How to identify your events target audience
Whether you’re marketing a reoccurring event for its 5th year or launching a new event, knowing your target audience is imperative for a successful event.
A target audience refers to identifying the group of attendees that will be specifically interested in attending your event or can identify with your brand. An event’s success will depend on how well the event marketing is pinpointed to a specific group that will benefit from attending your event.
So how do you find that specific group of people?
Define your attendees’ persona profile
Depending on your business, industry, and event goals you will be looking to target a certain type of delegate, company, partner, etc. to invite to your event. The best way to identify who is most suitable for you to get the most out of your event is to define your attendees’ persona profile.
Depending on your type of event, the information you will want to define your persona profile will involve looking at characteristics and interests of an attendee that would make them want to attend your event. For example if your event was to promote and showcase a new corporate IT software you would want to define persona characteristics such as industries and companies that would be interested in your product then defining the specific job titles within a company that would directly use/be interested in your product.
If you’ve organised a similar event in the past, you’re already sitting on a lot of this information. You can now have a closer look at your past attendee’s data information to break down and understand your target demographic even further. This information will also help you to build out a marketing and content communications plan for your next event.
Identify your event goal
Events can have a lot of benefits from community-building to brand awareness or to increase sales. Identifying your event goal will determine what kind of audience you need to attend your event:
- If you’re looking to increase customer engagement, target your customers
- If you’re looking to drive new leads or create an increase in brand awareness, review your current audience profile and target similar customer profiles through different event marketing strategies
- If you’re looking to close opportunities, target your in-pipe or late-stage prospects or your high-value accounts
Begin conversations with internal stakeholders such as leadership and sales team to gain their insight on who they would benefit from attending the event as well as any external event partners to gauge who they are expecting to attend . Both internal and external stakeholders can help with driving registration numbers and connecting with your target audience.
Find what motivates your audience
Structuring your communication strategy around your target audience to motivate them to attend is your next step.
You will need to assess the characteristics of your targeted attendees, such as their motivations, reasons to attend, reasons that may keep them from attending etc. Ask yourself how will attending benefit that person and what messaging can I use to motivate them to register.
This information will set you up with the necessary knowledge for crafting the right marketing message to get them over the line and register.
How do you market your event to your audience?
Think about how you can best reach your audience to promote your event, where would they expect to hear about your event? Are you trying to reach existing contacts that you can create an email campaign for or are you trying to expand and reach your target audience on social media?
Social Media
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn all have built-in advertising platforms that allow you to target the attendee persona profile that you created at the start of the blog.
A big benefit to using social media to promote your event is the public communication, Q&A and networking via your event pages or advertising content, enabling increased activity and communication between future attendees or those who are on the fence about whether or not your event is the right choice for them.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still a very relevant communication channel, especially when it comes to marketing your live event. One of the benefits of email marketing is that you can create a value proposition for the event and send it to your mailing list with the attendance form attached below.
Those uninterested in your event will be able to say “no” without the delayed response times typically associated with email marketing. That way, any stakeholder who is interested in your event goals, program, scheduling and pricing will be able to quickly check-in and let you know that they are up for attending. You can then easily hype up and continue to promote the event closer to the event day.
#SpeaktoSleek
Determining your target audience for your event is crucial to the success of the event, it’s important to put the right messaging out at the right time, to the right people.
Sleeks event experts are ready to work with you to help you find your target audience and community. Our event consultants can help to analyse previous event or marketing data, as well as pull together your audience personas and a marketing approach on how specifically to target that audience. Whether you’re looking to plan a full event with us or speak with our events consultants - we are here to help.