What you should know about digital marketing for your regional event

This is a long post but easy to read, so grab a cuppa and learn about easy things you can do to improve your event marketing.

The most important tip? 

• Focus your marketing efforts and budget on achieving goals for your event based on your Ideal Attendees. Plan your content around those goals!

CONTENT MARKETING

• Content is basically photos, videos and written text such as blog articles that you develop and share.

• Content is the basis of digital marketing – make it relatable and highly relevant to your target audience.

• The purpose of content marketing is to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and inspire them to take a specific action or purchase.

• Quality, relevance, and timing are key. 

• Create content for searches your potential attendees might be making such as 'What to do in [your town] during [your event]'

• Regularly post interesting content that keeps fans connected with your event. They'll buy if or when they're ready. 

CONTENT PLANNING

• Know why you are creating each specific piece of content, what the benefit to the event is, and how you'll measure results.

• Schedule when you'll create content for blogs and post on social media into your weekly calendar.

TARGET MARKETS

• Those high-vale visitors most likely to attend your event.

• Personas help you define the needs of different target markets who have different pain points (where they get frustrated), needs, attitudes and behaviour. Create content that will help them.

• 'Speak' to an individual and personalise your offer. Consumers don't like to be lumped into a group such as families with older kids within 300km who travel with their dog

• Post your content on the channels your Ideal Attendees use (from specialist magazines to Pinterest).

PURCHASE CYCLE

• The tourism purchase cycle is Dream, Plan, Book, Experience and Advocate, though they often happen simultaneously.

• Provide genuinely useful info at each stage to delight, attract, engage and convert your Ideal Attendees.

• Understand your target markets' customer journey - the media they use and the info they read at each stage of the purchase cycle. 

• The most relevant stages of the purchase process for social media are Dream, Experience and Advocate.

MARKETING CHANNELS

• Customers typically experience 7 to 11 ‘touchpoints’ before making a purchase, such as being on your website, seeing one of your ads, or hearing a recommendation.

• There is paid, owned and earned media.

  • Paid: radio ads, TV ads, paid search ads, social media ads.

  • Owned: your website, blog and email database.

  • Earned: word of mouth, social media likes, comments and reviews. Earned media is the most valuable. 

• Popular marketing channels are social media, articles, email newsletters, blog posts, webinars, videos and traditional media (TV, radio, magazines). Events should focus on video, images, blog posts and email newsletters. 

• Email marketing is very good for events with return visitors.

• On Facebook only 4% of organic social media posts are seen – the more you post, the more of your posts will be seen.
  Learn Facebook strategies for events in our on-demand Master Class

• For Instagram, keep a list of relevant hashtags to use in the notes on your phone and copy and paste them into your posts. Have at least 11 hashtags per post. Writing and drawing on images increases engagement, as do emojis.

• YouTube is being used to see how other people experience events.

• Twitter is valuable for communicating with media.

• Google Ads is good if you don't have many competitors. 

• If your target market is the drive market, grey nomads or campers, the WikiCamps app is important. 

TRENDS

• Live video streaming

• Visual content: overlay of words, hashtags, great fonts, memes, emojis

• Paid ads on Facebook to increase the chance of people seeing your posts

• Native advertising: advertorials, infographics, influencers, educational videos 

WEBSITE

• Your website should be the hub of all your marketing activity with calls to action sending people to your website.

• Your website is how you are perceived - a professional slick user-friendly appealing design will make your event look appealing. Use quality images.

• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly. Test your website for mobile usability, loading speed and navigation quality at thinkwithgoogle.com which will email you a website report card - great for a conversation with your webmaster. Think With Google is a great marketing education resource.

• Most visitors will only ever see your homepage so ensure your tickets sales and subscription to your newsletter are prominent there.

• To make booking easy, ensure there are no more than three clicks from your homepage (or landing page/s) to your booking page otherwise you'll lose the customer.

• Make sure your website is useful to potential attendees!

• Monitor your website’s analytics and make changes based on what you learn. Use the free Google Analytics and Google’s Webmaster Tools. 

• Enable social sharing on your website with links to social media so articles and pages can be shared.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

• Search engines are critical in the purchase journey. For inspiration, people look at social media and video. For planning, people use search engines, sites they know (hotel chain, travel agent, airline), travel reviews and destination-specific sites.

• Content such as blog articles can rate better than a website homepage in search results. For this reason, blog articles should answer the questions posed by popular searches about your event or destination.

• Inbound links to your website are very important. Who can you approach to ask to have a link from their website to yours? Get listed on distribution sites and local directories.

• Add a page of outbound links on your website such as ‘What to do in [your town]’.

• Try searching like your customer would search.

• Go through your customer's journey on a phone (dream, plan and book).

BLOG WRITING

Blog articles drive long-term results. 

Brainstorm content to write about:

• Think of your top keywords and search phrases.

• Write an article to answer each of the top ten questions a potential attendee would ask about your event.

• Think of your customer persona. For example 'She's wants to find activities for her kids that she will also enjoy' so write an article about how your event is fun for young kids and parents too

• Think about the needs of customers at different stages of the purchase journey and write to meet those needs.

• Keep a swipe file of ideas including blog articles from other events. Save urls of inspirational pages.  
  

  Spend half of your time on your headline - only 20% of readers go on to read the article, 80% only see the headline. Use keywords in the headline. Test your headline with com/headline A couple of ideas for effective headlines are

• 'How to [mundane task] that [rewarding benefit]' (such as How to plan a family weekend away that will be both fun and relaxing!)

• 'Who else wants to [x]?'

• 'The secret of [x]'

• 'Here's a quick way to [solve problem]'

• 'Now you can have [something desirable] + [great circumstances]'

• 'Do [x] like [world-class example]'

• 'Build/have a [x] you can be proud of'

• 'What everyone should know about [x]'

Here’s a great article on brainstorming searched-for topics and headlines for articles

The process of writing an article:

• Understand your audience (your Ideal Attendee)

• Select a topic

• Write the headline

• Write a captivating intro that hooks readers - set the scene. 

• Organise content in an outline

• Write 300-500 words and make sure it's easy to take in on a mobile phone

• Add a conclusion reminding your readers what you told them

• Include a call to action

• Choose images

PARTNERSHIPS

• Work with partners and leverage what they are doing: your visitor information centre, council, your local/regional/state tourism organisation, Tourism Australia, ATDW (Australian Tourism Data Warehouse), online travel agencies, local tourist-service businesses, special interest groups, influencers, etc - think about where your target market is to help you identify partners

• How can you work together?

• Follow the social media of your partners, and use your partners' hashtags

This YouTube clip from Tourism & Events Queensland ‘Online Distribution for Events’ is worth watching.

EVENT MARKETING MASTER CLASS WEBINARS:

• Using Google Ads to market your event: 9 steps for success (19 April 2021)

• Free media: Big PR ideas for smaller festivals and events (10 May 2021)

• Easy and effective marketing for regional events (Watch on-demand)

• Facebook strategies for events (Watch on-demand)

• Facebook advertising success for events (Watch on-demand)

• Setting up an affordable but effective event website (Watch on-demand)

ONLINE TRAINING MODULE: Marketing success

Learn event marketing skills in our online training program with

• Training video

• Supporting resources, tools & templates to help you action learnings

• Successful case studies and examples to highlight how others do it

• Links to further supporting readings, podcasts and blog articles to extend your knowledge

• Access to Q&A sessions to allow for further discussion on the topic

Lesson 1: Planning to achieve results

Lesson 2: Working with media to showcase your event

Lesson 3: Digital marketing

Find out more about our online training program