Foursquare for Event Promotion & Check-In

We’ve mentioned on this blog a great number of ways to successfully throw the biggest and best event you’ve ever seen.  We’ve gone over how Facebook, Twitter and blogs can be used to create a buzz and then spread it like wildfire before your event happens.  Now we have another tool that is rapidly gaining in popularity and yes, effectiveness.  Have you ever thought of promoting your event and your event-check in with Foursquare?
The bottom line is, over the last year and a half, geo-tagging and geo-location has become one of the biggest and fastest moving trends.  They are well on their way to the billion mark for check-ins and I don’t see many signs of it stopping.  With this much momentum, it’s time to get on board and start using Foursquare to promote your event and event-check-in.  Here are a few ways to do it:

1. Add Your Venue – Before your event is even close to beginning, start off by adding your venue and event to Foursquare.  Name the venue whatever your event will be called, add the address, your Twitter information and even a website for the event.  Pick a category and you’re ready to start marketing your event.
2. Create Check-In Incentives – Foursquare uses an entertaining “specials” system that businesses can use to draw in customers.  Events can do the same exact thing.  If you create rewards for event check-ins you could create a buzz that will spread a lot faster than any other method.  Have a first check-in reward, or create a drawing out of all the names of those that checked-in.  Announce your incentive early and often to keep the buzz, well, buzzing.
3. Leave Tips and Ideas – When your event is up and the buzz has started buzzing, leave fun ideas, information about your event, tips for what people can do in the surrounding area and any kind of additional information your guests might need.  The more information they have at their disposal, the more they’ll see that their best interest is your first priority.

Between Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and so many other social networking sites there are more methods of social media at your disposal than ever before.  By harnessing the power of these sites and services, you can take your event promotion to the next level.  Once the guests are in, do not forget to also tap into the power of event technology to make the event (that you spent all that time marketing) truly unforgettable.
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The Ultimate Guide to Selling More Event Tickets

This post is for those event planners who haven’t realized they are the no.1 salesperson of their event. In time of crisis, ticket sales go down. Here is how to sell out and go to bed with a big smile on your face.
I see a lot of talk online on how to engage your attendees, how social media will save you from the oblivion, how new event designs will solve all of your troubles.
What about selling more tickets?
Don’t get me wrong; being innovative, using social, engaging in different ways is amazing. If you sell 10 tickets out of 100 though, you are in deep… troubles.
Event planners need to wear a lot of hats. They need to be people managers, accountants, project managers, customer service representatives. They also need to be salespeople.
Having met thousands of planners online and offline, this is where a lot of us get stuck.
We don’t realize how crucial it is for us to become the prime advocate of what we do. We need to transfer the excitement of what we are planning to prospects and influence them to buy tickets.
I hear you. It’s not an easy task.
Here is a small guide to get you started and become a sales ninja.

The Core: What You Sell

I asked the same question in a post three days ago. I am picking this up again because I’ve been astonished by how many people mentioned this paragraph when sharing the post on social networks.
You are selling a unique experience that will wow your guest.
If you nail the above, you’ll feel confident enough to sell it to the world.

Learn How To Sell

Do you know how to sell?
Selling is an art. It’s definitely about charisma, but you can learn a few tricks.
I am a big fan of the AIDA method. I believe this is one of the most effective approaches to selling that can be applied to online, offline and verbal communication.
Alec Baldwin explained it in a testosteronic way in Glengarry Glen Ross (watch out for a lot of cursing).
If you are willing to get your audience to take Action, Attention->Interest->Desire are the most recurrent motivational states that you need to drive them through.
I’ve been applying that in the past 10 years to all copy and marketing communications and I can say it works really well when properly implemented.

Learn Persuasion Principles

Now that you know the basic commandments of selling and the process that drives people to take action, you need to work on your persuasion techniques.
When I say persuasion, I think Robert Cialdini. He is the first non-bogus author who tackled the science of persuasion with an academic approach and without wishy washy theories.
The books by dr. Cialdini are all time best sellers and laid the foundation to modern sales and marketing communications.
This is the best sum up of his theories. In the years these have become the archetypes of every piece of advertising that has been developed.
Learn these principles by heart.

Learn Who Your Customer Is

Do you know who buys your ticket? How much do you know about them? Where do they live, how old are they, what’s their job title, what social networks do they use.
You need to have a clear image and segmentation of your audience. The best method to build a profile of your customer is by creating personas.
One of the best posts I’ve read in the past months about shaping personas is at Copyblogger. They also provide a PDF of what a profile may look like.
Clearly defining your audience helps in shaping your selling techniques and calls to action. You’ll be amazed how good you can become at anticipating questions and hurdles.
Oh, almost forgot. Concentrate on the top 3. Ignore the others, they are a waste of time and resources.

Learn to Measure

Do you know how many ticket sales each marketing communication channel generates? Without this information you won’t be able to understand what works for your audience.
One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen in the past two years is desperate event marketers jumping on social media and spending crazy budgets without really knowing the effectiveness of their initiatives. This is wrong and not healthy.
It may well be that your audience prefers to be called via phone or faxed.
In order to make sense of how your funnel looks like, learn how to use goal setting.
Some tools to track the effectiveness of the most common communication channels are:
- Website: Google Analytics
- Blog: Postrank, Google Analytics
- Brochures, Print Materials, Faxes, Direct Mail, Print Ads, Display Ads: QR Codes, ShortURls
- Email: Short URls, Platform Analytics (MailChimp)
- Phone: Unique Phone Numbers (FreshEgg)
- SMS: Unique Codes
- PPC: Google Adwords Analytics

Review and Re-deploy

Once you are confident with the motivational cues that drive people to action, the principles of persuasion, the profiles of your ideal customer and the measurement of your efforts, it’s time to sit down and review what worked.
I use a multivariate testing approach. That means that I try different messages and motivational inputs to see what works best.
Isolate the channels and the messages that worked best and double up the effort to maximise on the opportunity. You’ll soon realize that you’ll have a selling machine in place that sells more tickets with an exponential decrease in the effort required.

In Conclusion

This guide is a starting point for your sales efforts.
Please do read all of the links I attached as I cannot give you all of the answers.
If you find it of value share it on Google+, Twitter, Facebook or wherever you wish. It’s a great feedback loop for me to know the content is going in the right direction.

20 Tools to Measure Event Marketing

This post is a follow up to a previous article on organizing your sales effort. Without measurement you are wasting your time. Here is how to track and measure the impact of your event marketing efforts.
In times of crisis you are accountable for every penny spent on your marketing. Scarcity impacts budgets and accountability becomes omnipresent.
Knowing what your event marketing channels deliver should be a fitness check nobody should avoid. Nonetheless we witness frantic rushes to spend precious budget on channels we really don’t measure.
The positive side of downturns is that we are forced to become wiser. Measuring your marketing activities is always a winner.
When you measure, you enter the virtuous cycle of investing in what delivers more. In turn, you earn more spending power for next year. Sounds good, right?
Achieving all of the above is actually easier than you think. It takes a good old spreadsheet and some set up, but once in place, you have a marketing machine that will generate happiness for you and your business.

Start With a Question

What does success look like? Is it leads? Is it sales? Is it mentions on Twitter?
I believe that Marketing serves 3 purposes: Revenue, Traffic and Awareness. This is my humble opinion but think about narrowing down the set of objectives you work with.
I read too many articles talking about SMART objectives and business books lingo. Marketing objectives need to fall within the above three areas. If you are outside those areas, chances are you are wasting budget.

Enough With the Talk, Show Me the Tools

No rush dear reader, it’s coming.
Just a note before we start, I’ve organized the tools by communication channel. This will make it easier for you to pick the best tool for your event marketing communications.

Event Website

I put the website first. Your event website is your home base. It should be the center of all your online marketing activities. Here are the best tools to measure what role your website plays in your event marketing mix.
- Google Analytcs (1). Google offers the most performing free web analytics platform on the market. As simple as that. Without Google Analytics installed on your website, you are literally throwing money out of the window. Google Analytics by itself won’t help you go anywhere, unless you have the followings clearly set up.
- Goals and Funnels (2). Without setting up goals and funnels you won’t know the impact of your communications on your business objective. Please read through this guide and make sure to get them in place.
- Campaigns Tracking (3). It could be that you run a campaign on Twitter to drive ticket sales. I recommend you tell Google Analytics exactly where your visitors are coming from as creating goals and funnels with referral traffic could miss on some data (unidentified referral, multiple clients, etc). Follow this link to attach Google Analytics tags to the links you share on the Interwebs.
- Crazy Egg (4). Believe it or not but I am not a numbers person. I prefer visual information. Crazy Egg has made a name for itself in Eye tracking and Heatmapping. Crazy Egg will tell you the areas of your website that capture the attention of your visitors. You can include this precious information in your goal setting and depict more realistic visitors journeys. You can give it a go and try it for free. The pricing is very reasonable.
- SEO Tools (5). Search Engine represent usually 75% to 85% of the traffic you’ll ever get. How you optimize your event website for SEO it’s crucial. How you measure the performance of your website against specific keywords will help you to identify marketing opportunities on Google Search. SEOMoz offers a complete suite of tracking and measurement tools that I find extremely valuable.

Social Media

A basic premise: Social Media is a very broad term. I could list 200 tools for this category only. I summed up the best tools for the media I find to be the most effective for event marketing purposes. The thing is that social media is playing an increasingly important role on the SEO of your event website, therefore it is advisable to give it an educated go.
- Twitter. Hootsuite (6). I can’t do without Hootsuite for business. I’ve been managing more than 40 accounts under one Hootsuite account and I am an absolute fan of their reporting dashboard. Hootsuite integrates with Google Analytics for easier campaign setting. It will give you key statistics such as followers growth, mentions and clicks demographics. You need to activate Hootsuite Pro to have such capabilities.
- Facebook. Facebook Insights (7) is the most commonly used tools for measuring the impact of your Facebook event marketing. An interesting alternative is Pagelever (8). As benchmarking tools I would look into Wildfire (9) for benchmarking and EdgeRankChecker (10) to understand your EdgeRank.
- Blog. I sincerely hope you run your Event Blog on WordPress. If you do, you’ll need to use Google Analytics, Jetpack (11) and Postrank (12). Jetpack and Google Analytics will give you a cross-referenced traditional web analytics performance, while Postrank will help you to understand the impact of your blog on social media. This is extremely important if your objetive is awareness or pure engagement without commercial indicators.
- Youtube. Insights is the tool offered by Youtube to understand the impact of video in your marketing mix. Here is a handy guide(13) to master the tool. If you are a Youtube Partner you can enjoy in-depth reporting as well as Youtube Live, the latest live streaming service from Google.

Apps

If you use mobile applications as a marketing tool, you may want to be able to measure their performance. Here are some of the most useful apps:
- iPhone/iPad/iPod. Appfigures (14) is my choice. The service collates the most significant analytics and reporting features you’d expect to see in mobile marketing.
- Android/BlackBerry/Windows and iPhone. Localytics (15) really pulls it all together. If you run multi-platform campaigns with apps, this is your choice!

Print

Print still plays an important role for event marketing. This includes everything from brochures, to flyers, banners, direct mail, faxes and print ads. Sticking your website address on print material is a wasted opportunity. Here are some suggestions to track your print event marketing.
- QR Codes. They have been around for a while but they have recently gathered a lot of attention, mostly thanks to the adoption of smartphones booming across the world. Services like bit.ly introduce QR codes generation and reporting, but I invite you to have a look at QreateBuzz (16) for a comprehensive approach to measurement.
- Short URLs. They are everywhere. The aforementioned bit.ly is a prime example. I strongly suggest you create your own Short URL domain and use Yourls (17) to manage it. It’s free and relatively simple to set up. Make sure to add your Google Analytics tags to the short URLs you generate.

Email

Email still owns a big chunk of event marketing. I am gonna cut it short here, just use MailChimp (18) if you don’t have any email marketing service already up and running. A good alternative is Aweber (19), a slightly more advanced solution.

Affiliate Marketing

In a previous post a reader asked ‘how do you set up affiliate marketing with bloggers and partners?’ Well it pretty much depends on what platform you use for managing your content. If you chose WordPress to run your event website, I strongly suggest to use the Magic Affiliate Plugin (20). An extra reason to try it out is the integration with both the above mentioned email marketing platforms.

In Conclusion

What can I say, if it’s not measured it’s not worth it and if it’s not reported upon it doesn’t exist. This is what I learned about event marketing. Enjoy your measurement!

The Best Posts in November

Hey dear reader, how are you? Looking forward to the holidays?
November has been the most prolific month in the past couple of years. It’s good to know thousands of you appreciated it.
Keep an eye on the blog as December is usually full of surprises.
In case you missed some of the action, here is a handy recap:

Top Posts, November 2011

1. 20 Tools to Measure Event Marketing.
If you don’t measure, you don’t know. In time of crisis measuring your marketing efforts is a must. Here is a very comprehensive guide.
2. The Wow Factor in Events.
Surprising your guests, easy to say right? Here is a bit of inspiration to get you started.
3. The Ultimate Guide to Selling More Event Tickets.
Nobody likes an empty room. Here is how to fill it up.
4. LinkedIn Updates Events: What You Need to Know.
LinkedIn introduced a few changes to their events application. This posts tells you all you need to know.
5. Use Eventbrite like a Pro: Social Media Integration.
A series of posts looking at how to master the use of Eventbrite.

The Impact of New Twitter on Events

Yesterday Twitter announced a major overhaul of their platform. Here is what you need to know and the impact of the new changes on events.
I believe Twitter is event driven. I started saying this back in 2007, when not a lot of us event lovers were paying attention to this revolutionary social network.
Events shape the way Twitter works and users go to Twitter when they want to follow the unfolding of events, whether organic events such as the Arab revolution or planned events such as conferences.
News is that the California based company is going to change its platform dramatically in 2012. Apart from a major redesign, there are significant changes impacting businesses and events.
Let’s have a look.

The Hashtag Button

This is the biggest introduction that is going to have an impact on your event.
Twitter is introducing a whole new set of smart buttons. You can see them here.
I want to focus your attention on the “Tweet #Hashtag” Button.
Hashtags have become the standard way to categorize a tweet. If you are a social media savvy event professional, you will have set up a short and snappy hashtag to categorize all the tweets coming from attendees.
The new hashtag button allows you to tweet any item on a website with a preset hashtag on it.
AWESOME!
That means that you can attach the button to a video or schedule you have posted on your event website. Users will be able to click on the hashtag button and tweet from a pop-up with your event hashtag already in the text.
This is the most relevant change Twitter made that impacts events.

Brand Pages

Brands have the ability to customize their pages on Facebook and Google+ but they had no option to have their own space on Twitter. They now do.
On Facebook the biggest opportunity for event planers is to have a Facebook Page dedicated to their event. The same applies in this case.
There are already some examples circulating for major US brands.
The major benefit is the rich content integration. That means that you’ll be able to display videos and pictures for everyone that visits.
You will also have the ability to select a sticky-tweet that sits on top of all your tweets for new vistors of your profile. Read more here.

Self Serve Ads

This is the one that should capture the attention of event marketers. Clickz reported that the minimum spent to advertise on Twitter is US$15K.
Self serve platform hopefully will mean that the budget will be flexible as it is on Facebook and LinkedIn.

In Conclusion

There are a lot of other changes and you can learn more about them here. I believe that these changes make Twitter the social network to watch in 2012.
What do you think?

Use Eventbrite Like A Pro: Facebook Integration

Last month we looked at integrating Eventbrite for better event marketing and reporting.
This month I’ll show you how you can integrate Eventbrite and Facebook to sell event tickets directly from your Facebook page.

Do You Have a Page?

A common misconception is that the biggest opportunities for event planners are Facebook Events. While the Events App was recently given a marketing makeover, the biggest event promotion opportunity on Facebook remains a Page.
There are a few reasons for this.
Think in terms of custom welcome tab and rich media integration, these reasons alone offer attendees a superior experience and raise the quality of your social media offering.

Selling Tickets through Facebook Pages, good idea?

Of course it is.
I cannot imagine any reason why you wouldn’t have a shop front selling tickets on your page. This is especially relevant if you decided to promote your page via Facebook Ads.
You’ll then be able to measure effectively how much you spent on promotion and how many tickets you sold through the page.
That sounds like a neat ROI measurement machine to me.

Eventbrite for Pages

I covered cool Facebook Page Applications for events and mentioned Eventbrite as a top solution for selling tickets on your Facebook Event Page. Now let’s have a more in-depth look at how to set it up and make the most out of it.
Firstly, set up an Eventbrite account. You can easily do that here. Eventbrite is free for free events that need registration and charges a small fee for paid for events.
Secondly, head to the AppBistro Eventbrite for Pages App page. Allow the app to connect to your page, enter your Eventbrite ID and Password and…….voila! You’re up and running.
It’s as easy as that…

Why Eventbrite for Pages?

Pretty much because they recently introduced some changes that make it my app of preference. Above all:
- Foreign language support
- Ability to manage multiple events by adding additional tabs
The latter is the most important feature you could want in a Facebook Event Page. In fact you may want to use your page as a permanent space for your attendees while adding more ticket selling each time you have the actual event running.

In Conclusion

The ease of use of Eventbrite for pages makes it a no brainer for those event planners who are looking to make Facebook their prime social media acquisition channel. Let me know how you get on…

Obama’s job-approval rating is highest since summer, Post-ABC poll finds

After a difficult summer and a contentious fall, President Obama’s job-approval ratings are showing signs of improvement — a crucial indicator of his reelection chances as he seeks to overcome voters’ doubts about his economic stewardship.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that Americans are still broadly disapproving of Obama’s handling of the economy and jobs, the top issues, but that views of his overall performance have recovered among key groups, including independents, young adults and seniors.

At the same time, the public’s opinion of Republicans in Congress has continued to deteriorate, potentially putting the president in a position to benefit politically from his standoff with the GOP-led House over extending the payroll tax cut.
Obama’s job-approval rating is now at its highest since March, excluding a temporary bump after the killing of Osama bin Laden: Forty-nine percent approve, and 47 percent disapprove.
Perhaps more important to the battle over the payroll tax cut, Obama has regained an advantage over Republicans in Congress when it comes to “protecting the middle class.” In the new poll, 50 percent say they trust Obama on this issue, compared with 35 percent who choose the GOP — a major change from last month, when the two sides were more evenly matched on the question.
On taxes, Obama has improved since early October, while public trust of the GOP has slipped. Forty-six percent now side with Obama on the issue, and 41 percent with Republicans in Congress. Independents now side with the president on that front by a 17-point margin, 49 to 32 percent.
Obama continues to face major hurdles on the overarching issues of the economy and job creation, with independents divided about evenly between the president and Republicans in Congress.
Still, his rise suggests that the White House’s new tactics in recent months — to adopt a more populist tone and to challenge Republicans aggressively over taxes and income disparities — may be shifting the national political landscape back to Obama’s favor.
And it comes with an outburst of optimism among Democrats, 72 percent of whom now say Obama will win reelection, up from 58 percent who thought so in October. Americans overall believed by a wide margin in October that a Republican would beat Obama next year, but they are evenly split in the new poll.
The president is locked in a dead heat in a potential general-election contest against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the new poll finds, with each winning support from 47 percent of registered voters. The two have been closely matched all year and are now about even among crucial independent voters.
The president leads a potential race against former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) by 51 to 43 percent among registered voters — in part because of an eight-point edge among independents.
Although the hypothetical general-election matchups are little changed from previous polls, overall, the results suggest that Obama may have found a way to navigate the politics of a sour economy — a development that seemed unlikely after the bitter debt-ceiling debate last summer. Then, he and his aides played an intimate role in negotiations, only to share public blame with Congress when things turned ugly.