Associations spend a ton of money marketing their events, but are they are making the most of their event marketing budget? In this article, we’ll review common event marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Not Setting & Following a Budget: The first mistake that many associations make is not creating an effective budget for their event. Your event budget should include everything: venue rent, food & beverage, AV, taxes, fees, travel, and marketing. The marketing budget should encompass all event marketing costs including digital ads, traditional marketing, and any giveaways or prizes. Setting clear goals and expectations can help your association keep each allocation on-budget.
NOTE: Successful budgets always account for worst-case scenarios or unexpected costs. Take a look at these templates from Guidebook to help you build your event budget.
Mistake #2: Not Keeping Track of Your Marketing Efforts in Real Time: Failing to track your progress can be very detrimental to the success of your campaign or event. Throughout your campaign, you’ll want to setup different campaigns and appeals in ClearVantage Association Management Software to help you measure all of your marketing efforts.
ClearVantage Association Management Software measures each initiative in real time - giving you the opportunity to adjust and/or re-target based on your results throughout the event marketing period. For example, using ClearVantage Association Management Software, you can setup a campaign (titled “Initial Email”) with two or more appeals to test subject lines or email content. You’ll want to test the open rates, link clicks and unsubscribes to determine how well each email is performing and adjust your message accordingly.
The results of the campaign will populate into a graph format in the campaign notebook. However, you can also use the free, downloadable campaign reports from ClearVantage Association Management Software Marketplace to pull and export results. To keep this top of mind, you can also add this report to your home dashboard.
Mistake #3: Not Targeting the Right Audience: Targeting the wrong audience can costs associations time, money and resources. In this case, the wrong audience includes people that aren’t really going to attend your event. On the other hand, effective targeting can help you optimize and hone in on the “lowest hanging fruit”.
ClearVantage can help you create targeted lists based on numerous criteria including:
- Interests & Event Attendance: filter your individual list by a user’s self-defined interests (which users can update in their online member portal at any time) and previous/current event registrations. All events can be tagged by topic area to make this filtering even more seamless.
- Location: if your event is costly or appeals more to a local audience, you can use ClearVantage Association Management Software to filter your list by location (e.g., zip code, region, city, state, etc.).
Mistake #4: Not Involving Influencers Early On: It’s not hard to understand why events that are supported by thought leaders & industry experts are more likely to go viral and sell out. However, even with the right influencers, many associations fail to execute influencer marketing in a way that actually promotes their event and conjures prospective attendees to register. The failure is often in the execution. Many associations don’t get influencer buy-in early on, and their event promotion and registrations stall out as a result.
The resolution? Whether paid or not, get influencer buy-in early on! When influencers feel tied to your association its mission from the start, they’re much more likely to promote your event. Not doing so could result in wasted time, energy and money (especially if you’re paying your influencers).
In a recent post, we discuss ways that even smaller associations can hone influencers for their marketing efforts. You can use this post to help you find the right influencers for to help you promote your event.
Conclusion: In order to optimize event marketing budgets, associations need to set clear, trackable goals. Once goals are in place, they should be used to benchmark your team’s success throughout the promotion of the event. Taking these steps and avoiding a few simple mistakes will help guarantee your next event is a success!
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