35 Tips to market your event for FREE! Marketing an event to success is one of the most critical parts of an event planning. Digital marketing channels offer tremendous opportunities. However, the conversion of paid marketing channels is very low which further impacts the budgeting. In this post, we will walk you through 35 tips to market your event for free.

1. EXPLARA WEBINARS
HOW TO
MARKET AN
EVENT?
Presented by
Santosh Panda

2. Presentation
Outline
Event as Product, Price & Place
3 Ps for Event
For the current event and build a brand for your
upcoming events
Pre-event, Event-day, Post-event
Revenue & Engagements are key
KPIs for measuring success
(c) Explara 2019

3. 3 Ps for Event
Your event has to have a unique
concept/offering in a competitive
event space. Attendees are
looking for unique benefits, such
as learning new things, having a
great time, or meeting fellow
attendees or simply having a great
time. Identify this in clear ROI for
the participants /attendees, and
you have found your perfect event
as a product!
Product
Analysing your prospective
participant demographics, you can
easily arrive pricing. However, your
event must make money for you or
cover your cost, therefore balance
this to lay out clear pricing.
I have written an article recently on
medium about ticket
types/registration types & pricing
Price
That’s Location /Venue for
you! This could make or break
your event. Choose your event
location to match your
audience profiles and
event/conf theme! A fantastic
‘right’ location goes a long
way adding to your marketing
messages/word of mouth!
Place
(c) Explara 2019

4. You market an event
as per event timeline:
pre-event, event-day,
and post-event.
Explara
(c) Explara 2019

5. Pre-Event - Marketing
SEO - The King Pre-Event Website Blogs Email Campaign
Past Event
Attendees
Members &
Community
Volunteers Speakers
Sponsors Behind the scene
Branding /Media
Agency
Social Media
Twitter LinkedIn Groups
WhatsApp/
Telegram Groups
Meetup Groups
Influencers Hackathon FOMO Invitation
Coupons/
Discounts
Affiliates Giveaways Post-Registration Press /Media

6. SEO - The King
Before you push the event
ticketing/registration to live, build up
your website with right content much
ahead to build organic traffic.
(c) Explara 2019

7. Pre-Event Website
Along with SEO, build your website much ahead of
time to raise awareness and point of reference
for your event. Allow visitors to join in your
newsletter to stay updated on announcements,
ticket sales, and insider tips! Gain as many visitors
subscription as you can. This is your rich database
with zero investment!
Have you seen how SaaStr keeps all their
upcoming events
(c) Explara 2019

8. Blogs
Invite Thoughtleader blog from your community, and this will influence readers
to share/generate interest.
Invite guest authors (speakers, previous event attendees or industry experts).
This will further add to your SEO/inbound marketing.
Use content scheduling tools like Buffer /SocialPilot to post your blogs and/or
repost.
(c) Explara 2019

9. Email Campaign
We recommend you to keep building your
newsletter list from your event website, blog and
engage the audience in a personalized email once
in week/10 days until the 12 hours leading to the
event day.
With Explara Email Campaign, you can design and
send engaging email contents to your own
database/list subscriptions.
(c) Explara 2019

10. Past Event
Attendees
Engage your past event attendees. This is the most missing piece I observe among event
host that they don’t reach past event attendees. As long as you are not spamming them,
you can contact such attendees to build up word of mouth, share discounted pricing, ask
them to recommend the upcoming event and ask them their suggestions.
If you are using an XLS or CSV file, you have a tough job to merge, email and track. Not very
efficient.
If you are using Explara, it has a built-in mechanism to let you import all ‘your’ past event
attendees to invite them to your current events. You don’t have to do anything. All done
for you!
If you use CRM like Zoho, Freshsales, Hubspot, etc. to manage past event attendees, you
can engage email campaigns to engage past event attendees.
(c) Explara 2019

11. Members &
Community
I recommend you to build a community for your events!
Every time, you host an event, you have an opportunity
to build a long relationship with your participants. How
about hosting a community membership and allow
attendees to join as a member for free if they buy a
combo package (Event Full Access + Membership vs.
Event Full Access).
This will establish you to host micro-format events and
help you to build this audience for your future event
growth.
With Explara, this is doable in 1-click event registration
to membership. NASSCOM and TiE are two beautiful
examples of Members Community for Event Success!
(c) Explara 2019

12. Volunteers
Run a campaign to invite volunteers! Make it a
compelling proposition for them to be excited
about an opportunity for your event.
Most of the times, volunteers are your own
industry professionals who are very enthusiastic
to create a network to influence, engage on
social media and be the connector among your
participants.
iSpirt, Hasgeek, TED/TEDx are fantastic examples
of Volunteers contributing to market the events.
The Buzz!
(c) Explara 2019

13. Speakers
Speakers make the most crucial
element of your event success and your
marketing success. If you have
incredible speakers, that is compelling
enough even for most passive
participants to register.
But don’t stop just getting the speakers!
Share about them as part of your
content marketing, blogs, social media
and even influence them to be an
influencer.
Here is a snapshot of Suresh Sambadam
(Kissflow CEO) sharing about
SaaSBoomI event where he is a speaker
too!
(c) Explara 2019

14. Sponsors
Always be trying :) Sponsor is a great
endorsement for your event. When incredible
corporate talk about you, it multiples your event
marketing success!
(c) Explara 2019

15. Behind-the-scene
Time to show your event
production/preparation fun/hard work
and commitment as behind the scene
images/videos. This creates enormous
buzz/media sharing and helps you to
spread word of mouth, which translates
to more registration.
(c) Explara 2019

16. Social Media Ideas Activities
Messaging Feed
(c) Explara 2019
Depending on your audience of the
event, you have to choose a social
network. It may be LinkedIn, Facebook
/Twitter /Instagram.

17. Tweeeet
A fantastic platform for events! Combine with
hashtags, and FOMO campaigns and
Influencers, your event will draw a massive
participation interest and conversion for
registrations.
I am attending (Drives FOMO)
-Hashtag
Create hashtags to align with your unique event
name/concepts and make it easy for the Twitter
audience to discover and share/RT your
updates.
(c) Explara 2019

18. Groups
LinkedIn Groups
For the professional audience,
LinkedIn and LinkedIn Groups are
good! You can update/change your
bio to reflect the upcoming event,
making it aware to all your
connects/active connects. I
recommend you join relevant
LinkedIn groups much ahead of
your event and stay active. With
your event, now you can use the
groups to share updates. Note:
Too much of anything is never
good.
(c) Explara 2019
WhatsApp/Telegram Groups
Like LinkedIn groups, if you are
part of WhatsApp
groups/Telegram groups
(popular for Blockchain
/Crypto), you can broadcast
your event updates. Offer them
special discounts.
Meetup Groups
Meetup groups are top-rated
among tech
events/meet/conferences. You
can join existing groups to
promote your event and/or create
a group to build an audience and
drive the same to your event page
on Explara for event day
registration. You can even import
your meetup group members as a
particular set and offer then x%
discount for being a member of
your group!

19. Influencers | Hackathons | FOMO Invitation
Influencers
Invite and create a list of
influencers who are genuine,
expert in your event topics, and
ethical in their work. Engage them
in supporting your event and don’t
hire /use influencer agency, and it
is easy to figure out genuine
influencers vs. paid ones. Use your
strong connects/friends-friend to
establish a set of influencers. Keep
sharing them your contents and
updates for them to share.
(c) Explara 2019
Hackathon
Hosting a large scale
conference? I recommend you
to create several hackathons,
either spread in different units
or cities to build the
movement/buzz leading to
your conference. For instance,
if you are hosting a Blockchain
conference, how about hosting
a hackathon for a contest to
select few to join for free?
FOMO Invitation
South By Southwest /The Goa
Project and more are the perfect
examples of hosting events which
select participants and invites
them to join upon chosen. You can
use this for your conference
networking dinner/ private
session with speaker/etc.

20. Discounts | Affiliates | In-Kind Partnership
Coupons/ Discounts
Use discount to convert early
interest to registration. Discounts
like an early bird, bulk for group
/team booking are great to
generate buzz.
With Explara, you can use the
discount code, bulk discount for
certain types of
tickets/registrations.
(c) Explara 2019
Affiliates
Create affiliate links for all your
stakeholders, i.e. sponsors, speakers,
partners, etc. Give them unique URL/links
using which you can know how effective
promotion/conversion for each link.
Either you can pay these affiliate or offer
them in-kind partnership, i.e. free tickets
for each conversion.
With Explara, you can create such an
affiliate/channel partner for one or more
event and let each affiliate manage their
own sale (online/offline).
Event Stakeholders
Engage your branding /media
agency /photographer etc. to
cross promote for the event
marketing partnerships. With
Explara, you can measure this by
using an affiliate/custom tracking
link to measure conversions.

21. Goodies
You can leverage social media to organize a
small contest which will be about your event
and can offer goodies to people who will win the
contest. Let winners announce /share their
participation.
Or Give away the goodies after the event and
creates a massive social media appreciation
about your endeavours.
(c) Explara 2019

22. Post-Registration
When the user buys ticket/registers, on
the thank you/order confirmation page,
let them share /tweet that they are
going and include a hashtag to the
registration page.
Engage your registered participants
time to time for sharing word of mouth,
and/or sharing announcement with
their connect/friends.
(c) Explara 2019

23. Event-Day Engagement
Make your event-day an unforgettable experience!
(c) Explara 2019
Networking
Networking is a fundamental
expectation for your B2B
events/business events. If this is
done well, you are guaranteed to
have a successful series of events!
This is an early sign of a
community getting built around
the event.
Questions and Polls
You can ask event attendees to
post questions media during the
event, and you will answer it live
on stage.
Gamification
Allow gamification like scan a QR
code to get partner/sponsor
benefits. Gamify social media feed
to increase content sharing. All
these add to your event
engagement and value for your
participants.
Live Clips
You should post short live clips of
your event to make an excellent
online presence. You can make
use of periscope or Facebook live.
When you post such videos on
Facebook or any other social
media platform, you will get
excellent views, and this will
increase in your event brand.

24. Post-Event Relationship
Don’t let the momentum be transactional! Build & grow a relationship with your participants.
(c) Explara 2019
Learning
Share all the learnings such as
speaker slides, videos,
presentations with your
participants. Upload them in your
website and/or storage links that
can be offered as exclusive to the
participants or some of those in
the public domain.
Feedback Loop
Send a survey to gather feedback,
collect responses to measure the
effectiveness of your event. This is
a great way to assess your
participants ROI from the event.
This is very useful to plan your
future events.
Build your Contact Database
I recommend you not keep any of
your participant data in XLS files.
Use a contact management
software to create a list and/or tag
each set of the participant (by an
attendee, sponsor, etc.) and enrich
each contact using tools like
Clearbit/Fullcontact.
With Explara, you have contact
management software to build
your contact database for your
future events too.

25. KPIs
Total Visitors your website
No of paid Registrations
Total Revenue
Total Check-in
Attendee engagement
Social Media Mention
2015 2016 2017 2018
80
60
40
20
0
March 2020 | Souderton Senior High(c) Explara 2019

26. Invite your participants
as members to your
community/ Your Email
List / Social media
accounts to stay
connected.
STAY CONNECTED
(c) Explara 2019

27. www.explara.com
Web
info@explara.com
Email
+1 424 297 5678
+65 8309 9411
+91 969 9611 666
Chat
Phone
On www.explara.com
Twitter
@explara
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https://www.facebook.com/explara
The All-in-One Event Management & Membership Software Platform