7 Tips to Create Event Marketing Strategy with Shoestring Budget

Event marketing demands a fair share of planning and preparation if you want to make everything function flawlessly. But it’s definitely worth your time as more than 40% of marketers claim events are the single-most effective marketing channel.

However, corporate events can be a costly experience. Reports show that companies spend up to 25% of their annual budgets on event marketing, but what happens if you can’t afford to invest this much? Is there a way to organize a gathering without spending the vast majority of your budget?

The answer is simple: Yes, you can.

There are many ways to organize events on a shoestring budget and we will present you the seven most productive tactics here. Let’s take a look!

Benefits of Event Marketing

Before we discuss how to promote events on a budget, we want to let you know what makes this model of communication so important. Here are the biggest benefits of event marketing:

-Raise awareness: Events give you a great opportunity to raise awareness, especially if you are launching a new product or service.

-Networking: This is also a big chance to meet your peers and industry thought leaders.

-Lead generation: A database of leads grows bigger after each event.

-Drive sales: This benefit is a direct consequence of the previous one. It doesn’t happen instantly, but you can expect fresh conversions very soon.

-Boost customer loyalty: Allowing people to meet you, you can improve mutual relationships and boost customer loyalty.

Best Event Marketing Tactics

In the sea of interesting event marketing tricks, some tactics prove to be more effective than others. We made a list of seven such tactics, so let’s check them out one by one.

1. Social media

Social media gather billions of active users, so you can probably find the target attendees on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. If you already have a solid fan base, it will be easy to promote the event, but there is always the possibility to sponsor your posts.

It’s a relatively cheap solution that allows you to precisely target people you want to see at the venue. This means you probably won’t need more than $50 to boost event announcements and let the world know about your plans.

2. Create event-related content

You must publish a lot of articles on your event website, so you might as well seize the opportunity to create event-related content. The goal is, of course, to win over the audience with quality posts and spread the word about your event throughout the text.

Keep it relevant and trendy, writing about the hottest topics in the niche. Try to cover subjects from all angles, solving concrete problems in a step-by-step manner. If you don’t know or don’t have enough time to do it yourself, you should hire a writer who can do this job for you quickly and professionally.

3. Online collaboration

Another way to market your event on a budget is by collaborating with other professionals in your niche and publishing guest posts on their websites. Key opinion leaders in your industry could also write a few words about your gathering, while you can return them the favour next time they organize something similar. In case some of them are speakers at the event, they can also share the news on their social accounts. It will give you additional exposure and introduce your brand to a relatively new follower group.

4. Email marketing

Most event marketers (40%) believe email marketing is the most effective channel for promoting an event. The reason is obvious: people all over the world use email for personal and professional communication, which makes it the omnipresent communication platform. Besides that, email campaigns are low-cost since all it takes a reliable email marketing tool.

However, you need to craft top-notch messages in order to attract attendees. Make sure to write brief but attractive subject lines, while copies have to be concise, well-structured, and engaging. Add a clear call to action and leave no room for confusion about the venue, time, and date of your event.

5. Public relations

PR is one of the most rewarding event promotion tactics. First of all, it is cost-effective because it only requires you to invest time and effort. Secondly, well-executed PR campaigns can help you raise awareness very quickly.

This is where you should take advantage of the existing media connections, encouraging your fellow journalists to publish the press release. Don’t be pushy, but rather say something like: “Could you read this and tell me what you think about it? I can give you all the necessary materials to make the information more appealing and interesting for the average reader — it would really mean a lot to me.”

6. Offer incentives for registration

People love free stuff. It’s just a matter of basic psychology so you can exploit this fact by offering incentives for event registrations. It doesn’t have to be an expensive giveaway: most attendees would be glad to receive a small thing such as branded USB sticks, T-shirts, or discount coupons for one of your products.

However, you need to make sure that users actually register and attend your event. Don’t send them your incentives via mail, but rather wait for them to visit your conference and take giveaways on site. This is a simple, but highly efficient event marketing format that shouldn’t take a large portion of the budget.

7. Google Ads

If you really want to make sure that your event announcement reaches all of the target audience, you must go beyond content creation, emails, and incentives. We suggest you invest some money in paid advertising just to make sure that people who conduct niche-related searches can find you. Google Ads is the marketplace to go, so you should bid for the targeted keywords. Such a tactic probably won’t cost you too much because niche events don’t happen every day, so the competition is not too severe.

Conclusion

Corporate events are very challenging in terms of organization and event planning, but you have to do it because the results are nothing short of amazing. With this marketing channel, you can raise brand awareness, build professional relationships, and drive new leads and conversions.

In this post, we explained to you seven ways to market an event on a shoestring budget. Did you already use any of these hacks? Do you have other interesting ideas to share with us? Let us know in comments and we’ll be glad to discuss it with you or make a short request to UK best essays!

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