1.1 Associate with Your Community
While planning for an in-person event, connecting with your community adds much value to the event. Involving the attendees during the planning phase and getting suggestions or ideas from them can make your event more personalized to the attendees. Connect with your community members through online videos, chats, webinars and social media pages. Encourage them to list their thoughts, suggestions and doubts about the event.
Conducting advance surveys, polls and incorporating attendee's questions on webinars and presentations are also great ways to connect with your community. Involving the audiences in the initial stages of the event may help the attendees to become more engaged.
Why connect with your community?
First of all, connecting with your community can help to build an attendee group for you which can be a great source to be accessed for future events. Secondly, it makes the attendees feel appreciated, as if their opinions are valued. Last but not least, it boosts the overall interest of the attendees for a particular event if they access it in advance.
1.2 Involve Program Speakers
Collaborate with your event speaker/s and ask them to share a blog post, article, podcast or social media post about the event. Also, look for ways to connect with different speaker groups to promote your event through multiple channels such as social networks, the speaker's community and industry trade publications.
Why involve program speakers?
Involving professional program speakers in the event's initial marketing phase would help you to spread the word about the event. In addition, your speaker's community likely has a good audience reach that could help you spread awareness about the event. This method will also help the audience to connect with the event speaker before the event.
1.3 Capitalize on Content & Digital Marketing
Make sure you build a good website and social media pages. Then, produce various forms of digital content such as articles, blogs, social media posts, newsletters and interactive content to connect with your audience. Hire a subject matter expert or community leader to organize a free, informative and interactive webinar. In addition, hire an excellent digital marketing team to boost your digital presence with the latest digital marketing tactics.
Why capitalize on content & digital marketing?
Although it's an in-person event, search engines and various digital platforms are the first steps toward reaching your target audience. Digitization & digitalization have transformed the event industry to the next level. As a result, every marketing strategy revolves around the digital world. Your interactive online presence is the only way to reach out to your audience members. Therefore, you must capitalize on content marketing.