Getting new registrants is one of the most important objectives for BtoB event organizers.
In anticipation of no-shows, the number of targeted registrants is sometimes set beyond the venue’s capacity.
To reach your target number of registrants, you will develop marketing campaigns on different communication channels.
What marketing levers are the most efficient in addressing your target audience? How to track the performance of each campaign? What analysis should be done after an event?
What is communicated, can be tracked
When promoting your BtoB event, you can choose which channels to use depending on your objectives, budget, the nature of your content, and the targeted audience.
In this article, we focus on online acquisition channels, which can easily be tracked. To build an efficient tracking system, it is important to choose the right channels among owned, earned, and paid media.
Owned media allows you to address contacts who are already aware of who you are. They could be for example participants from previous events. This qualified audience is already following your content through:
- Emails (newsletter, email signature, save the date, teasing, …)
- Websites and blogs (articles, interviews, …)
- Social media (video teasing, announcements, quotes, …)
You can leverage these channels to promote your event. In this case, it is key to produce personlized messages and to adjust how often you communicate.
Earned media includes all spontaneous communications from the people involved in your event and from your community. Eanred media helps extend the visibility of your event to larger audiences through:
- Partners
- Speakers
- Press and influencers
To make it easier, it can be effective to produce “ready-to-use” content for them to share: communication kit, press release, visuals highlighting the speakers, etc…
Paid media includes all the paid channels that will be used to reference your event online or to broadcast advertisements. The visibility and reach of these campaigns depend on the size of the targeted audience, the duration of the campaign, and the bidding system used.
The following channels can be used for promoting these event campaigns:
- Paid search (SEA)
- Advertisements on search engines or social media
- Media partners
To maximize the reach of these actions, it is important to define your target and track expenses for each ad. These campaigns can always be adjusted along the way.
Once you have defined your communication plan and activated your marketing channels, you need to start tracking!
What is tracked, can be measured
If you activate multiple channels in the marketing mix to promote your event, an effective tracking will allow you to measure the results of your campaigns and identify the most effective channels.
Do Facebook ad campaigns generate more registrations than organic posts on Linkedin?
For your target audience, does an Adwords display campaign bring more traffic than a media partner?
You’ll need to set up a URL tracking system in order to monitor your campaigns. The UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) system allows you to tag the traffic coming from your marketing campaigns and to precisely identify the registering sources.
Here is an example of a URL enriched with UTM settings that promotes a post published on the LinkedIn social network, highlighting the video interview of a speaker at the event:
| Description | Example (to be personalized) | |
| Source | The referral source of the visit/ registration | |
| Medium | The marketing channel at the source of the visit and registration | socialmedia |
| Campaign | The name of the campaign | eventname |
| Term | Keyword associated to the communication stream | speakername |
| Content | Type of content/ format | interviewvideo |
The link to use in your LinkedIn post would therefore be:
www.monevenement.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=videointerview&utm_campaign=nomevenement&utm_term=speakername&utm_content=interviewvideo
Once this configuration has been mastered, we recommend that you apply it to all the communications in your marketing campaign.
Here are a few best practices to establish consistency in tracking communications:
Define a common nomenclature for your UTM links to ensure clear reading of results by source or campaign.
Use Google’s Campaign Url Builder tool to better control the configuration and simplify the creation of UTM links.
Shorten the UTM links used in your communications to make them look better.
What is measured, can be analyzed
Now that you follow all of your links, you are able to analyze how well each UTM link performs.
The analysis of this data can be done with your web analytics tool when it comes to measuring traffic and conversions. An event intelligence platform such as inwink, allows you to identify the source and campaign behind each registration.
In summary, the use of tracking links offers several advantages when promoting your event:
- Compare the performance of content and communication channels: article vs. interview, LinkedIn vs. Twitter, infographic vs. teaser video, …
- Analyze the effectiveness of a media partnership: number of visits and/or registrations generated vs. partner engagement
- Measure the return on investment of a campaign: cost of acquisition for a subscriber vs. overall campaign budget
- Adjust the budget of an advertising campaign in real-time: stop an inefficient campaign vs. multiply the budget of a successful campaign
Tracking your marketing campaign gives you a clear vision of its impact and offers you the opportunity to adjust your action plans for future events.
At the end of an event, promotion data can be compared with participation data to establish rich and accurate reports.
Ready to start tracking with an all-in-one events platform when promoting event?
