Events management is a competitive industry, and one in which success can lead to a snowballing effect.
We’re not going to tell you about the logistics or supply part of events management, and especially not how to get the party started (do people still say that?) – that’s not our area of expertise by a long shot.
Instead, here are six steps you can pursue to create a huge demand for your services and set the stage for even greater success in the future, along with the justifications for each stage from an online marketing perspective.
Create Awareness
Creating awareness is the first step for any marketing campaign, and for your site it’s no different. We’re sure you already know many of the social media tricks for promoting awareness of your business – using Foursquare, targeted Facebook adverts, social competitions and photo-sharing sites to show how great your parties have been in the past. Facebook ads are particularly effective when it comes to local business, as simply refining your target audience to Bristol will bring tons of interested custom straight to you. We’re also sure that you know best when it comes to ‘real-world’ marketing – we’re mostly about digital, us.
You may not have done so much work with creating awareness using long-form content. This requires creating content for which there is a real need, targeted to the correct audience, which mentions your product but is not about your product. Good platforms for this form of content include your blog (which you then seed traditionally using social media), LinkedIn articles, Google+ articles, and potentially Tumblr.
The Online Marketing angle:
Concentrating on awareness first, whether you’re creating it for a particular event or for your business as a whole, is vital if you want strong long-term visibility. Brand awareness and trustworthiness manifests as your customers spending a lot of time on-site and coming directly to your site when they see the result in organic search. These are metrics that Google almost certainly still includes in its algorithm to determine site quality, so it’s important to get this down before you invest in optimising for specific keyphrases. A good marketing agency will work with you to increase brand awareness among the audience sectors that really matter.
Keep Attention
Once you’ve got awareness, you need to ensure your audience continues to pay attention to what you have to say. In context, this means making sure you’ve got the right audience, but also means that a consistent and measured campaign is necessary to keep everyone interested.
Competitions are absolutely ideal for this, especially if you can get people to share their creative efforts and link back to your site.
Remarketing is a key part of keeping attention. Generally, people who convert will visit your site multiple times before the final purchase or other commitment. Remarketing is done through various pay-per-click or pay-per-impression channels, but the purpose is the same; remind your audience that you exist.
Done properly, remarketing will keep the attention of your audience and remind them that you exist.
The Online Marketing Angle:
Return visits are generally fantastic in terms of visit quality, but that’s not the real angle here.
In many ways, keeping audience attention acts to extend and build upon the brand awareness phenomena that are already so useful for meeting your business goals.
Differentiate Yourself
If your services didn’t offer something unique, you probably wouldn’t be in business. That’s true even if you’re the most ordinary event management team in town (we’re sure you’re not) – throwing something extremely predictable and reliable will attract its own brand of clientele.
Communicating the difference this will make to the client clearly and effectively will be the difference between modest success and domination of your niche.
The Online Marketing Angle:
Messaging across your site and social media channels should effectively communicate what makes you different.
Exploring a niche aspect of your business is one of the oldest tricks in the content marketing book. With less competition for more specific, higher quality organic traffic, it’s important to keep your content as tightly focussed as possible.
Seal The Deal
Conversion is complex, but there are a number of tools out there to make sure that people who are visiting your site are going to turn up. By progressing gradually and naturally to this point, you’re already building a trustworthy image to help your audience to convert.
Sealing the deal involves applying user experience best practices to your website, coherent and clear calls to action. Probably the most important part of all this is site speed; a slow site does not convert well.
The Online Marketing Angle:
Converting well is measured by site quality algorithms as high levels of engagement. This is perfect for generating further high quality organic traffic, as Google will naturally look to divert users to sites which answer their questions and provide solutions to their needs – sites with high levels of engagement.
Use The Local Social Advantage
As a local business, you are perfectly positioned to take advantage of the local social advantage. The advantage local businesses have when it comes to making use of social media cannot be overstated. You are closer physically and culturally to your customers, and can engage with them in much more honest and ordinary ways than large, national or international companies ever can. Exploiting this advantage can be as simple as talking to people.
Talk to other local businesses and get them involved, encouraging them to link to your site and discuss you. Get popular local celebrities involved, giving your campaign even more weight than national celebrities could.
The Online Marketing Angle:
Getting Google to recognise that you belong in Bristol is the first step to ranking well in organic searches carried out by people who live in Bristol. Being discussed by Bristolians, linked to by local businesses and shared on local forums is a really good way to demonstrate this directly. It’s also always advantageous to be the most popular topic of conversation on social media.
Keep Going!
The most important part of modern online marketing is consistency. Keeping the quality of your content, social media efforts and of course your product or service itself high is vital if you’re going to be getting the results you need and expect.
Offering people what they expect from you consistently is also a big part of it, as unexpected or quirky results (however useful) belong to the world of StumbleUpon or Reddit, not Google or Bing.
This consistency means that your marketing efforts will multiply with the continual predictable operation of your business over time, ultimately resulting in the ability to throw the biggest parties in Bristol.
Maybe not overnight, but over and over again.
