Running an event marketing company or an event marketing project requires paying attention to many elements. The majority of them can be automated with marketing automation platforms such as iPresso. Let’s have a look at what are your options if you want to conduct effective event marketing campaigns.
The truth is that in the last few years, the event industry has been struggling with all the restrictions related to the recent pandemic. Sadly, many companies and institutions did not survive a two-year pause in their operations. However, the latest marketing data seems more optimistic! In 2023, there was a study showing that the vast majority (almost 75%) of respondents are expecting their event marketing budgets to go up:
Source: https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2023/48754/event-marketing-in-2023-trends-and-challenges
It’s a significant increase from previous years when this percentage was below 40%. This means that the event industry is now experiencing thaw after a few poor years of the covid-19 pandemic. This means that event marketing companies now have more options and more potential to benefit from. More events are now organized and more people are eager to go out again and attend diverse events.
If this is true in your case, you can streamline your work by adopting marketing automation. This way, you can:
- Save a lot of time on mundane activities
- Streamline daily processes
- Stay in touch with your guests and participants
Let’s have a look at how this can be done:
Marketing automation in the event industry
Typically, event marketers want to promote their events to as many interested people as possible and then encourage them to buy tickets/sign up for the event and stay engaged in the communication with the company that organized a given event (primarily for the purposes of post-event communication and future events). How can marketing automation help you here?
KEEP ALL CONTACTS IN ONE PLACE
Events can be designed for thousands of people (think concerts). It’s a good idea to keep all the participants’ data in one place. In fact, one successful event can mean an email database of 1,000+ records, which is great!
With our contact database management feature, you can keep everyone in your audience in a well-organized digital space. This allows you to use this data for future events.
PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATIONS
You surely want to keep both current and new customers engaged for future events your company is planning. That’s where recommendation frames step in the game. With them, you can put personalized recommendations on your website, especially when it comes to logged-in users. As a result, you can recommend your events to different people based on their interests and previous purchases.
For example, if in the past, you organized a car show, it is very likely that people who attended that event will also be interested in other car-related events. And that’s the whole purpose of recommendation frames.
STAY IN TOUCH WITH YOUR CONTACTS
Staying in touch with your target audience is crucial concerning the success of your event. People need to be reminded about things they’ve signed-up for, and regular communication is what gets this job done. Event marketers have several options of reaching out to their customers. On the one hand, social media is a very good channel, but it’s not always possible to know who actually bought a ticket. You can only send general reminders to your followers.
If you want to be more specific, you need more direct communication channels. And with marketing automation, you can automate four of them:
- Emails (a good channel to send the digital ticket)
- SMS and WhatsApp (good for short reminders, e.g., “Our meeting starts in 0.5h”)
- Push notifications (effective for reminders, e.g., about unfinished ticket orders)
Moreover, with iPresso, you can integrate all those tools together, so that your participants get push notifications about unfinished order, emails with digital tickets, and text messages with quick reminders about upcoming events – all on auto-pilot!
LOYALIZE YOUR CUSTOMERS
Loyalty programs are good, not just for e-commerce. You can allow your regular guests to earn points for every event they attend and then exchange these points for free admissions, discounts, or other benefits (e.g., access to a VIP lounge). With our loyalty tools, you can also create discount codes and vouchers (e.g., for future events or your participants’ friends).
BENEFIT FROM RTM
Real-time marketing is a tremendous technique that reacts not only to the behavior of customers and their declared needs at a given moment, but also takes into account the context, e.g., the current environmental conditions. With iPresso, you can automatically observe the indicated parameters to maintain personalized communication with your audience, streamline information processing, and react to diverse scenarios.
For example, if you’re staging an outdoor event and there’s a storm coming, you can use our iPresso Satellite to inform attendees about the impending storm and advise them to seek shelter in designated areas.
Wrapping up
Event marketing can be challenging, but with marketing automation, you can streamline the majority of your tasks and make your work more effective. We invite you to take a look at the whole list of our features – it is likely you can use even more of them in your work.
If you run an event marketing company/project, consider marketing automation as a worthy addition to your marketing stack. If you’ve never used this technology before, we have a free 30-day trial for you to see how it can work in your company.
Sign up here, and our team will guide you through the next steps. We’re sure you’ll benefit from adding MA to your team!
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