5 Great Strategies to Optimise Social Media Marketing for Your Events

Even as we write about event marketing on social media, the digital world is going gung-ho over Instagram’s new platform, Threads. Launched just a few days ago, the Twitter-like platform has already crossed 100 million users. 

This is a classic example of how dynamic the social media world is, and shows us why it’s crucial to always be one step ahead of the game when it comes to identifying and marketing an event’s presence on any social media platform. A study by EventMB shows that 40% of event planners rely on social media to make their event a success. And, on the other hand, nearly 53% of B2B buyers look to brand social media platforms to get product details. 

Being on social media doesn’t just mean having an account and posting content. It’s about finding out what format of content works best in each platform, and creating audio, video or textual content that will drive the best results on each of these. For example, you wouldn’t write a 100-word write-up on a video-savvy platform like Instagram. Or, you wouldn’t write a 500 character description on LinkedIn. Instagram is all about great visuals and crisp content, whereas LinkedIn is all about making your content look more professional and detailed. 

Pointers like these are exactly what we’re going to talk about in this blog. Let’s find out more about the best and optimal strategies to market an event on social media. 

Strategy, strategy, strategy

Before diving into creating visuals, content, and infographics for your event marketing on social media, you need to first come up with a strategy to define your goals and identify your target market and personas. This will be the guiding force for your entire social media strategy. How do you do this?  

A Merit expert says, “Research and analyse your target market’s demographics, interests, behaviours, and preferences and accordingly align your goals and target audience, tailor your messaging, select the appropriate social media platforms, and develop a compelling marketing campaign that resonates with your audience and drives meaningful engagement and attendance for your event.” 

For example, let’s say you’re hosting a B2B tech conference focusing on AI and machine learning. Your goal is to captivate young professionals aged 25-35, who are tech enthusiasts, data scientists, AI engineers, and tech entrepreneurs, seeking insights and connections. Your go-to social media platform for such an event will be LinkedIn, because that’s where you can share thought-provoking articles, engage in discussions, collaborate with AI influencers, place targeted ads on LinkedIn Groups, and more.  

On the contrary, let’s say you’re hosting a B2B design workshop. Your spotlight is on  designers, creative directors, and marketing managers aged 18-30, who are design aficionados, eager to explore novel creative avenues. In this scenario, your go-to social will be Instagram and Facebook, because these visually-driven platforms will resonate seamlessly with your audience. You can craft visually captivating posts, share teaser videos, and narrate success stories of previous workshops. You can leverage trending hashtags, live sessions, and user-generated content to kindle an interactive community. 

Don’t miss out on influencer marketing 

Influencer marketing means collaborating with influencers or individuals who have a good presence and following on social media, and getting them to promote your product, service or event. These influencers needn’t just be celebrities. They can be micro-influencers too, whose content and recommendations your target audience trusts. By leveraging their credibility and reach, event teams can create buzz, generate excitement and encourage the influencer’s followers to interact with and register for your event. 

While influencer marketing has been on the anvil for quite some time now, in 2023, it’s slated to peak significantly. A report by Influencer Marketing Hub reveals that influencer marketing is expected to be worth USD 21.1bn in 2023, with 11% of marketers ready to spend over USD 500K in influencer marketing this year. In fact, AI is set to play a crucial role in helping brands identify influencers who will resonate with their goals and objectives the most. 

Paid or organic? 

If you know which social media platform to target, and what objectives you want to achieve, the next natural question will be; how do I plan my budget towards paid and organic promotions? 

We would say, determining whether to use organic or paid promotions for your event on social media depends on various factors. For instance, organic promotions are effective for building an engaged community and nurturing relationships with your existing audience. It helps create buzz, generate word-of-mouth, and establish an authentic presence. This approach is ideal when you have a limited budget or when you aim to cultivate long-term event supporters. On the other hand, paid promotions provide advantages like laser-sharp targeting and specific segmenting based on geography, interests, behaviours, and preferences. They can rapidly expand your event’s reach, attract new attendees, and drive immediate results.  

Choosing between organic and paid promotions depends on your event goals, budget, and timeline, and a combination of both approaches can often yield optimal results. 

The bridge between paid/organic promotions & pre-event tactics to engage your event audience 

In an earlier blog, we spoke about surefire ways to increase B2B registrations for a B2B event. Part of the blog involved various strategies you can adopt pre-event to drive more registrations – like having early bird offers, discounts, referral systems and so on. 

In the context of social media marketing for your event, and choosing between paid vs organic promotions – how do these pre-event tactics fit in? 

Let’s go back to the example of the B2B design workshop. 

Let’s say you have a limited marketing budget for the workshop, but you want to build and engage with your community to drive more organic registrations. You can start off by offering sneak peeks into workshop preparations, up-close interviews with industry luminaries, and teasers about the vital skills attendees will gain. This mix of content will fuel anticipation and generate buzz among your existing follower base. Then, you can float engaging contests and design challenges, inviting participants to showcase their prowess with workshop-specific hashtags. This will create a lot of buzz around the workshop and boost user-generated content. You can also forge collaborations with influencers and design personalities who align with your workshop’s goal. 

On the other hand, let’s say you have a good marketing budget to promote your B2B design workshop. You can use social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram to create targeted ads based on demographics, interests, and location, ensuring the workshop reaches potential attendees who match the desired audience profile. Another smart move is to remind people who’ve already shown interest in your workshop. This is called retargeting. It works by showing ads to those who visited your workshop website or liked your social media posts. This gentle reminder can encourage them to actually sign up, making the most of their previous interest. 

Don’t underestimate the power of event marketing tools 

Event marketing tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social are valuable assets in streamlining and managing your event marketing efforts across multiple social media platforms. 

• They provide a single dashboard to manage and schedule social media content across various platforms. 
• allow you to schedule posts in advance, ensuring a consistent presence on social media without the need for manual, real-time posting. This automation feature is especially useful for pre-planned event promotions. 
• They assist in organising and categorising your social media content, making it easier to manage and track the performance of different posts and campaigns. 
• offer robust analytics and reporting features that provide insights into engagement, reach, and attendee activity with your event-related posts and content. This data helps you measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns. 

• often allow team collaboration, enabling multiple team members to contribute, review, and schedule social media content. 

Merit’s Expertise in Marketing Data Intelligence 

Using our proprietary technology, we source, filter and qualify marketing data from thousands of online sources. We further enrich the data with expert research to deliver accurate contact lists that yield maximum conversion rates. Merit’s marketing data has proven to: 

• Multiply your event RoI with the best target data possible  

• Drive attendance at niche events and conferences 
• Be accurate, up-to-date and tailored for your exact audience  
• Be fully compliant (GDPR in particular), transparent and audit-friendly  

We are more than just a list broker; with a proven 10-year track record in building and validating over 100 million global contacts a year, our clients can rely on us to target relevant and engaging audience groups. 

To know more about Merit’s marketing expertise, visit https://www.meritdata-tech.com/service/data/marketing-data/