We love events as a part of a sales and marketing strategy. They can be a great way to build relational connections regardless of whether you’re cultivating existing relationships, prospecting new leads or promoting a specific service or product you’re offering. As valuable as events are, event planning is time consuming, and getting people to your event can be its own separate chore.
We’d like to share a few examples of how we use marketing automation to promote our events, so you can see how easy promotion can be with the right tools.
First, define your ideal outcome.
Consider these core questions:
– What is the purpose of your event?
– Who do you want to attend?
– What goal do you hope to achieve through your event? (gain x number of new leads, raise $xxx,xxx, etc)
Second, Figure out how you’re going to “fill the room.”
Once you’ve determined the purpose of your event, your audience and your goals, you can apply those parameters to how you will promote your event.
What do you need? The event promotion wish list:
In a perfect world, you’d have the following at your fingertips to promote an event effectively.
- A clean landing page used for easy registration, education about the event and web searchability.
- An easy to use, well-branded email template that can be tweaked and sent out multiple times (even pre-scheduled, hint hint)
- A direct mail piece or a handout for personal invitations.
Using marketing automation, you can build all of this once, preschedule your touches and get on to your event planning. The system will automatically track responses and you can set up alerts to make monitoring your attendee list simple and painless.
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Here’s how we do it
Case Study: Wine and Marketing (WAM)
Wine & Marketing is an exclusive event hosted at VSG Marketing. We gather a few select guests in marketing from around the Puget Sound to come enjoy conversation and knowledge sharing over a glass (or 3) of wine.
We use our marketing automation technology to promote it from start to finish.
First, create an information and registration hub.
We built a landing page with a drag and drop builder that has info about the event and a registration form. Any traffic, submissions, or activity on this page is instantly tracked and recorded in our CRM. We can also set alerts. For example, if someone registered or clicked a specific button, we can set up auto alerts to our sales team and send automated confirmation emails immediately or on a time delay.
https://pages.services/events.vsg360.com/WAM/
Next, get invites out.
With our hub of information out on the world wide web, we build tools to invite our guests.
A.) A drag and drop email template that can be sent individually and personalized, or to a list with variable fields:
We were able to create a few versions of this and pre schedule sends to guests 3 weeks out, 2 weeks out, 1 week out, and the day before the event.
B.) A printed touch card for handing out or mailing. This piece is also facilitated through our brand management platform, Suitespace, in a few clicks.
Follow up.
We also created thank you cards and emails to send post event.
Track and measure success throughout.
Perhaps the most helpful part about using marketing automation to promote events is the insights and analytics it can provide. We’re able to create a campaign and track actual fiscal success from the event all the way through and evaluate our marketing touch points for opens, clicks, engagement and more.
If you have an event coming up and would like more information on marketing automation or our brand management platform, we’re here to help. Schedule a demo or consultation with us by emailing applied@vsg360.com, or calling (253) 680-3992.
