One of the hardest parts of planning an event is marketing it to the right people and getting them to attend. Fortunately, online marketing can be harnessed effectively to build an audience for your event while keeping budgets under control.
Even better, the WordPress plugin Event Espresso comes with several features that help to make marketing your event easier. In this article we will explore some key steps you can take to market your event online effectively, and show you how Event Espresso can help.
Let’s get cracking!
1. Use Event Espresso to Advertise Event Details
When checking out an event, the first place people typically go for information is the event website. This makes the event website a key element of your online marketing strategy – it must be comprehensive, provide all the event details, and be kept up-to-date.
Event Espresso, as one of the leading event plugins for WordPress, makes it extremely easy to setup and display details about an event. Its intuitive interface enables you to create events with all associated information such as ticket details, venue information, speakers for a conference, and so on.
2. Drive Event Marketing with Content
Generating interest in your event online means cutting through the noise to attract and retain your audience. This can be achieved through content marketing, which focuses on creating and distributing valuable and relevant content. Blogging and sharing video are very common tools used in content marketing strategies.
You can kickstart your content focus by using the automatic event posts created by Event Espresso when an event is published. Build on your content strategy by creating additional posts and pages with event details inserted using Event Espresso’s shortcodes.
3. Create Audience Incentives with Promotional Codes
Most events use registration and attendance numbers as a measure of success, but filling seats isn’t easy. In cases where the number of attendees can affect other budget items (like catering), early registrations are important. Incentives can be used to generate interest and encourage registration and attendance at events.
An easy and popular incentive is to offer promotional codes for discounts on ticket prices. Event Espresso enables you to create promotional codes for many different scenarios, such as early-bird pricing. These promotional codes can then be used as the basis of blog and social media posts in your content marketing.
4. Encourage Social Sharing with Built-in Tools
When marketing events online, one strategy is getting word of the event out to as wide an audience as possible. Social media has become one of the most effective tools for spreading information online. While creating content is critical, ensuring that it can be easily shared is just as important.
To achieve this aim, you can use Event Espresso’s built-in social sharing tools, which make it easy for attendees and other website visitors to share your event site and content. SImply enter the social account details and your attendees will be able to easily share your event with their networks.
5. Focus on Search Engine Optimization
For those people outside of your attendees’ networks, you want to make sure they can find your event when searching online. Making your event website easy to find via search engines is a key part of marketing your event, and so search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial element.
With that in mind, you should take advantage of Event Espresso’s SEO features to help drive traffic to your event website. The plugin helps by (1) highlighting the venue with a detailed profile, and (2) integrating flawlessly with Google Maps. Furthermore, through integration with major SEO plugins and the default creation of keyword-rich URLs, Event Espresso helps to make your event website as search engine friendly as possible.
Conclusion
When planning your event marketing, Event Espresso should be a valuable part of your toolkit to attract and retain an audience, encourage registration and attendance, and spread the word about your event. Let’s recap how Event Espresso can help in the marketing of your event:
- Advertise event details
- Drive content marketing with event posts
- Create audience incentives with promotional codes
- Encourage social sharing with built-in tools
- Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As you can no doubt guess, Event Espresso is our preferred plugin for events management. If you’d like to explore the plugin’s capabilities further, please feel free to contact us for a no obligation chat. We can even create a custom events management website for you!