Using Event Advocacy to Increase Event Awareness and Attendance

Influencer marketing is a pretty strong marketing tool to help bring together like-minded people and build communities. It is not only a great way to connect and engage with your audience to build long-lasting relationships, but it can help leverage conversations online and offline to keep the conversation going all year round. 

As event organisers, you can leverage your audience, attendees, speakers and partners to help promote your content and increase the reach of your event. 

In this episode, I had the honour to speak with Maxie Smit, Brand Marketing Manager at Clarion Events about how they are using advocacy at Clarion Events to build long-lasting relationships with their audience and increase event awareness and attendance. 

Some of my top takeaways from this episode are:

• Advocacy is not only great for brand awareness but it’s also a great strategy to get your existing audience to help you promote your events.
• Making it easy for the current attendees to share about the event is key, but it’s also important to appear at various stages of the journey and remind them to share about your event.
• With your speakers, it’s key to get your content team to mention it while they are talking with the speakers and show the benefits for the speakers to promote their speaking session. Highlight the benefits of them sharing to get them to share more.
• “We see the best results with the attendees and speakers. It’s difficult to get our partners and exhibitors to share about the event.”
• Show the benefits to your attendees of bringing multiple people from their team or colleagues to your event.
• Incentives are a great way to get your audience to share about your events. But you do need to have an incentive that your audience really wants.
• “Advocacy and brand are related. If someone is advocating for your event they obviously like something about your event and your brand, so it’s important to keep in touch with them all year round and then hopefully, you can get them back for your next event.”
• By providing smaller events in between your larger events, you can stay in contact with your audience throughout the year so that when you start your campaigns to promote your larger event, this audience is more likely to attend.
• Advocacy marketing can be a much more cost-effective marketing strategy than traditional marketing strategies. It is very time-consuming but from a cost perspective, in the long run, it can be much more cost-effective.

This is just a portion of the gold Maxie shared with us during this conversation. If you would like to hear the full interview and learn how Clarion Events is using advocacy marketing to promote its events, listen to the full episode.

About Maxie

Maxie is a Brand Marketing Manager at Clarion Events (technology portfolio). Maxie’s role has evolved over the last year, moving into a more brand focused role.

Maxie’s main focus is to engage the community all year round as well as defining, measuring and analysing the success of brand initiatives and optimising these based on data-driven insights. Within event campaigns, Maxie’s focus is on community marketing and advocacy. The most recent advocacy marketing initiative saw registrations increase dramatically year on year.

Maxie recently spoke at Event Tech Live and has also been shortlisted for an AEO People’s Award for Marketing Manager of the Year.

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