The Marketing Funnel: Your Dependable Source of Event Attendees
Have you heard of the marketing funnel? It's a lead-generation strategy that's been used by small internet-based start-ups for years. In recent years though, bigger brands have started realising the value of the marketing funnel, and are implementing in their marketing efforts. How does this related to you, a professional event planner?
If you want to attract more event participants to your events than ever before - faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost than ever before - then you'll want to implement a marketing funnel in your promotional efforts.
What is a marketing funnel, and how does it work?
In a nutshell, a marketing funnel is a proven way of:
Getting leads (i.e. people who may be interested in your upcoming events)
Nurturing leads (i.e. getting them interested in an upcoming event)
Closing the deal (i.e. enticing interested prospects to sign up for, or buy tickets to your event)
Best of all - once you've set up your marketing funnel, it'll work automatically and around the clock, bringing more event attendees to your upcoming events. Here's a quick overview of how you can use a marketing funnel to sign up more attendees for your next event.
Step 1: Get your prospects' email addresses
The first thing you'll need to do, is be able to contact prospect - this means getting their email addresses.
And you can do so by asking them to sign up for your newsletter, promising them a free gift (or useful download) in exchange, or giving them promotional codes that they can use for your products or services. In marketing speak, this list of contacts and email addresses is your email list.
Step 2: Nurture your leads with valuable content
Now, you'll want to reward everyone for being on your email list, by sending them valuable content in their inbox. This can mean anything from helpful blog articles, to interesting videos, news updates, or more.
Most importantly, the content you send your mail list cannot simply be self-promotional - it must contain content that your prospects will be happy to receive and read about (or watch).
Step 3: When the time is right… promote upcoming events
Only after you've given lots of great content to the people on your email list, can you then start promoting events that you believe they will be interested in. Now that you've built up some brand loyalty by giving them valuable, entertaining content for a while, you'll find these prospects a lot more receptive to your marketing messages and promotional materials.
Of course, this only works if you only promote events to people who could be genuinely interested in the event - and if you've been providing your list with valuable content all this while, and not simply spamming them with more and more emails.
Learn more
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