5 Ways to Maximize Your Event Marketing

5 Ways to Invite Partners, Sponsors & Speakers Market Your Event

If you want your event to create a “standing ovation experience” for everyone involved, these steps and actions will get people and partners on their feet.

1) Connect ASAP Across Platforms

We recommend you start connecting with speakers, sponsors, and those involved in helping to promote your event as soon as possible and across various channels. 

We asked partners to connect with us by…

• Following us and engaging with us on our social and event pages. When you ask partners to follow you, be sure to list all your social platforms with links and tags/handles to make it easy for them. Also, ensure you provide them with your specific event page links and social pages so they can follow, like and engage there as well (and, of course, share). 
• Introducing themselves and inviting them to tell us about their brand/business.
• Inviting partners to join us on our pre-event connection calls. We did 3 calls on Zoom to have partners, speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors start to get to know each other and build community. These calls enhanced sales and brought in new registrations... We could talk about there only being “x” number of tickets left, prizes of “$x” value for people who bring in registrations, etc.
• Tagging us on any posts they published so we could engage with their posts.
  

2) Promote Attendance

Encourage your speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors to share that they are attending the event on both their social platforms and yours. Using memes to note this attendance can be a great way to expand your reach through your partners’ audiences while also marketing the event and the partner at the same time.

To make it easy for our partners to promote their event attendance, we:

• Created and provided the partners with memes and message captions that encouraged people to stop by the partner’s event booth or website. 
• Provided the suggested pre-written text copy for blurbs and captions with registration and event information details.
• Included the partner logo (each partner approved images using their branding) on each partner’s version of the meme.
  

3) Make Invitations Easy

Encourage your partners to reach out and invite people from their circles to register for the event. Depending on the size of the partner, you might even create a custom registration page that would be branded and tailored to each partner so they’d have their own custom registration link to use for their community.

We also provided the following pre-written suggested invitation copy to our speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors:

• Sample email and eblast copy for their community
• Sample letters to their customers and clients
  

4) Create Prize Partners

All of our partners had the opportunity to provide prizes that would be marketed throughout the event, on a special event slide, and in webinar chat boxes leading up to the prize announcements and after.

We reached out to our partners alerting them of the opportunity and asked them to indicate:

• If they wanted to provide a prize
• The value of the prize
• A description (and photo, if applicable) of the prize

The prize opportunities provided additional promotional support for the partner’s brand and the prizes could also be marketed across social media platforms to generate buzz.

5) Q&A / Chat Participation

We also invited partners to chime in on our Q&A posts on social media. Engaging on those posts was a great way for partners to start building connections and rapport with those registered before the event. The same invitation applied to being active in the online chat for pre-event webinars and online conferences. 

Opportunities Specific to Speaking Partners

If your event involves speakers, there are some specific requests you can make that can be worked into your marketing strategies that will serve both you and the speaker:

• Ask the speaker to share any hashtags they use in their business marketing.
• Create a press release announcing the event’s featured speakers. Ask the speaker to share the press release on their social platforms and with their local media. 
• Encourage the speaker to create a 90-second to 2-minute teaser video that can be shared on social platforms and in email promotions (and that they’d share on their platforms, too).

These are a few of the many helpful strategies we used to make our speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors full marketing partners for past events. How can you increase engagement and promotional support from the exhibitors and speakers participating in your events?

For more ideas, book a Power Hour call with Charmaine.