Top 7 ways to promote your event agency [including 0 marketing budget ones]
If you’re an event planning agency founder or you’re thinking about breaking into the entrepreneurship universe, knowing marketing strategies is a must. By all means, you’re absolutely right if you’re asking yourself: how to promote my event agency? Promotion is essential because, after all, we need to sell to keep business profitable, healthy and growing.
However, there are right ways to do it. With time, you’ll get familiar with concepts like Customer Experience, Inside Sales and Content Marketing. Above all, you’ll understand that, to expand your sales, you’ll need all of them.
Promoting your business is not only about pushing people to buy from you. We have all been in the position where people want us to buy what we don’t want, and we know that’s annoying. In this consumerized world, the needs and demands of each and every client are being considered in detail.
Hire one PR agency from the beginning. As the name says, they are specialists on personal relations. “Nobody reads institutional material”, one might think. However, having your event planning business as the subject of a newspaper article or a niche blog is a strong validation. It reinforces the knowledge and authority of your business among experts.
Whether your agency organizes B2B corporate pavilion shows or B2E sales conferences, your event planning business marketing strategy needs to combine PR and content. And specialized personal relations will know where to publish your story.
Good PR can also promote your event agency by connecting your brand with influencer’s audiences. Influencer campaigns rose as quickly as any other digital strategy. It’s way more effective to have somebody talking about your product than yourself.
The main two differences here are: One – it’s way cheaper than hiring a celebrity, and two – influencers are everywhere, on different sizes and niches. You could almost say that everyone is an influencer. That’s how important it is to have a specialist selecting the right people to promote your event agency.
2. Social Media
Think about the last time you had a professional talk, in person. The person is right there, in front of you. Maybe you even got their business card. What’s the first thing you do after finishing the meeting? Going online and checking their social media channels. Being on social media is no longer a suggestion, it’s a must. You need to exist online.
Chief Marketer states that corporations such as IBM saw a 4x increase on sales after taking their social media strategies seriously. Have you got a corporate LinkedIn profile yet? How often are you posting? Social media is time-consuming, we know. However, we live in an age where you need digital presence.
Social media is also a market that demands tests. Algorithms are constantly changing and demanding unique content pieces and models. So, to do efficient tests, make sure your social media content calendar adheres to your overall marketing strategy, buyer personas and attends to the latest trends.
That is one way of receiving spontaneous feedback and uncovering valuable insights and opinions on your business. Possibilities are endless to promote your event agency in social media, as you not only increase brand awareness but measure how appealing your product appears to be for different targets.
Craft a detailed social media strategy including: channels, contents, and frequency. Creating a profile and abandoning it will cause the reverse effect, so you wanna make sure you regularly feed your social media with relevant content. Curating content is half the battle though, so a regular stream of in-house created content should also be contributed to the social media channels. This way, you are directing traffic to your website.
3. SEO and Link Building
Have you registered yourself on Google, Bing and other search tools? What about Reddit, Angel List, Index.co and Crunchbase? Starting with the basics make things way easier! First, you need to build a foundation – than think about optimization.
Once you’ve accomplished this small but satisfying project, you can begin to build your SEO strategy. It’s the cheapest solution to building an efficient relationship with your audience. If you have doubts on where to begin, go for “how-to’s” and “lists”. It is what Buzzfeed did, for example. And as we can see, it worked quite well.
Write regularly and publish an article every two weeks at least. Having a professional blog helps your company to disseminate your vision and provide free value to your potential customers. Once you’ve mapped out buyer personas, write advice pieces that will resolve their problems. Clarify one topic per post, and make sure to internally link to your other posts.
A clear audience target will also help you to define keywords. Keywords will bring traffic to your pages. And the most important of all: quality will assure readers retention, repeated visits and a good amount of shares on social media. To get the balance between keyword density and readability right, you should take advantage of on-page SEO services, especially if you are new to this.
Google EAT
In addition, let’s not forget about Google algorithm updates. One of the latest big things is the E-A-T. It’s been slowly deployed since late 2018 and is continuously being perfected, in search for web pages and blog posts that present:
- Expertise – Measures the expertise of the website owner and the writer. Still, it measures the amount of helpful information of the article’s main content itself.
- Authoritativeness – It refers to how this content provider is perceived by others. Product reviews, backlinks and testimonials build up an authoritative reputation.
- Trustworthiness – All about security, especially for YMYL (Your money, your life) pages. Those include: pages with medical information, legal information or with forms where people input financial information.
In order to avoid subjective measurement criteria like “relevant content”, “high-quality content” or even “better content”, Google is now making it clear that “high E-A-T news articles should be produced with journalistic professionalism – they should contain factually accurate content presented in a way that helps users achieve a better understanding of events”. It is a bit complex indeed. This is the official reference used by people who rate webpages quality. Their rating don’t affect page’s SEO directly, but is used to improve the algorithm.
If you’ve got a designer on your team, create rich material such as downloadable whitepapers and info-graphics. They are very popular as reference guides and bring a significant increase to your leads base.
4. Email marketing
Your SEO is just the top of the funnel. You need to attract people to get to know about your business, but you need to sell too.
And one of the best ways to do it is, surprisingly, still is via email marketing. It reaches an audience that has already demonstrated an interest in your content. And remember, keep the content useful. If you keep sending sales material or pushing your leads to purchase something they don’t want, chances are they going to stop responding to your marketing efforts.
For small businesses, email marketing is one of the effective ways to scale your business on initial levels. By delivering quality content, you can nurture your relationship with leads and customers, without spending a lot of money.
But how do you get started with email marketing when you have a limited budget? AWeber’s software is a great option for small businesses on a budget. It allows you to create autoresponders, so you can automate your email marketing efforts and continue building relationships with your leads, even when you’re busy.
5. Video promotion
By 2020, video is going to take up a whopping 80% of internet content. Hubspot research states that 50% of customers want to see video from their favorite brands. Video is the most complete form of communication and it’s taking over text. Spend extra effort on your video communication, regardless, especially via indirect marketing. It can be done via podcast, animated tutorials or the quick pills of knowledge, but you have to use the power of video to enhance your brand’s reach. Videos are engaging and shareable. It’s the place where you can explain complex topics with attractive storytelling that makes sense to your audience.
A video promotion strategy can be composed of educational material, business cases, live videos, event recaps, demonstrations of your product. The most important here is to have a definition of what you aim to produce in short and long term, as the process of video production is a more complex one than social media posts or blog articles.
One little trick to video making is: most people think that the look is the most important, but prioritize sound recording quality and you’ll leverage your video quality to the next level.
6. Events and Live Marketing
Check your friends social media right now: everybody is sharing moments and experiences. This is what life is made of. Events are becoming more complex experiences every day. Having the chance to interact with humans and technology at the same environment is powerful strategy you need to take advantage of.
But you understand about that. The thing you’re looking after now is how to promote your event agency.
Check out these corporate event tendencies we recently listed on this post. We also prepared a quick guide about how to use recurrent events in your marketing strategy.
7. Marketing Plan checklist to promote your event agency.
We never said you were gonna be able to do it all by yourself! Becoming a thorough leader to unite all of what has been mentioned in this article is essential. But don’t be afraid: it’s something that you can learn. Begin from knowing how to communicate with your team and out it all together in this quick event planning business marketing strategy checklist:
- 1. Have a deep understanding of the overall market attractiveness you’re breaking into.
- 2. Find out what’s unique about your business and establish that on your vision.
- 3. What you want to accomplish? Be able to answer this question in 30 seconds or less.
- 4. Marketing efforts and objectives, when applied with the best practices, drive results. Measure constantly to learn what’s working.
- 5. Define deadlines. If a strategy didn’t work after being remodeled several times, shut this door down and go for the next one. Pragmatism always.
- 6. How much is your marketing budget? Allocate resources and manage them efficiently.
- 7. Focus. If you’re losing yourself on irrelevant details, it might be time for you to evaluate your management style. Avoiding micromanagement and going back to your event agency vision statement is a good place to start from. Don’t do it all by yourself, even if you know how.
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