10 Common Misconceptions About Event Marketing

1. Too Small to Market

Having a marketing plan for your event is the foundation for how you will present your event to potential attendees. If you want attendees, you will have to advertise. Even a two man show still needs to outline their target audience, channels, budget, tactics and more. Without at least a basic plan, you could be wasting time and money. Planning your event marketing campaigns, keeping all of your event business’s possibilities in mind, is the only way to get the optimal return on your investment.

2. Losing Marketing Focus

In the age of a barrage of constant information, losing your marketing focus is incredibly easy. Most especially when, in doing so, your social platform’s interactivity increases. It may be compelling to want to lay out a snappy line, share a funny photo or interact on topics not related to your industry, but in doing so, it becomes impossible to keep your message consistent and clear to consumers. If humor or off-topic conversation really brings the conversions in, make sure you continue to engage your audience through dedication to your business’s essential message.

3. One-Shot Marketing

While running ads is definitely a marketing tactic, it is not a marketing plan. A marketing plan includes taking advantage of all of the available venues on which you can share your brand and deliver your message to your targeted audience. Many event planners wrongly assume that every tactic used in marketing will come with very high costs. This is patently untrue. Many forms of event marketing can in fact, be done by the event marketer themselves for free or very affordable usage fees.

4. Marketing Only to Prospects

This is a dangerous position to get in if you truly want to market your business through events. Event planning and organization often takes a village to carry out, even if one single organizer sets up the plan. That means your event already has attendees, and those attendees often have like-minded friends and family. Make sure that as you do market to prospective future consumers or attendees, that you never forget to market to your current base as well. This is where loyalty programs or rewards can really set you above.

5. Ignoring Social Media

Many event planners think that they do not need social media. They already have a great customer-base, plenty of event attendees, word-of-mouth advertising. That could be entirely true. However, it’s a guarantee that if you have customers these days, they are on social media platforms. So while you may not feel like you need social media, why on earth would you ignore the opportunity to share updates, promotions, events and more with your customers in real-time? If you have word-of-mouth advertising via very happy customers, give those customers a place to voice those opinions, which will only help grow your business. Having great reviews on social media sites is one of the main factors in turning prospects into attendees.

6. Tough Times, Budget Cuts

While phasing out marketing can absolutely seem like the best place to make cuts in your event spending during tough economical times, shutting down the marketing budget can literally be the end of your event. You may have to get in and get your hands dirty by picking up some of the tedious work yourself. Instead of having the print shop down the road make your event flyers, you could print them yourself. But when it comes to direct advertising, you should continue to invest. Even if it means raising the cost of your products or offerings slightly.

7. No Need to Blog

In just about every industry these days, there is definitely a need to blog. The fact is that today, consumers do want to know that the companies or individuals they purchase from really are engaged in their own business. When they find you, make sure they find interesting, engaging and entertaining content or other forms of media to browse through while they learn about your event.

8. Replacing your Sales Team with Digital

This may be tempting to many to save on costs but there is no replacement for your sales team. While you should be blogging for your small business and events and you should be engaging on social media platforms, these are in no way replacements for an effective and compelling sales team. As much as digital business may appear to be advertising itself, it will not grow without professionals who are trained to be a walking, talking spokesperson for your brand.

9. Delayed Gratification

Many who enter the world of small business can take quite a while to understand that marketing campaigns, even the best of them, are almost never immediately effective. Neither is social. And many types of marketing should never be considered stand-alone, such as social media or ads. Thinking that marketing results can’t come fast enough for you, and using that as a reason to never market, is a 100% sure sign that your business is already in serious trouble.

10. Email Marketing isn’t Effective

Email marketing for your event is actually very effective. Recent studies show that 66% of all consumers have made a purchase online as the result of a marketing email. That study was conducted in 2013. The marketing misconception here is that email is changing and therefore email marketing is dying. Untrue. While email may be experiencing in change in how we use it, email marketing is far from drawing its last breath anytime soon.

If you keep these common marketing misconceptions about your event in mind, you should be able to formulate an effective marketing plan for your business.

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