by Osman Sheikh on
One of the biggest issues that event organizers have is increasing the amount of people who register and attend their events. In this post, we’ve put together 3 different strategies you can use to promote and market your next event. Along with marketing effort, increasing event registration also takes a focus on making things easy for attendees.
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Bad event registration processes can make all your event marketing efforts worthless. No matter how many people you get to visit your registration page, a bulky and cumbersome registration process will drive away potential attendees.
The best event registration processes decrease the amount of information that attendees have to enter. Only ask for the information you need. For example, you don’t need attendees’ addresses unless you’re planning on mailing them something.
An event registration process that is hard to navigate and forces users to go through multiple pages will lead to less attendees. Filling out page after page of registration information will annoy anyone. Presenting necessary information and sign up forms in a clean single page format is the best way to go.
Did you know that 50% of all tickets are purchased by someone other than the attendee or are purchased in a group? Whether it’s a company buying tickets for multiple employees or just someone buying a ticket for their friend, making it easy to purchase multiple tickets at the same time will help increase the amount of tickets you sell. Attendees should be able to purchase multiple tickets in one transaction, entering their payment information only once.
We know that having multiple ticket types is important, that’s why we made it easy to implement multiple ticket types. However, having too many ticket types can cause decision paralysis. Only create ticket types when the difference in benefits between tickets is clear. For example, we recommend creating student discount codes instead of defining a special student ticket type.
Take the “convince your boss” approach. If your conference or event is large and business oriented, chances are a company and not an individual will be making the decision to attend. Make it easy for potential attendees to convince their boss by giving them 3 or 4 benefits of attending. Whether that be making connections or learning new skills, make the benefits of attending clear and concise. The Next Web Conference did a great job with this, publishing an article on how to convince your boss to send you to their conference.
Communicate to attendees what they will learn during the conference. In large companies where the human resource department decides whether or not to send employees to a conference, they look at what employees will learn and the knowledge they’ll gain from the event. Sometimes the best way to communicate this is through the conference agenda or schedule. BusyConf schedules are made to effectively show the sessions and talks that are planned for the conference, along with the speakers who will be presenting.
All the basic rules of selling and marketing apply to events, and the most important part of selling is to show people the value of what you’re trying to tell them. Here are some ways to show people the value of attending your event:
Conference discovery sites are great tools for attendees to find relevant events to attend, and they’re an indispensable tool for conference organizers to promote their event to a large number of interested people. Some great conference directories are:
When submitting to these sites, be sure to include some compelling reasons to attend in the description, along with relevant information like dates, locations, times, and information about the past event.
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