7 Steps to a Successful Digital Marketing Plan for Your Event

The concept of digital marketing become a crucial issue in event marketing for companies to acquire new members and create contacts with them, especially after the new Canada anti-spam law (CASL) has come up. With the aims of building up these contacts and converting the targets into our members, participants, or sponsors, a high influential digital marketing plan must can make a positive outcome for your ROI. Then, in order to make yourself increase the visibility and engagement with current members and the potential ones, how to begin the plan with our end goal and put it on its right way?

1.       Establish a content strategy

Every great plan has its content. However, “build it and they will come” is just an unpractical idea to make your visitors engage. In fact, a content strategy is all about planning a social plan, an editorial calendar, efforts on engagement, optimization, conversions measuring and so on.  If you desire to achieve your content seen by your target audiences, you should first find out who you’re addressing to and what you wanna achieve before you start to type pages by pages in front of your computer. You should consider: the goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), measurement of whether it gains visibility and increases registration at your events.

2.       Achieve SEO Optimization

Your content should be not only reader friendly, but also search engine optimization. If Google can’t find your information, no one else will. To make a great SEO plan, first, you should use “keyword searching”. Use Google Adwords, Bing Ads and Wordtracker to find and name a few search terms of phrases that are associated with your event, and create content or advertisements on search engines based on them. Second, build a link. Attach your website to other quality and famous websites which share related content with specific keywords highlighted. Those hyperlinks should be better use the title of your events instead of “click here”. Third, use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and event forums to interact with public through creating and sharing content. It’s an efficient way for promoting your event and brand, maximizing the range of your audiences of knowing your event or product, and helping to maintain relationship with your existing participants. Every piece of your message should be shareable, searchable with a simple search keyword and with valuable content for your targets.

3.       Inbound Marketing Instead of Interruption Marketing

Interruption ads are the paid ones on the right column at Facebook, Google results and sponsored hashtags or updates at Twitter. Inbound Marketing is a kind of marketing activities that bring visitors in rather than marketers going out to get prospects’ attention, using unpaid media to promote and strengthen the information spreading. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content (Wikipedia). Unlike interruption ads which are often ignored by most of web users, inbound contents are much better to be the first effective outcome with the right plan of how to do it.

4.       Establish Solid Landing Pages

Landing page is where you should put your unique selling points to drive your visitors into the right messages. For example, launching a promotion ad and benefits for your audiences through a video or image slides or a solid call to action at your landing page to be straight to your point.

5.       Focus on Website Construction

Your website should be scientifically developed and easy to find information for users with intuitiveness. A great website is always with beautiful interface and clear structure. After all, the website is your participants’ initial recognition of your event and stands the quality of its organization, you should make sure to construct it systematically and respondent to your participants’ needs and interests.

6.       Set Up a Social Media Plan

The social media of an organization or event requires not only the posts of their press coverage, but also an “ever-presence” of engagement like quick responses to the audiences’ inquiries and questions within 60 minutes.

7.       Use Evaluation Analytics

Digital marketing is a kind of system that showing all your efforts put online and if you don’t measure them all come to in vain. You have to use analytics to find out what’s working and which works best. Since your event is a repetitive cycle and it lasts for a whole year and a whole year again, you need to leverage your communication efforts.

Source:
1. Rachel Stephan, 7 Steps to a Successful Digital Marketing Plan for Your Event. Sensov Event Marketing. http://sensov.com/question/how-can-a-digital-marketing-plan-improve-my-event/
2. Inbound Marketing. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing

Edited by Wensi CHEN & Dongyu LIAO