“Growth hacking” is seen as a cliche by many marketing professionals, but when you’re on a tight budget, it’s an excellent strategy to achieve fast, measurable success.
Low budgets and short deadlines, will relate to thousands if not millions of event planners globally. So what Growth Hacks can you take from successful Silicon Valley technology start-ups to make your event promotion a success?
Here are three easy event growth hacking tactics you can use yourself.
Let’s dive in…
#1 The Infographic Hack
‘A picture is worth a thousand words’
This overused proverb is a great indication of why you should be focusing your efforts on visual content.
The goal of an infographic is for people to share it with their connections or audience. And, if you’re struggling to come up with an infographic idea, your first stop should be your event speakers.
They’re the ones with a following, hey?
Begin by dropping them an email, like the one below. Pointing out that you’re going to create an infographic that they will be featured in. This will put the piece of content on their radar, and lets them see the value in helping you.
I would keep the email short, and straight to the point. Your speakers will, no doubt, be very busy people.
Next, put your content together. I would suggest selecting your top five speakers; you can make this decision by researching their Twitter account, and choosing the ones with the most followers.
You then want to research interesting information about each speaker. Here are some ideas:
- Age
- Twitter handle & number of followers
- Their path to success
- Famous keynote session quotes
Once you’ve gathered all the information, it’s now time to make it visually appealing. To get started, here are some super helpful resources:
How to Make an Infographic in Under an Hour
Make Infographics That People Love
At the end of the infographic, make sure you include a call-to-action, prompting people to visit your event landing page – where by this time, they think your speakers are going to add value, and they feel the need to attend your event.
When you’re happy with the outcome, it’s time to promote, promote, promote.
Yes – the most important part of this task is the promotion. That’s where the success lies.
At the end of the infographic, make sure you include a call-to-action, prompting people to visit your event landing page – where by this time, they think your speakers are going to add value, and they feel the need to attend your event.
When you’re happy with the outcome, it’s time to promote, promote, promote.
Yes – the most important part of this task is the promotion. That’s where the success lies.
Step 1: Post an article on your blog; which includes a 500-word introduction paragraph linking to your event sign-up page.
Step 2: Post the article link on social media. Email the link to your speakers and get your colleagues to share across their personal social profiles.
Step 3: Submit your Infographic to the following sites:
- Visual.ly
- Daily Infographic
- Cool Infographics
- Infographics Archive
- Infographic Journal
- Infographics Showcase
- Visual Loop
- Flickr
The above steps will increase the chances of your Infographic getting shared, which is your goal right?
#2 The Vanity Hack
‘Excessive pride in one’s achievements’
The success of The Vanity Hack boils down to one key component; having an optimised thank you page where your visitor can re-convert, or for the sake of this hack, show vanity.
Let me explain…
A website visitor lands on your event landing page, reads your content and converts by registering their details. Next, they click the submit button which confirms their registration.
Here is where the magic happens.
The visitor or, even, event attendee, will be redirected to a new ‘Thank You’ webpage. This is where we want a micro-conversion to take place, or in other words, to share the fact they are attending your event on social media.
The example above is a very basic version of what a thank you page should look like, here are some optimisation ideas I’ve had some excellent results with.
- The thank you page should not include a header, navigation or footer. This is a distraction from the primary conversion goal (sharing on social)
- The only link on the page should be your company logo, which should take people to your homepage
- I would recommend creating an eye-catching image, that people actually want to share, and where they can show vanity “Check me out, I’m off to Your Event *** in New York”
At the end of the day, for somebody to share the content, we want to make their life easier and avoid any distractions.
If you want to perform like a Silicon Valley startup marketer, then I suggest you test different ideas to see what works.
#3 The Blog Call-to-Action Hack
‘A piece of content intended to induce a viewer, reader, or listener to perform a specific act’
Let me guess; your company has a blog, you write articles every week, you promote the articles on social media and email your audience with the link to the post.
Excellent, but what happens to those visitors as soon as they’ve read the article?
Yes – they probably exit your website.
Much the The Vanity Hack the aim of this hack is to get your blog readers to perform an action once they’ve finished reading your article.
We do this by having CTA images embedded at the end, and (if you’re feeling super aggressive) in the middle of the article.
Let me show you…
Here is a screenshot from our latest article, 10 Awesome PowerPoint Alternatives of 2017. In this article, we’ve embedded a CTA image, with the aim to direct people from our blog post to a landing page where they convert.
It’s simple to implement, and you won’t need any development experience. Just an understanding of how to upload an article to your blog…
Step 1: Design an eye-catching CTA image that includes a punchy headline, selling your event.
Step 2: Upload the CTA image at the end of the blog post. If you use WordPress to blog, just click add media and select the image from there.
Step 3: You will then need to add a link from the embedded image to your event landing page.
Extra Tip: I would recommend adding a designed button to the image, like the one above, so people are prompted to click.
A CTA creates curiosity, and this hack is essential for driving traffic to your event landing page.
Wrapping Up
I hope this article has given you some great examples of event growth hacking, and ways in which you can use them for promotion success.
It would be great to hear if any of these tactics are currently winning for your company, just give me a tweet @oliverfisher23
Happy Growth Hacking :)