Having a digital communications strategy is vital to ensure you grow your audience reach for your event and experiential campaigns, whether live, virtual or hybrid.
Planning and building a promotion leading up to an event is only half the equation in leveraging digital communications. Engaging attendees during the event using digital communications is a highly effective way to build awareness around your cause or mission.
More often than not, this key strategic component is not fully incorporated. On the contrary, marketing and communication for events tend to focus on the building of a website and sending out emails to increase attendance.
Digital communications provide crucial growth benefits for brands and associations and requires detailed planning and execution. The benefits include:
- driving awareness
- increasing attendance and reach
- managing & personalising registration
- gathering valuable data
- audience engagement
These components will not only help with the success of the current event, but also provide you with valuable insights for development of further opportunities. Above all, the change of continued engagement with your audiences to grow and innovate your brand or association.
Making a greater impact with digital communications
Incorporating a target audience and data strategy with the development of the website branding and layout, having marketing collateral for e-mailers, digital advertisements and social media posts need to be considered.
Impact 1: Begin with the target audience you need to attract and identify what key data collection will provide meaningful insights.
Having a strong understanding of which audiences are key to the success of your event will be the cornerstone for developing all the supporting marketing materials.
Impact 2: Optimise your website to provide an experience that encourages your audience to participate and engage.
These elements could include online registration and payment, interactive maps and real time event updates and attendee support tools such as chatbots.
Impact 3: Leverage social media to its full potential.
Aside from ensuring your branding is consistent across all media channels, consider how you could incentivise registration with an offer or a benefit for attending.
Be sure to target people who have interacted with your brand, association campaigns or previous events. Create an event hashtag, to help build further awareness on social media and tease exciting details about forthcoming benefits of the event, such as access to high profile speakers.
Impact 4: Look for opportunities where you can use influencers.
Connect and engage with new audiences by seeking out any influencers who can easily promote your event. These can include the media, your speakers as well as sponsors. Providing them with a social media guide will help them get on-board to support your brand and association in a consistent way.
Use social interaction to extend your reach throughout your event. Endeavour to engage with your audiences by commenting, liking, sharing and interacting with your and their content and commentary of the event.
Impact 5: Email marketing will be the cornerstone to your digital communications.
Ensure your messaging engages your audiences, includes a call to action and clearly promotes the benefits for what the audience can expect by attending your event.
Consider conducting teaser interviews with guest speakers or give a behind-the-scenes peek at the event line up will help to inspire and pre-engage your audiences.
Impact 6: Digital communications is what separates the mediocre from the great! This is the time to now process all the data collected throughout the event to enhance future audience engagement strategies.
Understanding which channels, where the most effective sources for increasing your audience reach and engagement. Conduct a deep dive into the content which most resonated with your audience and gather insights from the online interactions.
Use the registration data to further enhance your audience’s preference for further marketing outreach. Always seeking to improve the attendee experience.
By focusing on these areas will foster a community around your association cause and brand goals. These proven digital communication strategies will bolster attendance and engagement.
At MCI, we help brands and associations achieve greater impact. We shape their tomorrow by creating experiences, designing communications and building communities. To discover how MCI can help your brand or association, get in contact here.
MCI Content Team
