There are a heck of a lot of marketing strategies out there. So we’re going to narrow things down to the best marketing strategy for engaging your community: Event Marketing.
Event marketing works as a stand-alone business strategy and alongside other marketing plans, particularly Community Marketing.
Here’s a run-down of event marketing and why it’s a must for Community Leaders and Marketers.
First Things First: What is Event Marketing?
Event marketing is marketing that uses events to raise awareness, generate leads, and convert customers. By launching events, you give your customer a reason to directly engage with your brand, product or service.
Hosting events is the best way to interact with your customers and activate your community.
How do I know if Event Marketing is for me?
If you:
- Want to grow your audience, and are keen to do so via video or audio
- Have a network you want to use to activate a customer population
- Want to serve an existing community
- Are keen to position yourself as a thought leader in your space. Thought leaders at HeySummit include authors, professional coaches, course builders, entrepreneurs and many, many more
- Are passionate about a particular subject, cause, or product, and want to get yourself out there
Who is Event Marketing not for?
No marketing strategy suits absolutely everyone. If you:
- Don’t like the idea of working with a lot of people in your space
- Don’t like sharing the stage
- Don’t see yourself as a connector
Then event marketing may not be for you.
What about Community Marketing?
Community marketing uses the power of a specific community as a focal point for showcasing your authority.
But being an authority doesn’t just mean being an expert in your field, it also means being a connector. Your customers (or potential customers) come to you because you’re a prominent figure of the community they wish to be a part of - and you can lead them to other key people, too.
That’s where event marketing comes in. If you’re a natural connector, a Community Marketer or Leader, events are a great way to showcase your knowledge and your network.
How does Event Marketing help Community Leaders?
🌰 In a nut-shell: jump-starts, lead generation, and nurturing. 🌰
- Events jump-start your community. Virtual events are a great way to get your existing customers excited about actually meeting each other. You activate your existing network and audience in a dedicated community space.
- Events are a lead generation tool to bring other people into your community. As a community organizer, you give your members the mic to spread the word about themselves.
- Events nurture and encourage your members to be more active in your community. When you host weekly/bi-weekly/or monthly events, you keep your community talking. And the best part? These events can be anything. Talk series, masterminds, networking sessions, whatever works best for you and your community.
Let’s talk revenue
Alright, we’ll cut to the chase: let’s talk about what event marketing does for your revenue. Aside from the obvious ticket sales, here are the three biggest ways events increase your revenue:
💲 Passive Streams of Income
Most virtual events don’t happen live: they’re pre-recorded or ongoing. Every virtual event is recordable and forever available to you as a passive stream of income after your initial launch date.
Plus, if you want that live experience, you can still record your event for customers to access later.
Running recorded weekly events for your community, for example, creates both an active income stream and an entire series of passive income streams.
🐝 Cross Pollination
Event marketing is an incredibly strong source of cross-pollination. Having speakers at your event attracts their audiences to your community. Trust us, they’re absolute beacons of lead generation.
Your existing community will also be very useful for attracting speakers to your event. Not only do they get to promote themselves as experts in their field, they get access to your community.
👬 Partnerships and Sponsorships
When you have a community, you’re engaging with an active network. Having an active community gives potential sponsors and partners an extremely good reason to work with you.
Events are ideal for working with partners and sponsors.
If you have a virtual community, whatever its size, and you’re not giving partners and sponsors the opportunity to work with you, you’re missing out on a whole lot of revenue and lead generation.
What’s the most common misconception about Event Marketing?
We cannot stress this enough:
📢 You do NOT need a big team behind you 📢
At HeySummit we’ve seen virtual events of 10,000 attendees run by a team of 2.
We won’t pretend this isn’t dependent on your goal, objectives, and existing audiences, but, fundamentally, event marketing is by no means out of reach for you if you don’t have a large team. All you need is the right platform.
The vast majority of events we’ve seen are run by one or two people. It’s absolutely possible, even commonplace, for one person to manage tens of speakers in a large virtual event. A team of two to three people can manage a hundred speakers or more perfectly well.
How do I start?
Launching your first virtual event may seem like a daunting task. But don’t let this stop you. Streamline the process with HeySummit. We offer:
- Customizable landing pages
- Email templates
- Speaker dashboards
- Customizable ticketing and registration
- Marketing automation
- Analytic reporting
- Integrations with Zoom, LinkedIn, Vimeo, and many more
- A knowledge base of videos, live classes, podcasts, blogs, and a live team of experts... our own community you could say 😉
Event marketing is the best way to strengthen and build a community. Virtual events allow community marketers to activate their community members, generate leads, create new streams of revenue, and attract partners and sponsors.
Don’t waste your potential. Try out event marketing for free with HeySummit’s 14 day trial.
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