There are many ideas event planners use to stimulate engagement during the event. Some bring comedians, others commission Cirque du Soleil style shows, hire magicians etc... You name it and it has been done, especially in North America where events get additional, hype which I think is pretty cool.

I personally see the value events don't necessarily need to be serious and academic and networky all the time. Well, what if you could invest your money in something that will actually generate excitement, buzz, shares, a twitter frenzy, awareness and, more importantly, an everlasting memory of your event?

Try attempting to break a world record title and give yourself the chance to join the likes of Usain Bolt and Richard Branson by being in the Guinness World Records book!

So you’ve got a webinar coming up and as yet, no attendees. How do you get your registration numbers to skyrocket?

A webinar is a fantastic (and inexpensive) way of showing off your event hosting skills, and your credibility within the industry of your topic. What most event marketers do to get the increase registrations is blast non-targeted, non-personalised emails to the entirety of their database, which is of course ineffective.

So here are our top proven techniques to maximise your audience.

If the qualitative and quantitative evidence that we’ve provided in other blogs isn’t enough to get the support of your team, or your CEO’s buy-in, the cherry on the cake in your argument will be demonstrating the effects of an online community at every level of the value chain.

There are several groups who will thank you for your efforts in your B2B online community – in terms of both monetary rewards and delegate fandom.

Many companies, particularly smaller ones, find it difficult to create their own content, and instead resort to curating, reusing or even copying content from other sources. Big no no. Doing this can be time consuming (for little or no reward), risky in terms of copyright issues, and your website may not really be advanced enough to host this kind of content.

We always recommend that companies create their own unique content, and if possible host their own regularly updated blog. But if this is not a feasible undertaking – for reasons relating to time, budget, or technical capabilities – it’s better to take action and join the content publishers than take a backseat and simply watch others succeed in this arena.

There are a number of different tools you can use to create your own bespoke news portal in less than one hour. Yes you read that right - under an hour. It’s the perfect way to provide your audience (both internal and external) with relevant and industry related content that you think will add value.

This is the single question, budget holders ask most frequently to both marketers and service providers like us.

Everyone understands what are the benefits of adopting an inbound based, community driving approach. Everyone gets it, however to get the support of the big guys you will need to be able to back up the bold statements you’ll be making with some hard facts.

We’ve drawn upon HubSpot’s research with their 30,000+ customers and the findings to demonstrate how a community based marketing strategy can impact your metrics – from website visitors to actual tangible customers.

The ROI is represented in three main areas, visits, leads and sales:

Building a community is a big commitment for all parties involved, and one of these commitments is financial. Yes, depending on the company size, the financial commitment might be perceived as big or not and you need to commit for at least 6-12 months before you start realising results and a return on investment.

To give you an idea, it costs between £36k and £250k. That doesn't help does it? The reality is that the costs vary greatly depending on many factors and how you choose to go about it.

Let's hit the nail on the head, in order for a 12-month inbound/community marketing program to be successful, there will be many daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that need to be completed to stay on course for achieving your business goals and getting a return on your investment.

So you have two options:

Hubspot publishes every year ‘The State of Inbound’ report and it is full of fascinating insights, statistics and findings, but just in case you don’t have time to read it yourself, here are the top takeaways in easily digestible summaries. Not only is this a real time saver but we’ve also unearthed what these insights mean for the event industry – and how you can use them to your advantage.

1. Budgeting

As a marketer, you’ll be well aware that the size of your budget depends on and relates to so many different factors it can seem impossible to ensure all of them lead to an increase – but it is achievable. Factors such as the economy, a change in management and a past failure with inbound marketing typically led to a lower inbound budget being granted – however demonstrating success with inbound accessed significantly higher sums of budget.

We advocate that before you do anything else to kick off your community, you must, must, must have a blog, but once that’s done and you’re in the routine of publishing regular content, it’s time to bolster your efforts with the other platforms available to you.

These are the steps you must take to develop your online community:

Great, you’re convinced. You realise that at some point you’re going to have to come around to the idea of an online community for your event(s) and what better time to start than right now? So how exactly do you do that?

Start Blogging! Start your own, blog on LinkedIn, blog wherever you want, but do it consistently.

Well we’ve shown you the shape an online event community can take, so think about which areas you’d like to focus on. We have some advice of our own on that topic but ultimately it’s down to you to fit the forum to your ideal customer, or the place you know your prospects and customers can be found.

However, we can’t stress this point enough – if you don’t have a blog you’re missing a major opportunity to generate leads and build a captive audience. This is the most effective first step you can take in creating YOUR community, though you might not think it’s the easiest.

Here are our 5 steps to blog success, take them one step at a time.

How to attract an event audience, and how to keep them

Is there really a secret recipe for event success?

And then a secret sauce to keep them coming again and again?

Not really, it is not rocket science.

This was the opening line from Ashley Friedlein from econsultancy at the recent PPA Breakfast connect event.

I couldn’t agree with Ashley more - there is no silver bullet for achieving event success. So if there is none, what is the magic that some successful events like the Festival of Marketing enjoy?

Everyone knows the formula for event success and the most common mistakes to avoid.

The way you will attract an audience is through the “promise of the experience” and the experience you deliver. This is what Ashley thinks is the secret sauce. Successful events like the Festival of Marketing have the following elements:

In a recent survey, Adestra explored the attitudes of marketers towards emerging technologies, and their feelings towards adopting (or ignoring) it. They predicted that the research would unearth two distinct personas – the technophobes and the technophiles – and were surprised to discover that there were actually three separate camps. So which category do you as a marketing professional fall into, and what, if anything, should you do about it?  

Most event companies we’ve engaged with have at least an understanding that something in the industry needs to change, even if they’re not sure quite what shape this change will take. They’re all scratching their heads as to how they can achieve greater levels of awareness for their events, drive delegate attendance, and increase ticket sales – and do so in a sustainable way.

The beauty of the online community is that it checks all the boxes. It is the only clear solution. Any conference organisation that isn't thinking about developing a community, generating good engaging content, pulling rather than pushing and recognising that there needs to be a different approach, is missing a huge opportunity.

Many event companies are just waking up to the fact that online communities could become a huge part of their event marketing strategy, so let’s start by clarifying exactly what we mean.

An online community, put simply, is a virtual community where members or users primarily use the internet to share information and interact with one another. In the event industry, an online community is formed around a single event, or if the topics are related, a group of events. The information shared would relate to the topic of the event(s), and participants in these interactions would have an interest in the sector. In its purest form, an online community is inbound marketing in action: the process of attracting leads to your organisation, rather than using outdated, interruptive methods to gain new business.

Sometimes it’s easy for the marketing team to become an island, and as a marketer your job can feel like a constant battle to prove yourself, and the value of the work you do, to the business. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Some simple cooperation can encourage other teams to view yours as an equal, and can demonstrate to your boss just how much of an asset you are.

Every one is talking about it. This is our time, the golden age of marketing is almost here, and sooner than you think if you decide to step up and take it. There is huge opportunity for marketers to engage with broader areas of their businesses, and be THE change benefiting their function and the company as a whole, but on a much larger scale than normal. The focus is finally back on the customer, which is surely where we come in, but unfortunately there are still some significant hurdles to overcome.

Picture this: Your business launched an event last year and it was a resounding success, receiving 150 attendees. This year, your target is 200 delegates (about 30% increase), and senior management believe that if you "do some clever marketing" and "throwing some additional money at it" your could easily reach 300. That’s right; the boss has just raised the bar by forecasting a 100% increase in event attendees. Simply because there is a good feeling about it.

Salesforce recently published their 2015 report on the current state of marketing, and naturally it has given me plenty of food for thought. The report is a thorough and comprehensive overview of what marketers say about their budgets, priorities, channels, strategies and metrics for 2015. Yes, it goes into great detail, but there are definitely a lot of valuable insights in there for curious marketers. With a focus on the UK, and B2B marketing primarily, I’ve summarised what I believe to be the salient points.

If you read this blog, you know my view on how event marketers use and abuse email marketing, and I’m afraid to say it hasn’t altered just yet. If anything, I realise that there are several fundamental forgotten points that I just had to make. If you’re a B2B event industry insider, and you use email as your main marketing channel please listen up, because your approach so far is not good, not because I say so, just because click-through rates in our event industry are appalling!

Email marketing click through rates in the events industry range from 0.5% to 1.5%

Video for B2B events is a must, and any organiser who doesn’t think to budget for it and prioritise its importance will likely regret it when the sales and marketing teams come to sourcing or generating new leads next time around.

But how exactly do you make the most of that conference footage? And how can you tell its effectiveness as a lead generation tool? Well, I’ve been keeping an eye on one company in this arena that is driving the industry forward in a very innovative and cool way. CatchTalk.tv has built its own platform for event companies to showcase conference video on, and not only that, but it can demonstrate the ROI behind it too.