Telemarketing for events promotion is a great way of engaging with your audience and creating buzz around the event. But it can be a bit tricky to do right – so should you do it at all? What’s the alternative?
Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a 7-year-old more than the idea that their friends might not turn up to their birthday party. Nobody wants to be Billy-no-mates. Likewise, for an event organiser, the prospect of an empty room or conference hall is probably your biggest nightmare. The question is: how can you ensure that your event takes off and doesn’t end up being an embarrassing flop?
There’s probably no hope for poor Billy, but we reckon we can help you give your events a boost.
Do you need to drive awareness & attendance for an event?
You need to figure out how to tempt people out of their busy lives and into your event. So you consider your options surrounding how to do event promotion.
Should you set up an email marketing campaign?
What about some online ads?
Maybe you should try to drum up engagement through your socials…
Or, ideally, all of the above.
But, are you forgetting something? What about picking up the phone?
Telemarketing for events promotion. Yes, telemarketing. No, it’s not old school. Yes, people still like to talk on the phone. And no, it’s not pushy. (Read about more telemarketing myths in our blog)
In fact, telemarketing is the most effective way to boost event awareness and attendance – and the added bonus is that you get to pre-qualify event attendees to ensure that only the highest quality, most relevant people are engaging with your event. But how does telemarketing for events work? Let’s take a look.
Why is telemarketing so useful for event promotion?
Telemarketing for events promotion is the perfect way for you to help your event realise its potential because it’s personal. You can speak to invitees directly, creating a human-to-human connection from the very start of their engagement with your event.
Having a conversation with potential invitees means you get the opportunity to understand them – and then feed this intelligence into further marketing activities, both with the individual and your wider prospects.
By talking to your invitees, you get to find out what makes them tick, and discover a) whether your event really is appropriate for them (ensuring quality over quantity in your attendance figures) and b) how to show them your event’s value to them in a personal and relevant way.
How can you use telemarketing to promote your event?
Calls to invite
You can either go straight in and grab the bull by the horns by scheduling an event telemarketing campaign to call with the initial invite. The benefit of this is that you can instantly qualify prospects and promote the event on a personal level from the outset.
Invitation follow-ups
Alternatively, you can kick off your event marketing strategy with an email marketing campaign. This means the telemarketing for event promotion aspect of your campaign will begin with follow-up calls to confirm receipt of the invitation, gauge interest and complete registration.
Avoid the dreaded no-shows
You can use an event telemarketing service to call invitees with a reminder about the event and check if they have received delegate packs/tickets/ID badges to boost overall attendance and ensure you minimise the number of no-shows your event has.
Gather feedback from refusers
If people said no to attending the event, finding out why gives you the opportunity to a) turn things around b) understand barriers to attendance so you can improve attendance at future events. For example, if there’s a pattern of issues suggesting that timing or venue is a common objection, you can adjust these for future events. You can also use this feedback to improve your event marketing materials, such as making it easier for people to find out more about the event and registering online.
Gather post-event feedback
Did they come? If not, why not? If they did, how did it go for them? Was it worth it? What was valuable? Any issues they’d like to discuss? What would they want from another event in the future? Would they recommend it to a colleague? Would they come again next time? And if they would, can you sign them up now?
Post-event telemarketing
The delegate list is a gold mine of leads, so be sure to make the most of it while you have the chance. Immediately follow up with a telemarketing campaign while the event is fresh in your prospect’s mind – and capitalise on your investment.
Event promotion with telemarketing – can you DIY or do you need an events telemarketing service?
Promoting your event by telephone might seem simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get right. Well, we’re not surprised – there’s a reason people outsource to us for their event promotion telemarketing campaigns all the time.
A successful telemarketing campaign for event promotion is more than just picking up the phone and telling someone about your event. Like any telemarketing campaign, it’s about creating meaningful engagement. And it’s about intelligence-gathering.
45.7% of marketers say that the primary goal of their virtual event is to keep their sales pipeline full. So, there’s more at stake here than an empty delegate list.
You need to know how to engage someone in conversation, and how to do so quickly and without sounding like a salesperson. You need to know how to interpret the responses you get and use them to tailor your message so that it’s more likely to resonate with your audience.
What does a professional events telemarketing service look like?
It should look like whatever you need. There’s no set menu for a telemarketing campaign for event promotion. But some benefits of outsourcing the promotion of your event can look like:
- Access to GDPR-compliant data for account profiling and contact list building to create a targeted list of potential delegates or invitees;
- An integrated multi-channel events marketing package, using email marketing, telemarketing, content marketing and account-based marketing techniques;
- Maximising the opportunities for creating forward-moving business relationships with your prospects by intelligence gathering and lead nurturing before, during and after your event;
- Make sure you eek every last drop of ROI out of your event and build either a robust sales pipeline or useful feedback to increase event attendance and engagement in the future.
Telemarketing services for exhibitions, seminars, webinars, conferences and more
One of the biggest challenges when holding an event is making sure you have ample attendance – but the biggest challenge is ensuring that your delegates are high-quality. This can only come from the qualification of their interest in your event, and their ability to contribute something useful or as a potential sales prospect. Without this qualification, you just have bums on seats – which does nothing for your ROI.
We can help you increase the impact of your event by stimulating interest, registering delegates, and following up after the event. Find out about our telemarketing services for exhibitions, seminars, webinars and more, and see some telemarketing advertising examples from previous campaigns. Contact us or schedule a call.
