Marketing an Event: What's Most Effective?

October is peak event season in our world. Conferences, annual meetings and grand openings abound. We are working hard and having so much fun promoting an exciting, important event. The CreateWV '08 Conference is right around the corner, Oct. 20-22.

We've had the honor of promoting this event, again for its 2nd year, working with a very talented planning team and an army of enthusiastic volunteers. The strategic, layered marketing plan, which commenced in July, includes the following tactical elements:

• Earned media - press releases, Op-Eds, feature articles, newspaper tab, radio interviews
• Direct mail - two postcards and an invitation brochure
• Social media - blog posts, blogger carnival, Twitter presence, Facebook - event, group
• Buzz / WOM accelerators - traveling art display of creative cones, "No Misoneism"
• Advertising - a few targeted program/newsletter ads, banners, Facebook ads
• Sales offers - early bird special, group discount program
• Web site, event Web site and blog - all working in concert

The conference is almost sold out, with about 400 attendees registered. The event registration process involves a step to ask folks: How Did You Hear About CreateWV? After 100 days, we've got a good set of data to show what's working to drive such great results:

100 registrations from Direct Mail

50 registrations from Word-of-Mouth/Referral

5 registrations from Media/News

* (the other 200 didn't bother to tell us. we'll forgive them.)

What can we learn from this? In our electronic communications world, marketing messages printed on paper are still important and can be very effective.