Any successful event is a direct output of its event promotion strategy in which event panelists, speakers, and the host work together to achieve a wild audience. This collaboration is hard to witness.
Most of the time, once a speaker is included in the event, there’s a drastic dip in their enthusiasm for further involvement in the event’s promotion. This attitude is not only a violation of the speaking contract if it has asked for promotional support already, but it is also a loss to the host and the speaker.
The population of high-performing business executives spread across global SMEs is enormous! There is a lot of money that businesses invest in promoting their key decision-makers, and yet, only a few get the opportunity to make a public appearance.
If you have received an opportunity that you have agreed to speak at, it is incumbent on you to be involved in marketing the event. If you think that you are too big or too busy to do so, there’s a Greek flaw that needs an immediate fix.
Choosing to make a public appearance is clear that you are not a complete introvert to face a crowd that is eager to listen to you. But it can be agreed that you do not know the best ways to promote your upcoming event. If that’s the case, below, you’ve got six simple steps to involve in your host’s event marketing drive.
Leverage Personal Social Media for Event Promotion
Everyone is on social media today. It may sound cool if you are not a part of it, but that doesn’t help if you enjoy public presence to impress on an audience your thought leadership.
Create social accounts if you don’t have them already. Inform your host of all the channels they can likely engage with you through tags, comments, shares, retweets, etc.
Simultaneously, talk about your gig at least once in a week by drawing rich analogies or telling stories that’ll attract people to take notice of your public presence and join your talk.
Create Useful Incentives for Event Participants
Encourage your audience to register for your event by sharing the event ticketing page. Create incentives for your target audience. What’s in it for them to join you?
Say you are a C-Suite executive for your business firm. In incentives, you can offer to write LinkedIn recommendations for every active participant in your talk or the one who asks you the most compelling question. Now, who’ll refuse a well-written recommendation from an Industry expert?
Another incentive you can think of is to write references for your active and most erudite participants for further study, research, investment solicitation, and anything that helps them advance as professionals in their domains.
If you think you can explore more unique ideas, use the below the comments section.
Media & Press Release for Event Promotion
Yes, the host will take care of their event; they will do their media and press releases communicating their esteemed list of speakers and panelists. But you have to do your part because it is your talk.
You can use a press release service for a single PR distribution across 350+ digital media coverage for $40 in which you can write your PR or chief of staff write for you. Else, check out inexpensive PR Solutions on Fiverr wherein they will do the writing and publishing both. Add your LinkedIn or website link in the PR, and of course, a link to the event.
For example, if you are passionate about IoT, then think of how your passion helps you solve critical social issues that can be replicated en masse. With a story like this, more media houses will be interested in publishing your news distributed through your PR network.
Ask your Business or University Social Media Team
If you are a graduate of a reputed university, then you are a part of their alumni network, right? Depending on your graduation year, an alumni network is a considerable size of the member network you can invite to attend your talk.
You can reach out to the social cell of your University, informing them about your upcoming event, which they should be happy to give a shoutout through their Twitter & LinkedIn accounts.
The same goes for your business. Get in touch with your social media team and ask them to share the news because irrespective of your designation and impact on company ROI, it is also publicity for your business no matter how famous they already are. It’s great if you are the founder; no explanation is needed.
Engage with your Host’s Social Media Marketing
Your host will undoubtedly do their marketing. They will create social assets for social media marketing to promote their events. But despite all the efforts, the visible engagement is often not a manifestation of the impressions a social post garners.
If an event page has 10k followers on LinkedIn, you’ll see hardly 4 to 5 Likes or Comments, which is discouraging for the ones who want to engage but think if they will be judged for their engagement that doesn’t have any visible engagement already. This deters the reach.
Break the ice, share the post that talks about your participation, Like, Comment, Tag your colleagues, mentors, investor-partners, stakeholders, mom, dad, children, partner, just anybody who appreciate your work, shares a personal or professional relationship with you. Invite people in your network for one time to follow the event page. There must be visible engagement and social media platforms, enough traction to trigger their algorithm to float the post to its users, organically.
Be a People’s Leader by Promoting Others
In a business of 1000 employees, you have 1000 opportunities to market your personal brand with an indirect incumbent on the business’s bottom line (Yes, the bottom line because an event is your opportunity to sell your product and market your service).
But that’s hard, which reveals that the same concern is shared by your host company as well. Well, while you speculate this idea from several other angles at a later time, the idea, for now, is to be a people’s leader by advocating the chances of success of people around you and in your existing or potential network.
At a tech conference, you are not a single speaker; there are other speakers, too. Take the lead to talk about their talks on your social channels so that you don’t spam your social audience through excessive self-promotion but a meaningful promotion of fellow industry speakers with who you’ll share the light.
In this mindful event promotion strategy, you might strike a new friendship leading to unique business opportunities; where do you think the possibilities end?
