true strategies to maximize event attendance. (Tweet This!) Implementing them, and a great message, is sure to help you drive more event sales.