The success of an event heavily depends on how this event was promoted. Meanwhile, event promotion can be extremely frustrating if you have never done this before. In our article, we shared best practices to promoting events with PPC that you need to know before launching your campaign. Even if you are quite experienced, you may also find some useful tips, so let’s begin.
Event types that can be promoted with PPC
To start with, here are some examples of events that can be promoted:
- Tradeshows
- Conferences
- Product presentations
- Lectures
- Events for the press and bloggers
- Open days
- Sales events
- Grand openings
- Pet adoptions
- Recreation
- Sports events
- Workshops and seminars
- Charity events
The type of events may vary depending on your industry but the ones mentioned above are the most widespread. The one common feature all the events have – they are time-sensitive. And this feature has a huge impact on the promotion.
Before you start to promote
Before launching an ad campaign promoting your event, you need to think of an event invitation that will be sent to potential attendees. A successful event invitation should be personal and concise. It should answer the following questions:
- What is the event about?
- When and where will it be held?
- Who are the speakers?
- What benefits will an attendee get when visiting it?
The next step is to think about when you would like to reach out to your audience. Webinars, product launches, and other major events may require building awareness several weeks prior to the event. On the other hand, small local events may require several days of promotion so that they would stay fresh in a user’s memory.
When promoting an event, it may be a good idea to add a new separate ad copy, lead gen form, sitelink, or video to your ongoing campaigns. Keep in mind that your event needs a particular marketing strategy (targeting & etc.) that may differ from your current one.
If you are going to have several events, create separate ads/campaigns for each of them – this way you will be able to apply more precise settings to them and track metrics for each event.
Make sure to supply your event campaigns with their own budget instead of redirecting it from your current campaigns – this will keep your account stable.
5 best practices to promoting events with PPC
Customize your ads
Make your ads always up-to-date and relevant for users with the help of ad customizers. One of the most popular is the countdown, which will supply your ad with real-time information. Here is how it looks like:
The countdown creates a sense of urgency which motivates a user to sign up for an event. Setting up a countdown is pretty easy. Add a curly brace to trigger Google’s prompt in any description line and choose a Countdown option.
Fill the empty fields with the info, click on the Set button, save the ad and you are good to go!
Add great creatives
One of the best practices to promoting events with PPC is to think about the ad visuals. Make sure to provide fresh creatives for your event campaigns rather than layering info about the event over your current text or video assets. Pay attention that each ad platform has its own requirements for text and assets, so consider having them approved beforehand – this way the launch of your event campaign won’t be delayed.
It goes without saying that the creative should follow the best marketing practices, provide clear information about the event and have a tempting CTA.
Take advantage of your email database
Your email database can be a great help here. Create an audience that consists of users already familiar with your brand – just like you do for a remarketing campaign. Please make sure to change your ad for this audience. Don’t show them the same ad as you are showing the new users. Or you can use Google and Bing’s in-market audiences and detailed demographics to receive a list of users that are similar to the people attending the event.
Consider your attendees’ interests. If you are promoting an event dedicated to marketing, for example, your audience might also be interested in related subjects – blogging, social media, copywriting. They may work as e-mail marketing specialists, content managers on marketing analytics. Keep this in mind when setting up your targeting.
This will allow you to promote your event to the users that will be more likely to participate and exclude irrelevant traffic.
Set up end dates
Don’t forget to set up end dates in your campaigns so that you won’t be promoting an event that is already over. Of course, you can pause the campaigns manually, but end dates will save your time and hedge you in case you forget.
Pay attention to the time your campaign will end. In Google Ads, the campaign will stop at the midnight of the day you selected while in Facebook you can choose a specific time of the day.
SEO optimization
Do some keyword research. Tools like Google Keyword Planner or third-party resources (find some of them in our article) can help you discover what event-related search queries people actually use. Add some of these keywords to your landing page to get better chances at ranking for them.
If you are organizing an offline event, using location-related keywords might also be a great idea.
After that, include these keywords in your ad copy headers. Apparently, Google tends to check out for keywords headers first rather than scanning body text.
Watch for your site download speed as it impacts your ranking: the lower the speed, the higher the bounce rate. This applies to every page of your website, not only the landing one – the optimization of your whole website is vital both for the users and search engines.
Ad extensions in case of events are crucial for ad ranking – they have a sufficient influence on the expected impact of your ad. The most important for event promotion are sitelinks and callouts.
Tips and tricks to promote events
- Don’t miss the chance to take advantage of social media – let your followers know about the upcoming event. Pay special attention to Facebook with its biggest overall reach available and LinkedIn with its vast network of professional connections. Using photos or videos from your past events might be a good idea. For a UGC (user-generated content) Instagram works especially well. IG is a social media of personal recommendations.
- Monitor what people say about your event on social networks, communicate with them and don’t forget to thank them for coming after the event is over.
- Consider adding the link to your event to your email newsletter and/or to your email signature. The signature should look simple and neat.
- Create a unique page for your event with the major information – what your event is about and why the users should attend it. A good practice is to create a FAQ section there where the answers to the most popular questions about the event will be collected.
- If you are hosting a free online event, ask your attendees to subscribe to your newsletter when they sign up for the event. These users are very likely to be active in the future: they are already interested in your brand. Also, they are receiving something valuable from you which increases their loyalty. If your event is not free of charge, why not hosting a social media contest that lets people win a free ticket?
Event promotion examples
Let’s have a look at some event promotion examples. Feel free to use some tips and tricks from the cases that we collected below.
TechCrunch emphasizes the value that a user can receive from attending the event. Their announcements are never solely self-promotional.
Inbound created a separate landing page covering the main benefits for attendees, speakers list, and agenda.
Summing up
In the article, we highlighted best practices to promoting events with PPC and the main things that you should know about event promotion from theory to very practical tips that you can apply anytime. Still, there are a lot of pitfalls that should be taken into account and avoided. If you need any assistance with event promotion, Teamedia is always here to help.