Your event relies on numerous registrants to ensure a rich and valuable experience for all. More participants means more networking, a broader distribution of information and of course, more money made or raised for your organization. There are many things you can do to increase your event registration, from clearly defining your event goals to developing a comprehensive marketing plan. Taking these steps can help fill seats or virtual spots to ensure event success. At A2Z Events, we simplify event registration to encourage more sign-ups. Our event registration platform also gives your team the ability to organize, communicate with, manage and coordinate your registrations to ensure a more orderly and successful event overall. Below, we’ve listed several strategies you can use to increase your event registration. Define Event Goals to Increase Event Registrations Help your audience understand the purpose of your event by setting clear, measurable event goals. The more your audience knows about your event, the more they’ll know about how your event will benefit them. What will the audience learn at the event? Is the purpose of the event to provide information, gather information, network, or all of the above? Is the event a celebration or perhaps a source of entertainment? Know the answers to these questions and more. Work with event organizers and speakers to create an event summary. Some tips: Create a list of event objectives. Create a bullet-point list that lays out event objectives in a concise and easy to understand way. Make the list as accurate and comprehensive as possible. Make the list easy to scan, with bold titles at each bullet point. This list should be advertised on your event information. Link to the agenda. The event agenda should support the event goals and illustrate how the goals will be met throughout the course of the event. Make the agenda as thorough as possible, including times, presentation titles and speaker names and titles. Understand Your Audience It’s important to understand your audience as you create your list of goals for your event. The more you know your audience and their needs, the easier it will be for you to tailor your event to the people who are likely to attend. Ultimately, you’ll need to know the answers to the following two questions: Who is your audience? Know their general demographic information such as average ages, location, education level, income and more. Also, how big is your audience? What does your audience want? Use data collection to find out what’s important to your audience. This will help you deliver valuable content during your upcoming event. There are many ways to collect data about your audience, including: Surveys. Ask your audience to take surveys either by phone or send surveys over email periodically. Consult with SMEs. Consult with subject matter experts (such as people within your organization that interact with your audience) to gain information about your audience. Consult with an independent 3rd party. Marketing groups and scientific survey companies can help you collect data about your audience. Convene focus groups. Bring together groups of people who represent your audience to learn more about their priorities. Develop a Comprehensive Marketing Plan Work with your marketing company or marketing team to create a well-rounded marketing plan that incorporates various channels and strategies. Knowing your audience and setting goals (as described above) are a part of creating an effective marketing plan. There are other steps to follow as well, including: Set a marketing budget. Know how much you can afford to spend on marketing well in advance of your event. Outline your strategy. Know what marketing channels you’ll use, whether that’s email marketing, paid advertisements, affiliate marketing or other channels. Write a list of steps that corresponds to your strategy. Create a timeline. Establish a timeline for each step of the marketing strategy. Know who will carry out the plan and ensure that each person involved is clear about their role in the marketing strategy Follow up on your plan throughout. Once the plan is created, continually check in with it to ensure that the steps are completed and the work is done. If the plan needs updating, keep it up to date to ensure that the document stays relevant. Leverage Email Marketing Email marketing campaigns are an excellent way to increase attendance and registrations at your upcoming event. Using email marketing, you can: Broadcast your event to a wide audience for a low cost. The more people who know about your event, the better. Generate excitement around your event. Tell potential attendees about your event goals and objectives, special guests and other information that will leave them wanting more. You can even drop teasers about surprises during your event, to make people curious and excited about what’s to come. Share information that will help make your event a success. Share any details that attendees will need to know before the event starts, to ensure an organized experience for everyone involved. Encourage people to sign up. Include a sign-up link in your email marketing campaign to ensure everyone knows how to become a part of the excitement. Harness the Power of Social Media Hopefully your company or organization already has a presence on social media. If so, your social media accounts are the perfect platform for informing your audience about your upcoming event. Broadcast information about your event regularly, starting with general information, then getting more specific and in-depth as you get closer to the date. Create engaging content about your event by posting articles or quotes from speakers. Advertise your agenda on your social media pages. Get creative by running a contest for free admission to your event, and encourage followers to engage in discussion on your page about the upcoming event. The more discussion you can generate around your event, the more effective your social media pages will be at encouraging sign-ups. Post a link to an online registration page on your social media pages. Partner with Thought Leaders The best events have the best speakers. Recruit high profile names in your industry to speak at your event, and be sure to highlight those names on your advertisements. Hopefully your organization has contacts with industry influencers and thought leaders that can enhance event credibility. Ways to encourage these contacts to speak at your event include: Offer to pay for event-related expenses (such as travel expenses). Showcase their work on your advertisements to give them free exposure and attention. Cultivate relationships with these industry contacts throughout the year, not just when it’s time to find speakers. Broaden your network base and promise a large audience at your event. Demonstrate good organization and a well-run event to attract as many speakers as possible. Use the names of high-profile individuals who have said yes to speaking at your event to encourage involvement from other potential speakers. Talk about industry leaders who plan to attend the event, to show that your event is legitimate and of value. Optimize Event Website and Landing Pages Optimizing your website landing page, event page and sign-ups page can also generate more attendance at your upcoming event. Working with a marketing company to strategically place SEO can help, or if you have an in-house marketing team, take steps to ensure that your pages are fully optimized. Some examples of ways that you can optimize your pages to appear higher in search engine results include: Use careful, strategic placement of keywords and long tail keywords to make your website more easily findable by web crawlers. Avoid using plagiarized content on your website, as plagiarized content is automatically placed farther down on search results. Publish content that is concise, conversational, and carefully organized with headers and bullet point lists to make your page easily scanned by readers. Link back to your pages and encourage link backs from outside pages. Pushing your website higher on the search results in a search engine can take time. Doing this is an investment in future advertising, and keeping your search engine results high can help with events that are coming months and years from now. Start this process as quickly as possible to get the maximum benefit before your upcoming event. Engage in Content Marketing Consider content marketing to share information about your upcoming event. Content marketing is the creation of online material like videos and blog posts to stimulate interest from audiences without directly promoting your brand. Content marketing establishes your expertise in the field and increases brand awareness. Like SEO, content marketing is a longer-term investment that may not pay off immediately, but over time. If you work directly with a marketing company, they’ll help you with this. If you have your own in-house marketing team, assign a subgroup to work on content marketing strategies. Blog posts, infographics, ebooks and videos are all the types of content that you can produce to support your content marketing efforts. Wondering How to Increase Event Registration? Make Registration Simple All the strategies above can help you boost awareness and excitement around your event. Promoting your event through social media, building your audience through content marketing, optimizing your event landing pages, advertising your event and its goals, and catering to the needs of your audience are all ways that you can build a bigger and more engaged audience at your event. Ultimately, if you’re wondering how to increase event registration, it helps to work with a well-developed registration website that makes registering easy to do. At AtoZ Events, we produce event registration software and provide helpful information to our clients to help them make an event registration page that gets the job done. Outstanding event registration pages encourage sign-ups by illustrating how professional and exciting your event will be. If you have questions or would like to get started with your event registration page, contact us today to book a demo and learn more about our services.