This article claims to introduce everything the modern event planner should know about marketing a conference or professional event – in 26 pages. I have quite a long a wide experience in organizing different types and sizes of events and was really into reading this article and see if there would be something new regarding the digital environment or latest technological trends, or some handy tips regarding organising or marketing events.
Table of contents shows that the article emphasizes strongly digital tools in event marketing and that really is what the article is mostly about. It starts with the fundamentals; what is event marketing, why knowing the audience is vital and proceeds to how to create a multi-channel marketing campaign with different aspects of digital marketing.
Article also explains content marketing, ways to create and distribute the content, Search engine optimization, social media marketing channels, essentials of community, paid advertising, and advocacy marketing. Most of the topics are also related to this study unit themes.
Even though the article doesn’t go into great details of different parts of the event marketing campaign, it manages to give an insight of perhaps the most essential practical parts of how to launch event marketing campaign in several channels in order to attract audience.
Most interesting points
I found the article quite interesting from the event marketing point of view and it was easy to read. There were several links to the more detailed information to give wider knowledge for example about different tools. The most interesting points in the article for me personally are described below. I chose these topics mostly because of they were partly new to me regarding event marketing even though they are familiar from working with marketing in general.
The article highlights the essentiality of knowing your audience by defining personas. I greatly agree with the authors but don’t think many do this thoroughly when planning events. I believe defining personas is lot more common when working with creating the target groups and segmenting customers.
I find quite interesting also the discussion about creating an event blog, as I haven’t used this when working with events. I agree that it can be cost-effective way to draw the attention of the potential participants, but on the other hand it might be challenging to reach the audience, especially in the early phase of organizing the event.
Advocacy marketing has become very popular in recent years and can also be used in event marketing. The article introduces harnessing also speakers and attendees into event promoters. Even this part was already familiar to me, I think it was a good reminder to consider this in event marketing as it typically is cost free.
Conclusion
Even though it might be self-evident, the event itself is a marketing tool and the article manages to present clearly reasons why it is so, as well as what is event marketing and how it is done with the help of different digital marketing tools.
In my opinion the article does oversimplify marketing events a little bit, but on the other hand it manages to explain perhaps the most important parts of event marketing in a compact way, which are suitable for most of the events anyway.
For me personally, the biggest learning was to use event blog, and I plan to take this into action next time when I organize an event. Other good reminders were the taking the personas into account also with planning the events as well as turning the attendees and speakers into event promoters.
The text acts as a nice reminder of event marketing necessities, which the organizer of an event should remember to consider.
References
Article Bizzabo. The Smart Event Marketing Playbook.