by Ashwin | Jul 20, 2016 | Blog, event management, Marketing
“Event marketing” is a huge term. From the inception to the end, various things are involved in event marketing. But is there a saturation point for event marketing? A person involved in event marketing always ponders upon various questions,
- Is there more opportunity to attract attendees?
- How can I make my event-hosting organization known?
- Am I targeting the right audience?
Although an event may or may not have managed to gather a large number of audience, a major factor that holds on to attendees and entices your prospects is event branding, through which you create a brand name for your event by making it memorable to the audience!
Here are some tips and tricks to get started with event branding.
Logo
The primary means to identify an event management firm amongst others is to develop a symbolic representation that accurately propitiates with the theme of your events and the ideals of your organization. Your logo need not be too fancy; a simple logo that people can relate to would suffice.
Invitations and Pamphlets
The initial step to event branding and awareness creation is to send out attractive invites to prospects. An interesting invite that conveys the point of your event combined with a remarkable image of your event logo at strategic positions can make a significant impact on your prospects, who would be tempted to transform into an attendee. If there are resources, do send a customized invite to attendees which will help you to gain their trust.
ID card Tags and Badges
Identity card or badges for attendees at your event and the ID tags can have the name of your event or your organization imprinted on it. This creates a feeling of oneness. These tag names will fall in the sight of all the people attending the event and is a very subtle yet sublime way to tie your attendees together.
Sponsor Banners
An award ceremony ritually hangs a sponsor backdrop with all the sponsor names and logos imprinted. Here’s where you can make a great impact especially when your event is getting media attention. Make the event’s/ organization’s name or logo prominent on the banner along with the sponsors to make a remarkable impact in the industry.
Goodies
Since most attendees would like to take away something from your event for remembrance, apparels are an ideal way to impress them. Giveaway tees or sweatshirts, that have your event’s name and logo on it add a tag line or two, and there you go! A good number of attendees is wearing an apparel around the city marketing your event’s name for free.
Flags and buntings
During the phase of event planning where you decorate your event venue make sure you add flags and buntings around the hall that displays your event logo. These buntings not only add flavor to the decorations but also continually tries to install the brand- ‘your event’s name’ into the attendees that they would memorize the logo.
Social Media
Finally, to have a larger level of impact social media is always the best means. Using your brand name and logo all over social media you can definitely create some buzz around your event.
The aim of event branding is to make people remember your event name and logo automatically when the thought of the word ‘event’ pops up in their mind. Get started with these excellent branding ideas for a successful event.
by Ashwin | Jul 15, 2016 | event management, Marketing
Event Management by Live Blogging
Event management is a tough cookie! The commencement to the conclusion involves a lot of things. The road from planning the event to successfully executing it is long. The beginning point for a successful marketing campaign would be through content marketing. Since blogging has been a traditional way to introduce your content to consumers, it is understandable that a rich, entertaining and unique content is the need of the hour to catch the attention and retain attendees. Usually, content for an event is often developed during 2 scenarios,
- Before the commencement of the event to create hype or publicity thereby earning more attendees
- After the event is hosted or concluded so that the attendees can relate their experience with the content.
What if, an attempt is made to significantly keep attendees glued to your event from the beginning to the end? This can be done by introducing live blogging. Live blogging is similar to live radio or live television, which provides a rolling textual coverage of an ongoing event. Constantly giving updates about the event ensures that attendees don’t miss out on anything crucial.
We are aware of Cricbuzz, ESPN CricInfo, etc. They provide live updates of cricket match scores at every ball in an over. ESPN’s espnfc.com provides quick updates on football events. Live blogging can be done similarly to keep the attendees informed about the happenings at the event.
What should be conveyed about the event while live blogging?
A most common way to keep attendees engaged is to put up a post that also serves as a trivia. A ‘did you know’ post that covers different undiscovered parts of your event will tempt the attendees to read further. These posts could create an everlasting impact on the attendees as they will be having a thorough knowledge of all aspects of your event.
When speakers come up to deliver their thoughts, a quick introduction and some facts about the speaker and his achievements or experience will attempt to create a feeling of trust in the attendees. Attendees would feel comfortable if they listen to someone who they know better.
This might be the “most read part” of your blog updates. Even a brief introduction to the variety of dishes that you are providing can be delectable. It is advisable to list the food being served at your event in an ordered fashion, as in a menu card. It can be made more interesting by giving ‘Food for thought’ quotes.
- Offers and discounts from sponsors
Sponsors are the events’ backbone. They act as economic pillars to make your event successful. As a token of respect, introduce your sponsors’ products, and their offers to the attendees while live blogging. This can prove to be an ideal way to build a lasting relationship with the sponsor while gaining viewers interest; which is not only restricted to the event but also about the products for sale.
- Integration with social media
While you post your blogs on your website, simultaneously update it on different social media platforms to capture the attention of a wider range of audience. Likes, shares/ retweets, etc., can help your posts reach more audience.
After you publish your posts on social media, as well as on the blog, make sure to keep track of the comments section. Reply to all the comments as quickly as possible so that you don’t miss out to keep any of your attendees engaged. This adds more liveliness to the blog and will convince the audience that “their thoughts matter.”
by Ashwin | Jul 13, 2016 | Blog, event management
In an era of digitalization, many mobile apps are on the rise! Though it might sound dubious, email marketing campaigns can fetch more than double the Return on Investment (ROI) compared to any other form of marketing. This stands true provided the email marketing campaign is done right.
- What are the probable reasons why some marketing emails end up right into the spam folders?
- How do you get the attention of your event attendees through your email?
- How would you persuade them to open the email and read the content?
- How do you make your content intriguing enough to hold your attendees on to their seats?
Here are some tips which would help ameliorate your email crafting skills and eventually lead to a successful email marketing campaign.
1. Services to use while sending emails
To get your emails effectively into the inbox of your targets/prospects, a renowned Email Service Provider (ESP) is required. The ESP will ensure that your Emails do not end up in the Spam folders and make it to the inbox after circumventing the spam filters that automatically identify a marketing email. Mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail etc. can quickly identify a promotional mail and filter it out from the inbox. ESP help you to overcome these barriers and enable your marketing emails to be noticed by the users.
2. Keep your name clear
The readers of your mail should know who you are. They need to identify the sender so as to go forward and read the mail. Promotional emails that you send out needs to be from an email address or domain that denotes your event’s/ organization’s name. Once your prospects read the recipient’s name, they will be able to relate easily and recollect the purpose of subscription or go ahead and open the mail.
3. The subject line is the entry point
The subject line acts as the gateway to your email content. After having created amazing content inside your email, it becomes incredibly doleful if the reader does not open the mail due to an unattractive subject line. The term “attractive” does not only signify catchy lines or slogans but also implies that the reader should be able to understand and predict the content of the mail so that he can distinguish or identify your email and find value in it. Subject lines are usually not more than 50 characters, and it conveys the point or purpose of the email.
4. Personalize your email
An email addressed to no one but has great content regarding your event, will directly end up in the spam folder. Most of the ESPs have the option to use a merge tag that allows the mail creator to use the recipient’s name inside the mail content. If you are sending a mail to abc@xyz.com, the ESPs will automatically include the word Abc in the email (for example, you may begin with ‘Hi ABC’). This allows the users to relate themselves to the email being sent to them thereby making it more interactive. This form of personalization takes you one step ahead and motivates the user to read further.
5. Check your spelling and grammar
Avoid spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Spam filters also have the ability to identify spam emails through such meager mistakes. Grammatical errors inside the mail may escape the filters, but it might end up annoying the reader.
6. Do not use Pompous Words and $ymbols*!!!!
Most spam filters can easily identify spam emails if you use words like ‘OFFER,’ ‘FREE,’ ‘YOU HAVE WON,’ ‘WIN,’ ‘PRIZE’,’BUY’ etc. Also, the repetitive use of certain symbols such as exclamation mark, the dollar symbol, asterisk, etc., must be avoided to evade spam filters. Avoid sudden usage of Upper Case letters, bold letters or italics. Serendipitously, if such emails somehow manage to enter the inbox, the users will immediately neglect and delete it or eventually throw it to the spam folder.
7. Uniformity and Professionalism
Maintain a consistent layout for your emails. Within one email make sure your content uses the same font size; color etc. so that it has a solid look and feel. These little efforts have a significant impact on the user’s mind it gives a professional appeal to the content.
8. Visual Treat
Try to place images at strategic positions in your email to keep your readers entertained. Some promotional emails have the entire content in one picture. While this might seem unique, it poses a problem to the user due to browser configurations, resolution of the screen and the type of device he or she uses (phone, tablet, laptop, etc.).
Images that are relevant to the topic and content of the email is generally advisable to be used. Most of the email clients limit the use of visuals to images. They don’t allow the usage of videos, gifs or flash, although you may cleverly use thumbnail images or text as hyperlinks to your videos present on your website or in global platforms like YouTube, etc.
9. Elaborate in the links
Through the content of your email, you are trying to consume few minutes of your attendees precious time. While you want to convey all the points in your email, it is highly recommended that you make it short and crisp so that the reader does not have to read huge passages. Attendees should be able to understand and know the highlights of the information that you are trying to convey, and for more details they can choose to read further, i.e., you can give them the option to click on a link at major points in the content.
For, e.g., if you have only provided the names of the speakers, and the attendee wishes to know more about any particular speaker, they can have the choice to click on the speaker’s name so that it navigates to another window (which might be your website), where they can get more details.
10. Don’t explode your attendee’s inbox
Yes, you do want to keep your attendees engaged and informed about your event, but bombarding your participant’s inbox is highly discouraged. Understanding the difference between regular communication and frequent communication is really pertinent for email marketing. While you limit the number of emails that you send to your prospects, it is important that they must always be in touch with your email communication at regular intervals.
by Ashwin | Jul 4, 2016 | Blog, event management, Marketing
Hashtags are the latest rage in social media. Tagging a phrase or a word with a hash symbol (#) makes the content in the post visible to the people with similar interests. Hashtags can be used as a marketing tool or a branding tool or just to start a trend!
In Event Management, Hashtags are pertinent to keep attendees engaged on social media platforms, and it is equally important for event organizers to keep a track on event hashtags that have been shared. Whether the hashtags replicated, share a positive or negative description, or the shared hashtags are unrelated to your event? However good or bad the responses may be, it is the responsibility of an organizer to monitor these hashtags in a nifty way.
Here are some tools that enable event organizers to keep track of event hashtags:
This is a fantastic platform wherein if a user keys in a word, it gives the most accessible and relevant usage of that word in hashtags across various platforms. An initial basic model produces a cloud of related hashtag words.
Through the hashtag walls generated by this website, one can quickly have a glance at the various comments, tweets, etc., related to the hashtags and thereby easily identify the overall opinion of audiences.
Tweetreach allows the user to similarly enter a keyword to search for and produces all the possibilities of the word being used on Twitter in the form of hashtags. You will be able to monitor Tweets about all your topics such as hashtags, brands, accounts, events, etc., in real time, with comprehensive analytics on Twitter reach, performance, and engagement. You can dive deeper into your tweets, measure earned an organic conversation and performed detailed, competitive analysis.
Twubs is a site where you can practically search, register and also brand a particular hashtag. It also has features like moderated tweet walls that you can use for your upcoming event or conference.
This site offers deep analysis of a particular word by inspecting its usage across different social media platforms. Providing statistical and analytical information about a hashtag and classifying it as a negative or positive remark or based on other categories on the identification of certain keywords.
Throwing a huge world map in front of the user and displaying the trending hashtags around the globe, trends map allows the user to click on the most searched word. You can scroll the maps by dragging to another area or zoom in or out using the plus/minus icons. You can also see where else this topic popular by clicking on the topic within the detail display, or what else are people tweeting about at this location by clicking on the site name. Trendsmap is a creative way of identifying trending topics around the globe.
Brand Mention is a real-time social media search and analysis. It allows you to enter a keyword and search for it in specific areas such as Blogs, Microblogs, Videos, Images, etc.
Brand Mention analyses different aspects of a keyword including
- The strength which is a measure of the likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media.
- The sentiment, which is the ratio of mentions that are usually positive to those that are typically negative.
- Reach, which is the measure of the range of influence, etc. mommabe.com
It also displays the sources from which these words were mentioned.
Hashtags play a significant role in creating leads for your organization. However, proper monitoring of these hashtags is crucial to a successful online event marketing campaign.
by Ashwin | Jul 1, 2016 | Analytics, event management
Word cloud or tag cloud are graphical representations of the frequency of words that give greater prominence to words that occur more frequently in a source text. The bigger the size of the word in the visual the more common the word would have appeared in the document(s). This type of visualization can assist feedback evaluators with exploratory textual analysis by identifying words that frequently appear in the feedback forms. It can also be used for communicating the most salient points or themes in the reporting stage for your event’s case study.
After having received multiple feedback forms, you may be eager to know the difference of opinions in the minds of your attendees. While Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are the most preferable and favorite form of requesting for feedback, regarding saving time, some customers don’t mind taking the pain of filling out long answers so that they receive a better experience if at all they attend your next event.
For your analysis
The primary reason to have a word cloud generated out of participant’s feedbacks is to have a very foundational understanding of the impact that your event had on your attendees. An overall picture of your event from an attendee’s perspective is a desideratum.
Let the prospective attendees admire
People are on the lookout for reviews about a product or service before availing it. When they encounter this readily available and readable word cloud that acts as a creative way of portraying attendee opinions they may be inspired to convert into prospective attendees.
Useful for case study and research purposes
When a single word is enough to describe the experience created by your event, it means a lot. It creates a platform where one can plunge into identifying reasons for having used a set of words frequently. It paves the way for improvisation regarding user experience, customer satisfaction, etc.
Put it up on social media
Since social media is driven mostly by pictures, a creative way of expressing the opinions of all the attendees through the eye-catchy word clouds can fetch raving reviews, likes, shares, and comments on social media thereby acting as a makeshift marketing tool.
A variety of word and tag cloud generators are freely available all over the internet, and the process for creating them is uncomplicated. Evaluators can only import the feedback documents into a text box, and the tool generates a graphical representation of the words. Most word cloud generators have features that allow users to change colors, font, and exclude common or similar words making it more attractive and entertaining for marketing purposes.
