The Benefits of Word-of-Mouth Marketing for Events

Many event and meeting planners are comfortable marketing an event using print, radio, TV and/or direct mail. Most of you understand marketing concepts like reach, positioning, and key performance metrics.

But, in today’s social media driven world, leveraging “word of mouth” (or “social sharing) marketing, event app promotion can be a great way to market your next event and you want to broaden your marketing mix to include this form of marketing.

Social Sharing is Exponential Marketing

Social sharing is one of the fastest ways to market an event – you can put your event marketing on steroids by incorporating some kind of viral element that lets one consumer share some kind of promotion that has value for the person it is being shared with. We should point out this type of marketing works best for events that are consumer focused and not B2B (business to business).

Facebook or Twitter are great platforms for social sharing or “word of mouth” marketing – it’s estimated each consumer on Facebook has an average of 178 friends he or she is connected with. If your mobile event app is “horizontal in nature” (that is appealing to a broad marketing mix) and you can get one person on Facebook to share the event or forward it to their friends you can understand how powerful this form of marketing can be for your event.

Think of Individuals as Potential Marketing Influencers

You want to think about individuals as a potential source of marketing influence and you can consider your past conference attendees as a marketing channel. They’ve already been exposed to your brand and provided the experience was positive, will be receptive to your marketing.

If you can identify key influencers or connectors (those with a lot of Followers or Friends via social media) and motivate them to promote your event planning app and you can turbocharge your marketing.

These key influencers are almost always busy, especially in today’s hyper connected world. So, you have to think of a marketing method that will give them some incentive to be receptive to your inbound marketing message to them and that will have some value component that motivates them to share this with their social connections (Friends, Followers, etc.).

You can motivate these individuals by offering something of value to them. This can be a discount on a conference that is targeted for them individually or in some way that helps them to promote the event within their company or circle of social connections.

Leveraging word of mouth and/or influencer marketing can be quite powerful through your conference app, when you are marketing an event for a specific demographic and can be much lower cost than traditional marketing and should be added to your marketing mix!