20 Engaging Event Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses

Event marketing has always been important for businesses to spread brand awareness and attract new clients. 60% of marketers believe that events are the most essential marketing channel. The essentiality of event marketing is undeniable, and 52% of CEOs believe that successful event marketing comes with higher ROI. 

Businesses should learn the correct roadmap to market their events and attract the right crowd. Event marketing ideas provide the solution for marketers to plan and organize a great event. 

For the best results, market your event before, during, and after the event to cut through the competitive crowd and reach a new audience. 

This article explains the event marketing concept and lists some excellent ideas to help businesses plan successful events.

What Is the Event Marketing

Event marketing is a strategic approach to organizing and marketing your upcoming event. This tactic helps businesses connect with targeted audiences and encourages them to mark their active participation in the event. 

Events are an excellent approach for marketers to promote products, services, and organizational aims in an organized way. Moreover, events are excellent marketing channels for attendees to connect directly with your brand, and marketing them allows you to connect with more people.

These events can be live or online; a new approach is a hybrid event, a combination of both. Events can also be self-hosted or sponsored by different individual organizers.

Events can take different forms, including trade shows, conferences, webinars, workshops, etc., but marketing is crucial to organizing an event. Marketing ideas for the event can be beneficial for business to keep their events on the right track.

20 Creative and Engaging Event Marketing Ideas in 2024

Events are vital to a business as they provide excellent networking opportunities that help in organizational growth. However, marketing is a crucial step to making your event successful. Many businesses fail to market their events correctly, negatively affecting event success.

Some excellent event marketing ideas can help businesses progress toward organizing a booming event. Keeping that in mind, we have prepared a list of some of the effective B2B event promotion ideas. These ideas will help businesses plan and execute productive event marketing to organize a successful event. Let’s get right into them.

1. Create a promotional site for the event

Create and publish a separate promotional site that only discusses your events. This site should be different from your main business website and must discuss exclusive details about the event. Ask the audience to register on the site and track their attendance. Moreover, this promotional site can also work as a channel to drive traffic to your main website.

2. Use hashtags for event marketing

Hashtags can be a game changer if you want to promote your ongoing event and reach a larger audience. Create relevant event-related hashtags and spread your event’s conversation to your audiences. Hashtags also help your attendees follow event-related social media posts. With that, attendees can add their posts under the same hashtag for better reach. Moreover, Hashtags help businesses collect event posts and showcase them on digital signage at live events through Social Walls.

3. Company newsletter

A company newsletter is another great opportunity to market your event. Write a newsletter about your event that features the details and covers the hot topics about it. You can also talk about the speakers or guests attending your events. Additionally, share details about what your attendees can expect from your event.

4. A press release for event marketing

A press release is a significant event marketing element. Event organizers can use it to announce any upcoming event and what it is about. Multiple press releases can be used to announce different aspects of the event. One can share special features of the event and topics through one press release. Further, you can announce the guest list or names of important people through another press release.

5. Offer early offers

Audiences love discounts, so take advantage of them in your event marketing strategy. Offer early joiners discounts, like 10% off tickets or a VIP pass at regular price. Offer group discounts to target businesses. Create a unique OR code to promote your event and offer a gift card to anyone who registers through it—tools like Social Walls.

6. Leverage content marketing

Create and leverage the power of content and fuel your event marketing strategy. Your content must cover all the touchpoints of your event. Create educational, entertaining, and engaging content that impresses the audience and conveys details of your event. A perfect mix of engaging and informative content intrigues the potential audience to join your event. For enterprise-level events, using an enterprise headless CMS ensures streamlined content management and personalization across all platforms, enhancing engagement and efficiency.

7. Pre-event quizzes

Make your pre-event marketing interactive with quiz sessions. Setting up a quiz is a great way to engage your audience with your event. These quizzes help the audience learn about different topics related to your event. Thus, it will promote your event by providing information to potential attendees.

Read More – Top 20 Corporate Event Ideas: In-Person & Virtual

8. Retarget the attendees

Retargeting is a good idea for convincing people who have shown interest in attending your event. Running targeted ads on different social media platforms is an excellent method to gather the best crowd for your event. In this process, businesses display ads for events to those who have already visited your landing page or promotional site.

9. Create an event on Facebook

Facebook is home to 2.89 billion active users, and you can use it best for event marketing. Create an event page on Facebook to market your event on the platform.  This extends the reach, and more prominent people will know about your event. So, make sure to add detailed information like date, time, location, and registration link when creating an event page on Facebook. The branding of your event page will be similar to that of any other event page.

10. Create personalized videos to promote your event

Give your event marketing efforts a personalized touch with customized videos to announce your event to high-value customers and potential attendees. This creative event marketing idea will impress your attendees and encourage better engagement. You can also let speakers record invitation videos and send them to your attendees.

11. Use past event materials

Use videos, images, and other materials from your previous events for active marketing. You can create infographics from the insights to showcase the value you present at your events. This will help potential attendees understand what they can expect from your event, which will ignite their excitement.

12. Email marketing

Utilize the power of email marketing to market your events effectively. Create a list of potential attendees who may be interested in your event. Send them an enticing invitation via email and inform them about your event with all the related details. Keep the interested attendees hooked on your event by sending them regular updates through email. But, if sending messages too often seems to be a problem, get assistance from online tools for quick email drafts and impactful invitations

13. Share event snippets for authenticity

Tell your audiences what’s happening at your event with creative short videos. Share event snippets on different social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp business, etc., to give incredible details of your event. To make it more authentic, you can share behind-the-scenes moments and exclusive interviews with your guests to grab their attention.

14. Filters related to events for social media platforms

One of the best virtual event marketing ideas is creating virtual filters for your events. Online audiences are passionate about using cool new filters and flaunting them in their posts. At this point, show your creativity and create fantastic filters representing your event. So, when attendees post event pictures or videos, they use the filters well.

15. Interview videos for post-event content

The post-promotion of your event is equally important as its pre-promotion. So, you should start planning during your event. Take interviews of your event attendees and the important speakers, and make sure you shoot them. Use the videos as blog posts or snippet videos on social media. This will let you continue the conversation of your event even after it ends.

16. High-quality event photographs

Capture high-quality photographs of the venue’s attendees and guest speakers during the event. If you want to see the authenticity and essence of your event in photographs, make sure they’re HD quality. This is crucial because these photographs can be great post-event marketing material and be used to promote your event for next year.

Read More – 15 Best Event Activation Ideas to Boost Event Engagement in 2024

17. Wrap up blog post

After your event ends, you can create a blog post summarizing its success. This practical event marketing idea helps you tell the audience what happened in your event and what they might have missed. So, reuse all the content, like pictures, videos, and the speaker’s words, for your blog post. This will encourage others to attend your future events.

18. Compilation reels of your event

You have captured enough content from your event, isn’t it? Why waste them? Separate the videos of some of the best moments from them and create a compilation reel. Share the reel on different social media platforms. The audiences love interacting with these kinds of reels, and they are engaging. Moreover, such content sparks excitement about your future events.

19. WhatsApp Event Updates:

In 2024, boost event engagement with interactive social media contests, influencer partnerships, and immersive AR/VR experiences. Use personalized invites, countdowns, and mobile apps to build excitement. Incorporate WhatsApp automation for real-time updates and exclusive content. Collaborate with brands, leverage user-generated content, and host pop-up events to maximize impact. Unlock the full potential of WhatsApp as a preferred communication channel for your audience by integrating the WhatsApp Business API

20. A recap email

As already said, email marketing is a great strategy. You can use it to post-market your events. A recap email is an excellent post-event marketing idea. Send your attendees a wrap-up email to keep them involved with your events and collect their feedback.

21. Start planning for your next event

Your next event is in a year, so why not start preparing for its marketing then? Create a registration page to start spreading awareness and engaging your potential attendees. It will let attendees pre-register by sharing their email and take the responsibility of reminding them. Also, you can create a buzz about your next event by announcing its date early.

Conclusion

Marketing is an essential and challenging part of your upcoming events. If you don’t have a clear strategy for event marketing, it can affect the success of your event. Event marketing ideas can make the pathway for your successful event marketing.

This article dedicatedly shared some great event promotion ideas that will guide you to put the pillar of a successful event. These ideas will let you establish a solid base for your event marketing game, which will help you plan a thriving event.

Infuse these strategies for your event marketing and get the show rolling.