Top tips to fill Business Events

31st October 2015

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No party without guests

Whether it’s a conference, product launch, dance performance, coffee morning, training session or Christmas Party, our worst nightmare is that no one turns up to our event. We need people to come to our business events for them to be successful. We achieve nothing if there are no bums on seats! Furthermore, having too few or no audience is damaging for morale and could end up costing you a lot of money. Here we look at seven top tips to generate interest and maximise the number of people to fill any business event.

Business event defined

Oxford Dictionary defines an event as an occurrence that happens in a specific place at a particular time. They are usually of some importance and aimed at achieving identified objectives for businesses. We class a wide range of occurrences as ‘events’ including meetings to plan a project, a function to raise awareness of products/services such as exhibitions, and fundraising activities.

Business events can be social and informal for enjoyment and fun (for example, parties and social get-togethers).

The common link in every type of event is the importance of having people there so that we can achieve the business objectives. This post focuses on event marketing: “the job of advertising different events so that people will go to them”. Effective event marketing is central to running successful events that have a greater chance of achieving business objectives.

Background

My motivation to write this post comes largely from a friend’s recent nightmare experience. She is the young Director of a contemporary Dance company who was so excited to get her first commission to put her show on at a local theatre as part of a London-wide tour. The first six performances sold out. So it was a massive shock when show the seventh night, the first of four at a local theatre, got exactly zero audience.

The theatre’s insistence that the show must go on made matters worse until several minutes into the performance when it was clear that they were performing in an empty theatre.

I have put on many events in my business roles, including Fundraising events, performance shows and training sessions. While I admit to the odd experience of the impending horror of too few attendees at a tiny number of events, I had never known of an event without any audience at all.

Benefits and costs of events

Certain lists these four outcomes of most business events:

Generate new leads and revenues for an organisation.
Generate interest and excitement for a company’s products and services.
Teach attendees something of value.
Facilitate networking opportunities between event participants.

All of these outcomes generate revenue for businesses. Therefore successful events make a difference to sales and profits as well as give value to the people attending.

The following graphic outlines the many ways everyone loses out when business events fail:

Failed event consequences

Instead of getting revenue from ticket sales and a share of bar sales, my friend obviously lost money. She had to pay or the theatre space as well as pay her performers. It is impossible to put an accurate financial value on the opportunity revenue she lost such from people who may have gone to future shows, sponsored her crowd-funding page or become advocates for her brand. There are also the opportunity costs of things that my friend could have been doing instead of preparing the performance and wasting the evening in an empty theatre.

I cannot imagine how demoralising it must have been for the dancers and performers to come out on stage and see that there is no audience at all. What is the motivation for them to put in any effort? I have no doubt that their faith in their chosen profession, the venue and the Director would probably also shake to the core.

The venue also lost money because of the absence of an audience. They lost revenue that would have come from ticket sales, takings from the bar as well as from people who may have bought tickets for other events there. You should not ignore the wasted costs of staffing the venue and utilities (heating and lighting) either.

My friend informs me that she advised two of her contacts that are big in the performing arts sector not to come to the empty theatre. So the theatre lost out because these power hitters were thinking about working in partnership with them.

It is clear that the absence of an audience for events like this is immensely costly psychologically and financially for the organiser, the team, venue and their staff. There are a million and one things that can go wrong with any event. However, not having attendees should not be one of them.

Armed with the belief that this type of disaster should never happen, I resolved to outline the strategies that I have used successfully to get people to come to events.

Events Promotion fails

Here are some common reasons events fail to get interest and attendees:

Giving up

Marketing events doesn’t usually fail because of the quality of the event. The main reason is that the marketing is inconsistent or it stops. Being persistent is the way to put some energy back into your promotion if it becomes stagnant or struggles to build momentum.

Focusing on quantity, not quality

While it can help to make the world aware of your event (for example, with an advert in a national newspaper), the only people that matter are the ones who are interested in what you do and with whom you have built a relationship. With trust comes brand loyalty and commitment.

You are not promoting your event

If you don’t market your event, how will people know about it? They won’t come if you don’t tell them! The secret to event marketing boils down to three things: creating great events, making sure people find out about it, and promoting it to your target audience.

Your marketing becomes same-old

Doing the same thing to the same people becomes boring fast – they will ignore your message. Breathe life into your event marketing by really focusing your message on each person at that moment in time and trying new ways to pitch your event.

Your event marketing leads to a dead-end

People expect to be able to book their place at your event easily and quickly. Having a confusing or inefficient ticketing process will simply frustrate people – they will give up on the event.

It is time to recognise the evolving landscape of event marketing. What worked for you at one time may no longer be enough to produce the results you want today. Repeating these mistakes won’t go away unless you change your approach.

The great news is this post gives you the antidotes to these mistakes. Read on for insights and tools to bring your event marketing into the modern age.

Why people don’t go to events

Unsurprisingly, there are a million and one reasons people may not be present at your event. Most of us have busy lives and it may just happen that it is inconvenient to be at your event because it clashes with other commitments.

For some people, the challenges of everyday life may be the barrier with obstacles like money, childcare, illness or transport as the underlying issues.

Whether you like it or not, there will be people who feel they have little or no affiliation to your business and thus no sense of obligation to attend. There are also going to be refusers who believe the event is not relevant to them and cannot give them any benefits.

There are some immovable barriers on this list, such as diary clashes, which you may not be able to do anything about, except perhaps to offer the chance to attend a future event. However, you can help to remove most of these barriers with a little time, effort and budget.

Organising transportation, a crèche facility, nearby accommodation options and reduced ticket prices could reap rewards if the cost-benefit ratio favours your event. Showing people how your event will add value to their lives is part of event marketing. We will come back to later.

Setting the scene for successful events

Successful events require that you do the right things at the right time, many of which start weeks and months before the event date. Leaving everything until the last moment is usually a recipe for failed events so should be avoided.

Focused effort

The worst thing you can do is to leave promoting your event until the last minute, say a few days before the event. The rewards for putting in focused effort over a long period will pay off handsomely. Moreover, some of the effective ways I recommend need time to work.

It is good practice to aim to collect contact details for people who express interest in your events, including those that do not come to one event because they may be able to come to another event in the future. Your contact list should become your go-to list for publicising future events as you know they are interested in what you do and they have started to trust your brand.

It’s in the mix

Relying on a single method to generate interest in your event is not advisable. Your target audience is likely to be on various communication channels. Believe it or not, not everyone is on Facebook and we don’t all read the same newspaper or listen to the same radio station. Be prepared to use a mix of methods at the same time to maximise your reach.

Identifying your audience

As always in developing any plan your first task is to identify who you want to reach. Jeff Winsper recommends this process to reach the people you want:

Describe your target audience as specifically as possible.
Compile a list of people (individuals, groups or organisations) that fit this criteria Identify the key decision makers at each one.
Get personal with your message and communication methods.

Knowing who your key target audience are will where you will find them and what they want/value. These will help you to choose the best method to get the message in front of them and what it is about your event that will be of greatest value to them – essential to making the right pitch about your event. Let us look at pitch now.

Aiming your pitch

It can be tempting to set out to ‘sell’ your event to people, which typically means going to great lengths to help your target audience understand why they should want or need to be at your event. The selling approach has limited success. Using a little common sense, knowledge of your target audience and psychological technique raises your chance of getting ‘yes’ greatly!

Cliff Ennico advises that your focus should be to frame your pitch by aiming at people’s passions and fears, which comes down to these seven deadly sins (plus one):

Pride – how you will make them look better in the eyes of others
Lust – how it will improve their sexuality/sex lives
Greed – how it will make them more money or have the best things in life
Envy – something that will make others jealous or make you feel superior
Anger – raise a feeling of conflict or hatred towards something
Sloth – helping to make your life easier and lets them do less
Gluttony – help you eat more
Nightmares – something that will help them sleep better

Take time to establish which of these factors to use to frame your pitch. If you cannot identify the right motivation for your target audience (individual or group), then it is likely that your targeting is too broad. In this case, segmenting of the target into small groups increases your chances of success.

Emphasise their greatest fears and before going into how your event will help to address them. Solving problems is the key to getting a person interested in your business event. When you get this right, people will tune into your message and take the action you want them to take.

Booking system

The last thing you want is for someone to decide to come to your event, but they find it impossible to book a ticket. Similarly, you do not want to have so too people come so you have to turn people away on the day! These make it imperative to have a robust and easy to use reservation system in place to book tickets and confirm attendance.

It is usually easier to have an online ticketing system – via your website, social media channels or third-party ticket vendors. However, businesses can also use traditional methods to confirm attendees including having them call in at your premises, telephone and postal based-RSVPs.

The important thing is to have whatever system you use in place before you set out to market the event.

Event marketing strategies

These are the seven event marketing strategies guaranteed to get huge numbers of people to your business event:

Professional networking

Google defines networking as “interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts”. Dictionary goes a step further in stating that networking is “an association of individuals having a common interest, formed to provide helpful information, or the like…. to cultivate people who can be helpful to one professionally”.

These definitions capture the essence of networking as a fantastic platform to meet and publicise your event to people with whom you have shared interests, in formal or social settings. As a concept and practice, networking has exploded in recent years, as illustrated in the following graph.

Mentions of networking in literature (Source: GoogleBooks Ngram viewer)

There is no doubt that “word of mouth is the best form of advertising. That’s still the case in today’s digital climate”.

Meeting people through networks gives you a much larger publicity machine to get your event out there, vastly increasing your chances of getting people (their friends, colleagues and families as well as friends, colleagues and families of their friends) to come along.

You can find a network for anything (and any business niche) in most parts of the UK today online by through search engines and social networks. If you have a unique business, focus your search on people who have an interest in your sector or come into contact with your target audience.

The opportunity to sell your event through face-to-face interactions gives you the chance to test your message/pitch as well as get interest and support from the network’s members to reach more people. As the following graphic by Nielsen shows, nearly everyone trusts word-of-mouth recommendations above all communication methods.

Information sources people trust (Source Nielson)

2. Your contacts (and the venue’s contacts).

The people you already know are a great source of attendees for your event because they know about your business and therefore, with whom you have a relationship. In most cases, the venue and partners for your event will also have contact details for people who have enjoyed their service in the past.

Your email subscriber list and contact details of people who have attended your previous events are often your best tool to reach these people. Just because you know people does not mean that it will be easy to get them to your event. Be determined and persistent to get commitment.

Start with a personalised email or postal campaign in which you send out personal invitations to the event and offer one-to-one time with you or a member of your team to talk through the event. Use words like ‘personal invitation’ and ‘invite-only’ to emphasise that you are offering exclusive access to a valuable experience.

Use a telephone call or face-to-face meeting to talk through your event and why it is valuable to the people who contact you in response or agree for you to contact them.

Follow-up with a second email or letter a week after the first campaign, asking recipients for their views about your event and your business – anything that gets them thinking about your event and how it could potentially benefit them.

3. Social networks

Your social media fans and Followers are also an engaged audience to whom to publicise your event. Social media offers speed and reach of a modern version of word-of-mouth advertising today.

Organic social media posts will only reach a fraction of your network on Facebook and increasingly, other networks. However, you can still reach more of your followers on Twitter, organically.

Paid-for-posts on social networks in the form of adverts or Promoted Posts can help to reach more new people quickly.

Your existing contacts (such as people who have attended your previous events) and fans can be used to target the right people on Facebook, especially if you use ‘Custom Audiences’ to target similar people (with regards to demographics, interests and location).

Influencers

Leveraging the support of one or more influencers in your sector or niche is another increasingly common social media strategy. Influencer engagement can help not just regarding the number of people you want to reach, but also regarding generating trust.

Arnaud Roy found that it is no longer unusual to find influencers who are “willing to be paid in money or freebies for producing posts, tweets and sponsored videos” that enables them to promote your message.

4. PR

Most of us instinctively think of PR is only Press Releases. In fact, Public Relations is much more than that. According to ShilohPR, “PR enables businesses to maximise their brand potential and media presence and help … stand out against the competition”.

PR activities build awareness, create interest, stimulate demand, reinforce your brand and ensure your name is recognised as a company worth doing business with. “Public Relations is all about building a good reputation based on what you do, what you say and what others say about you” (Joe Smith).

If you are still not convinced about the power of Public Relations activities, check out this highly informative blog post on why PR should definitely be part of the marketing mix for your event! Today, businesses have a variety of ways to get their PR message seen including:

Media (TV, radio and newspapers)
Online (social networks, publication websites, partner websites, your website, influencer’s websites and social channels)
Sector specific publications and online channels.

Here are some of the key things to consider in your PR campaign:

What are the fundamental tenets and values of your business?
How have you translated these into positive activities that benefit people/the community? (A charity you are involved with/support, events you have sponsored, causes you champion, etc).
Who and where are your target audience and what is the best way to get your message to them?
What does your target audience care about?
What do others say about you and your business?

PR activities all go towards building a positive impression of who you are and what you do. Give an honest impression of your business because if you are dishonest, your skeletons will come out of the closet sooner or later, which will damage your business in the long run.

5. Event platforms

There are many event management platforms that can help to advertise your event to people you may or may not already know. Businesses like Eventbrite are your one-stop shop for any event. They

Show your event to visitors.
Host ticket purchase page/process.
Link to your social media pages.
Post about the event on their social media pages.
Facilitate sending emails about the event to your and their contacts.
Provide a list of attendees for managing entry at the event.

Most such platforms provide a range of ticket options including Free, paid and donations. They also keep you updated on number of tickets sold and numbers remaining. Having that information allows you to make timely decisions about ticket pricing such as offering increasing discounts the closer it gets to the event if your audience numbers are not sufficient.

It is worth researching the event management options on the market to choose the right one for you because they offer different pricing options and services. For example, Eventbrite does not charge anything at all (it’s free) to post and promote free events, while for paid for tickets they charge 2.5 percent processing fee and 99 pence per ticket sold. Not-for-profit organisation get a reduced service fee of 2.0%.

In contrast, Ticket Tailor, another online ticket platform, does not charge commission on tickets sold. Instead, you have to buy a plan that starts from £15 per month (for one event and sell up to five thousand tickets).

6. Family and friends

I am always amazed at people’s reluctance to get the people closest to them (family and friends) to make up the numbers at business events. I know from previous experience that this strategy has to be the last resort when all other strategies have either failed or brought limited success. If you rely on this method all of the time, your personal contacts will eventually get fatigued.

Nonetheless, it is better to get people to your event than have empty seats. You may even get a pleasant surprise if your guest enjoys the event! You would be wrong to believe that getting your family and friends to come to your event will be a stroll in the park because you will also have to convince most of them that the event will benefit them.

Start with a personal plea to each of your personal contacts either face-to-face or by telephone. Do not be afraid to call in personal favours if that becomes necessary. You may also want to offer them free entry or reduced rates for tickets to the event, as that will increase your chances of getting their agreement to come along.

7. Following up

Assuming that people who say ‘yes’ will be at your business event is one of the biggest mistakes I see in marketing events. This strategy is the root of failed events because daily life is full of conflicting demands and changing priorities. Follow up every attendee to ensure they remain committed to your event.

As AshtonPaul Smythe, a friend, explained, to ‘assume’ makes an ‘ass‘ out of you and ‘me‘. Following up also gives you a chance to help to resolve difficulties or challenges that may have arisen for people that could make the difference between them turning up or not.

Don’t be shy about contacting attendees in the days leading up to the event by telephone and email if you have these contact details. At the very least, send a text message on the day of the event as a final reminder.

It is a mistake to assume that people will think you are too pushy with the phone call–email–text message combo. In fact, the opposite effect is true, as people tend to appreciate how important the event is to you and how much you value their presence.

Conclusion

The need for perseverance and boldness holds true for marketing events successfully. Crafting your message about business events that meets the needs of the people you want to attend will help to get interest in high numbers of the right people. This is especially true if your message is visible in the various places your target audience are.

If you couple this marketing-mix strategy with value-driven events and a targeted, personalised approach, your audiences will start to appear consistently, often in the most unexpected places. Do the right things at the right time and you will be singing a different tune about next business event.

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