You have a new idea for an event. Your team has planned a great concept, theme, and event goals that align with your organization’s mission. Now, you need to promote it to ensure your target audience knows about it and can plan to attend.
If you’re struggling with the marketing side of event planning, we have your back. In this guide, we’ll cover the core concepts of event marketing, promotional ideas, and examples of successful event marketing campaigns. Plus, we’ll cover how technology, such as some of the 25 best event management software tools for 2025, can help. Stick around for all the details.
Staying current with evolving event marketing trends will help you create campaigns that truly resonate with your audience.
Introduction: Understanding Event Marketing Strategy Meaning
What is the meaning of an event marketing strategy? It refers to any techniques and plans that event organizers use to spread awareness about an upcoming event and encourage attendance. Your marketing strategy will play a significant role in helping your audience hear about the event and understand how attending will benefit them.
Some popular ways to market events include:
- Sending an announcement to your email list
- Posting about it on social media
- Setting up an event website with information about it
- Posting blogs or videos about the event
- Partnering with influencers or industry leaders to spread the word about it
Integrating influencer marketing into your campaign can significantly amplify reach and add credibility to your messaging.
We’ll discuss individual strategies in more detail later in this article, but first, let’s discuss some of the core concepts to understand the event marketing cycle.
What Are The 5 Cs Of Event Marketing?
The 5 Cs of event marketing cover how you’ll promote your event and measure success at each stage. They follow the typical event planning process. The 5 Cs go as follows:
- Concept: The concept refers to the overarching theme, idea, and messaging behind your marketing strategy. You’ll usually want to focus on how your event will benefit attendees and ways it aligns with their current needs. For example, brainstorm how a workshop will help attendees gain new skills that benefit their careers.
- Coordination: Once you have the main idea, it’s time to coordinate the process. Tasks and responsibilities will need to be assigned across your team, schedules should be developed to ensure you hit deadlines, and you should plan for how often and when you’ll check in on the progress.
- Control: As you check in on your marketing strategy’s progress and success, you might find things that need adjustment along the way. For example, you might see that your social media posts are successfully driving traffic to your website, but a low percentage of website visitors are registering. It could be a sign that you need to work on the messaging on your website to convert more visitors into registered attendees.
- Culmination: Your event marketing strategy will usually culminate when you reach your organization’s goals or right before the event date. It’s important to remain involved right until the end to ensure the rest of your promotional strategy is executed according to plan.
- Closeout: Once your marketing campaign ends, it’s time to evaluate its success. Event management software can provide you with a lot of good data to use during this process, such as how many people registered, the total number of attendees, and the levels of engagement with your event. Based on these numbers, you can determine if you reached your goals and how you can improve for the next event.
Reviewing these metrics is crucial for long-term event success and helps refine your strategies over time.
What Are The 5 Ps Of Event Marketing?
The 5 Ps of event marketing are core elements you’ll want to consider as you’re developing your strategy. They go as follows:
- Product: The product refers to what you’re delivering at the event. You’ll want to ensure what you’re delivering to attendees is worth the time and money they’re spending. Some examples of good products at events are workshops that develop new skills, access to networking opportunities, or presentations with leading information about industry trends.
- Price: How much does it cost to attend? If you aren’t sure how to set prices, it can help to evaluate what other organizations in your industry are charging for similar events to get an idea of what a fair market value is. Also, consider your projected attendance and what you need to make to cover the costs of hosting the event.
- Place: Where are you hosting the event? That can include the city where it’ll take place, the specific venue, or if the event is in-person, hybrid, or virtual. Make sure the place aligns with your audience. For example, if many of your attendees live in a specific area, hosting it there might be a good idea.
- Promotion: How will you promote your event? It’s important to determine where your target audience would be most likely to see promotional materials. For instance, if a large portion of your audience is active on social media, that could be a good place to focus your promotional efforts.
- People: Consider who you’re promoting to and what their current needs are. For example, if you have an audience of IT professionals who care greatly about staying on top of the latest innovations in tech, you could align your messaging to connect with that desire and how your event will help.
For guidance in organizing your outreach, try using an event marketing plan template to simplify content creation and scheduling.
What Strategies Can You Use To Promote An Event Effectively?
There are many effective event marketing strategies you can use, such as:
Promoting On Social Media
Social media is a great option for event promotion. You can start by making a post announcing your event that your followers can see, with information about the event date, time, and how to register.
Then, you can follow up with occasional reminders about the upcoming event or exciting announcements, such as speakers you have confirmed or activities you’ll be hosting.
Additionally, you can promote with social media ads if you want to expand your reach to relevant audiences who might be interested in attending.
Create An Email Campaign
Email is a great way to reach anyone who’s already familiar with your organization. Similar to social media, you can send emails announcing your event and follow up with some occasional reminders and exciting announcements to drive more interest in it.
Influencer Partnerships
Partnering with relevant influencers in your industry can help expand your reach. Having influencers talk about your event is a great way to connect with a new audience in a way that feels more natural, coming from someone they already know.
Using Content Marketing
Many forms of content marketing (blogs, videos, infographics, etc.) can help you promote your event and expand your reach. For example, blogs are a great way to provide detailed information relevant to your event right on your website. Or, infographics can provide easily digestible information on a variety of platforms and are highly shareable to extend your reach. Every good event promotion strategy should balance digital and traditional methods to reach a diverse audience effectively.
Traditional Promotional Methods
Traditional promotional methods such as print, radio, or sponsorships can work too. For instance, you can print out fliers that you’ll hand out while getting involved in the community and connecting with potential attendees face-to-face.
Leveraging Event Registration Platforms
As you’re promoting your event, it’s a good idea to incorporate a smooth registration solution to make it easy for those interested in attending to sign up. You’ll want to ensure your registration solution is accessible, easy to use, and collects the information you need about attendees, such as any dietary restrictions.
Usually, having this as part of a full event management software is a good idea, so it’s integrated with the rest of your event planning tasks and information. These platforms also double as valuable event marketing tools for collecting engagement data and improving ROI tracking.
Event Marketing Strategy Examples And Measuring Success
Here are a couple of examples of how associations and nonprofits can deploy an effective event marketing campaign and integrate technology for measuring event marketing success.
Example #1 - Healthcare Association
A healthcare association was planning a mid-year conference and wanted to boost early registrations by 30%. They ran a coordinated social media campaign across LinkedIn and Twitter, sharing member stories and short video clips from past events.
Using event registration software, the association created accessible forms and added direct sign-up links to every post, making registration easy.
As the campaign went on, they tracked analytics and found that they were getting the most sign-ups from their LinkedIn posts, so they increased their efforts on LinkedIn to continue driving better results.
The result was a 35% increase in pre-event registrations compared to the previous year, surpassing the goal they set.
Example #2 - Environmental Nonprofit
A regional nonprofit focused on environmental conservation used targeted email marketing to promote its annual fundraising gala.
They started by segmenting their contact list by donor history and sending personalized invitations.
As they tracked analytics, they noticed low response rates from younger donors and switched to a mobile-first messaging strategy to try to align better with their communication preferences. The change was a success, boosting responses from younger donors by 25% in the second half of the campaign.
In the end, the nonprofit was able to exceed its attendance goals by 15% while increasing its base of recurring donors.
For many event marketers, success stories like these underline the importance of personalization and data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
As you’re developing your event marketing strategy, remember to consider your event goals, audience’s needs, and where you’ll be able to reach your target audience the best. Not everything will go exactly as you planned, so continue to assess the data and see how you can improve your promotional efforts.
The right technology can help in the process. For example, you can use an event management software to set up a smooth registration system, delegate tasks, and track analytics to measure your impact.
At Cadmium, we have a solution that can help with those needs. Eventscribe, Cadmium’s event management system, provides marketing tools to improve your outreach and track ROI. Plus, you’ll have features to help at each stage of event planning, including:
- Creating accessible registration forms
- Setting up an event website and mobile app
- Tracking analytics
- Managing speakers and presentations
- Coordinating logistics
- And more
Click here to learn more about how Eventscribe can benefit event planning, promotion, and execution at each stage.
