7 Hacks To Ensure Events Grow Your Business (Pt. 1)

There are secrets to grow your business at almost no cost when you have no connections and no experience. The problem is nobody is telling you those secrets when you are starting out. People tell you about expensive channels like Google Adwords or Facebook advertising. You are a startup and today I will share you some low cost hacks around organizing events which can really boost your business.

We will look at the promotion of an event first and in the following article we will focus on during and after the event.

Most Events Fail Before They Even Begin

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. This roadmap consisting with hacks will set you up for success. Let’s start!

#1 Will Your Hide-And-Seek Game Destroy Your Event?

Why hide away your event behind everything out on your website – give your event it’s own place to shine:

Create separate landing pages and test what works. This ensures that you can reach and attract different target customers.

HubSpot creates a separate landing page for every product or service they offer.
The same should be done for your event.

These are your action steps:

1. Create separate landing pages (either through new domains or a tool such as Unbounce).
2. Each of these landing pages should have a different focus e.g. customer segment, unique selling point. To ensure this different focus the content on each page should be 90% unique.
3. Measure which landing page works best through monitoring the traffic to each site.

Explaining what to put on your landing page to optimize it, would fill another article but there are two key additional points you should keep in mind.

1. Make it easy for your customer to leave behind their email address. This helps create an additional step in order to acquire customers who are not ready yet to sign up for the event but are interested. It also means if they cannot attend this event you can inform them about the next.
2. One main call to action. The CTA should stand out (bright colours and use a more catchy phrase than just “sign up”) and should also be placed on the right of the page. All these points have been proven to increase the conversion of your site.

Promoting Your Event

#2 Who Is Opening The Gates For You?

Would you throw darts blindfolded? No? So why are you doing this with your business?

Sure, you could post random things on every possible website, social media channel and hope something works. Or you could be clever and know where your efforts are going to.

Create a separate Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) code for each website/post using Google and then have a look at Google Analytics to see where most traffic and conversion is coming from. A UTM code is a customized URL that allows you to track a campaign source and medium:

How you create an UTM link

This will allow you to see the traffic that is generated from the different campaigns and channels. These are the channels you should focus on promoting on to hit the bullseye. Check not only which channels provide sign-up options for the events but also which of them provide the most email addresses. Once you find channels that work, go full throttle and focus on them to generate more buzz for your event.

#3 Make Your Event Pop

Chances are you probably have your own website which already gets daily traffic. So why not use it? Make sure every person who visits your site knows about your event through, for example, a welcome mat using SumoMe. It is free, easy to use and ensures any visitor of your site will get informed about the event. For example, when someone visits our blog the first thing they see is a welcome mat about our free event attendance growth hacking guide:

Example of our Welcome Mat via SumoMe

#4 How To Invite Your Clients 20 Times Without Them Minding

We all send a huge multitude of emails to (potential) clients day in and day out. Are you going to write “by the way we are having an event…” every time? Chances are you will not but in case you are your clients might get a bit annoyed by the promotion. So why not place it in your signature? One simple sentence under your information to ensure people know about your product but are not overwhelmed by it. If everyone in the company does this it will definitely make a difference. Something as simple us: Join us at our [name of event] on the [date].

This also means the client will see it every time you email rather than that one random email you wrote to them about the event. Do not forget to use a separate UTM for this (either per team member or a general one) to see if it generates traffic.

Ready To Get Your Event Noticed?

This is the first four growth hacks we wanted to share with you to help you get your noticed. Integrate them into your promotion to increase your reach and get more event attendees. However, there is more to just the promotion in using events as a form of growth. That is why you should keep an eye out for part 2 to see what you need to be doing during and after your event.

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