calendar pre event blackFrom a business perspective, events are an effective way to reach out to customers, prospects and colleagues on a personal level.  Without the proper promotion, however, you compromise all the potential benefits.  A multi-channel approach using digital marketing is one of the most efficient and effective ways to promote an event, but how do you leverage each channel to your advantage?

Starting early, the most important goal is to build a presence on as many digital channels as possible.  Whether it\’s SMS, email and Online marketing, social media or any other channel, start spreading the word about your event as early as possible.  This builds an initial foundation for future promotion that you can optimize and use to build the most awareness.  Simply blasting out information isn\’t as effective as diversifying your messages on numerous channels to ensure you reach your audience no matter which channel they prefer.

Each digital channel has unique benefits as well as limitations, and it\’s important to leverage the strengths of each to build the most effective promotional campaign possible.  Channels like SMS and certain social media concepts like Twitter promotion are limiting in terms of the message you can broadcast, but extremely effective in acquiring real-time responses.  Online and email marketing provide the opportunity to divulge much more information about your event, but present their own set of limitations and drawbacks.

Take a hard look at the strengths and weaknesses of each channel and design a unique campaign around each.  Broadcasting a blanket message on all channel compromises the benefits of a multi-channel approach in the first place.

It\’s also important to use each of these promotional channels to drive traffic to a central location that attendees can reference at a later time, such as a dedicated web page. This way, when the time of the event draws near, attendees can go back to that page for additional details rather than trying to locate the email, sms message, etc., that initially notified them.  It\’s also valuable to integrate an RSVP strategy into the event planning.  This is valuable because it can tell you how well your campaign is performing, can help you plan for the number of attendees and can increase attendance overall by asking recipients for a small commitment to attend.  This also gives you the ability to send them reminders and additional information about the event.  RSVPs can be collected by a dedicated email or use a RSVP manager such as the one offered by mobileStorm.

mobileStorm recently held an event at the Encore Beach Club in Las Vegas Nevada to celebrate a decade in business.  Customers, prospects and business partners were invited to the event in order to meet face-to-face with mobileStorm executives and sales people in the hopes that this would lead to stronger and longer lasting relationships between all.  In order to make sure it was well-attended, mobileStorm created a multi channel marketing strategy that included a dedicated landing page, custom emails, print advertisements and web banners.  Customizable email templates were also distributed among the mobileStorm sales team so that they could add a personalized touch to invitations.  All of these marketing vehicles directed traffic towards an RSVP manager that collected names, email addresses and phone numbers.  This information allowed mobileStom to plan for attendance, evaluate marketing performance and send additional messages to registrants as the event neared.  In all, over 400 RSVPs were recorded with attendance at around 250, making the event a rousing success.