As an event organizer myself I get anxious with attendee registrations on the lead up to my event. I’ve promised my exhibitors I’ll get X number of attendees at my show, but right now I am falling way short of what I had hoped for by this time.
Do you also feel that pressure and anxiety?
In the past I have made many expensive mistakes by reacting to sign up numbers with knee jerk actions on things like adverts and media coverage in areas that in hindsight may not have been the most target rich.
In the end, it all came good, but not without its failures. In this guide I am going to be sharing my top 10 tips that will help you boost your attendee registration with guaranteed results.
1. Delay Your Ticket Sales
Delay selling my event tickets? Are you mad? This might sound counter-intuitive but having a long ticket sale window works against your objective and ends up costing you more money that you should spend.
You want to delay ticket sales until approximately 90 days before your event if you want to be safe, or 60 days if you want to see a bigger return on your marketing investment.
Using my own research through selling tickets to my events, 80% of all tickets that I sell happen within 60 days of my event.
Why? Because 60 days out, attendees are more sure of what their plans are vs 100, 180 days away.
If you open your ticket sales too far in advance you’re going to be working hard to market your event into an echo chamber. Your cost per acquisition will skyrocket and you’ll end up wasting your energy, resources, and marketing budget chasing hares.
Delaying your marketing push until 60 days before your event gives you a better chance of reaching your target audience and convincing them to commit to registering because both sides are able to engage better.
You’ll get more registrations per dollar spent this way.
2. Use National Days As Incentives
We’ve all heard of Black Friday, Cyber Monday etc. These are days which industry comes together to go to market aggressively with special offers.
You can use the same concept to boost your registrations. Within your event vertical you might have special days on the lead up to your event that your target audience celebrate.
Use these to your advantage by offering lightning or one day only deals that are too good to miss out on.
These can create a sharp increase in registrations and also increase overall market awareness.
You can offer incentives by offering discounts in use limited coupon codes or by setting time limited ticket sale prices.
If you don’t have any industry days to celebrate, use any national days such as Easter Monday, Boxing Day. These days come at the end of a national break and people will be bored and scrolling through social.
Turn their boredom into ticket sales!
3. Reward Loyalty
This tip has a big impact. Show your appreciation to attendees who sign up to your event year after year.
If you’re going to spend $40 per head on attendee registration acquisition through marketing, offering a loyalty discount that saves someone $20 on their ticket actually makes you money and drives early registration adoption.
You can offer loyalty discounts easily by sharing out one time use coupon codes that are individually created for each loyal customer.
Or you can use Just Attend’s automated loyalty discount feature that rewards attendees automatically when they enter their email address to register eliminating the need for bulk coupons and mail merge.
You can select the number of previous events the attendee must’ve registered for to qualify for the discount and the amount of discount to apply as a fixed or percentage amount.
It goes further so you can select the past events that qualify and the role they participated in at those events to offer larger discounts based on their contributions and also which tickets the discount will apply to.
Then when they register, their loyalty is automatically rewarded at checkout.
This generates early registration interest. At the end of their purchase they’re able to share their registration with their social network that can highlight your event to others in your target audience.
This is important because you have rewarded them, they are more likely to share their registration to their network as way to thank you for it.
4. Mobilize Your Exhibitors
Your exhibitors combined network has access to the largest pool of target attendees and being able to leverage that can really boost your registrations.
Exhibitors can sometimes be quite resistant to promoting events to their network because they’re concerned that their network is going to be exposed to their competition.
This can be overcome by offering incentives to exhibitors that help to mitigate their fears.
One of the most effective ways to energize your exhibitors into sharing their participation to your event is through incentives.
By giving them their own referral URL you can track how many registration conversions are attributed to each exhibitor. You can then use this to reward the exhibitor with the most conversions with an enhanced benefit, like dedicated access to a room for private meetings with attendees.
Other incentives you can run to boost share-ability is to create promotional materials for them to use. These include:
- Email Signature Banners
- Website advert banners
- Social media posters tuned to be the perfect size for each social platform
Using Just Attend you can even upload an image to an exhibitor’s landing page so that when their URL is shared to social media, the link preview card is automatically populated with a branded image.
5. Use Your Speakers
As well as using your exhibitors, your speakers are also invaluable to your event promotion. Perhaps they are the single most important outlet for it.
A speaker is going to have technical authority in their topic and industry domain. It is highly likely that they are well known and respected within your target community and therefore carry considerable decision making power.
Being able to leverage their community ‘pull’ is a great free way to generate visibility and registrations for your event.
Just Attend makes it really easy for speakers to share their participation at your event.
Each session on your agenda can be deep-linked so that speakers can share their own session page. These also benefit from the same ability to upload custom graphics that generate in the URL preview links on social media.
Speakers also have their own dedicated profile page on your event portal so attendees can find out more about them and what they’re speaking about.
Just Attend goes even further by allowing anyone on the platform to enable their own ‘Event Resume’ page. This is a public profile page that showcases all the sessions and events speakers have and are speaking at as well as their speaker rating.
Although not directly associated with your particular event, this offers an indirect opportunity to attract attendees to your event.
6. Show Your Market Value
Lots of businesses including events spend too much time on social media selling. They post constantly with the same message, just written differently which boils down to “register now”.
Eventually doing this your target audience are going to mute or block you. If they mute you or use the report post to say they’re not interested, then its as good as a permanent block.
When was the last time you unmuted someone?
One of the most effective ways to engage and remain followed in your community is to share your industry experience.
If you want to attract end customers a news / media website or publication, podcast, video series, or other content can be valuable. Even a social newsletter to subscribe to.
If you want to attract businesses, then an awards program and ceremony might be a good option and offer you increased revenue potential to boot.
The main problem to solve is how to keep in your audience’s mind when you’re not actively promoting your event registration?
7. Use Social Algorithms To Your Advantage
Don’t waste your energy and money posting on social media randomly and hoping for the best. Instead think about when it is most likely that your target attendee is going to be scrolling through their social feed.
There are many articles online that promise they have the secret to the optimal time, but the reality is that it depends on your own environment as to what works best.
It is proven statistically that on average across all of social that people are more likely to be on social media early mornings around 7am, 11am – 1pm lunch time, mid afternoon 3pm to 4:30pm, and late evening 8pm to 10pm.
Many businesses write off the weekend, but I have seen good engagement posting on a Sunday evening too.
But it isn’t just about posting at the right time, its about two-way engagement. If you’re only posting in hope of getting likes and clicks, you’re only doing half a job.
Social algorithms love conversations. When it sees a comment, it pays attention to that post in order to decide if it should promote it. It waits for reply. The more conversation the post has the more it is promoted to others.
Some will say you need to comment within the 1st 15 minutes. To a degree this is true, but don’t be the 1st comment on your own post. Doing that will kill your chances.
It is important to get an organic comment within the first 15 minutes by someone who isn’t linked to the company employment.
You should respond within 10 minutes to the first post, but then slow down your replies over time.
Another tip is not to over post on social media. Contrary to belief posting many times a day or even over a week hurts your own social effectiveness. With each post, the algorithm has to choose which one of your posts to promote.
Instead, don’t make it choose and use the time to drip feed your replies over several days to a single post to promote its effectiveness within your social community.
Using this method you will get more eyes on your posts on social than before without spending any money on marketing adverts.
8. Reward Engagement
Gamification is a good way to involve and encourage attendee promotion of your event. The vast majority of registrations in my experience have come from either organic social engagement or recommendation by word of mouth.
With Just Attend you can set up an affiliate scheme that rewards the attendee with points for each time their affiliate link is used to register for your event.
At your event you can offer prizes and rewards for people who’s link has been used the most.
9. Build Your Network
As part of your social strategy it is important to also contribute to your network and build it over time. Its not all about you leading the conversation with your posts.
Follow your target attendees, make connections but also contribute to their posts by adding your own value and perspectives.
It is important not going in straight for the product pitch kill into these conversations. That’s not going to end well for you. It’s about connecting with them on their level and showing alignment and building that connection with them.
The more you engage in conversations others have started, the more your own content social strategy will pay off.
Its a case of “You scratch my back, and I will scratch yours”.
Because you’ve supported them in their conversation and social goals, they’re more likely to reciprocate with yours and thus extending your reach organically.
Having a constant social presence is a commitment in time and resource. If you need help building your network or marketing your event, we can help.
10. Strategic Advertising
My last tip is if you feel you need to spend money on adverts, then do so wisely. My personal view is that if you implement tips 1 to 9 effectively then you will never need to spend a dollar on online adverts.
Adverts are universally hated by everyone.
But they are sometimes a necessary evil and can be used for your last minute push to reach your registration goals.
If you do want to use adverts, then they must be carefully created for the intended person you’re trying to attract and have 1 clear call to action that spells out what they should do.
Behind the advert should be a very clear, simple conversion flow that makes it easy for them to complete their call to action, which is to register.
Then you need to consider what medium and platform your target is most likely to use. Then where they are most likely located based on volume.
For example if your target audience’s business vertical centers around London, UK, you want to focus your energy on advertising within London.
This could be through social media and search engine advertising, using their targeting tools to drill down to the right audience. Could it be digital advertising on billboards, a particular tube station like Canary Wharf if your target audience is finance or buses on a particular commuter route.
What you’re trying to do is spend the least amount of money possible to get in front of as many critical target eyes as possible.
There is no point spending £5,000 on advert budget to advertise to 9 million Londoners. But you can spend £5,000 to target 5,000 Londoners who you actually want at your event. Your money will go further and your cost of acquisition overall will be less.
Conclusion
Hopefully these 10 tips will help you get more attendees at your event. Just Attend is a great tool that can help you promote and encourage organic engagement as well as streamline your registration experience. But when combined with your enthusiasm, commitment, and strategy, unstoppable.
If you’d like to see how we can help you get more attendees to your event, why not send us a message, or book your demo below?
