Top 7 Ways to Promote Your Conference Online - Acquire New Delegates & Sponsors

Social Networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn & Orkut offers numerous opportunities to promote any event. You can create & leverage a community (e.g. Facebook Page or LinkedIn Group) to promote an event or a conference. You can create and promote Events at LinkedIn & Facebook. The status messages at these sites (particularly Facebook) can really create a meaningful buzz & engagement in the target community. Lastly, the core team can use their own network (by sending event invites; e.g. on LinkedIn) to spread the word about the event. Check out PanIIT 2009 Facebook Page and Leaders in India – Business Forum 2009 LinkedIn Event.

Again, there are many ways to reach out to your target audience through Online Advertising. Google Adwords (which allows you to publish text & banner ads on relevant sites) is one of my favorites. Others include Facebook, LinkedIn Advertising, Ad Networks and directly advertising on relevant sites.

Whether it’s a pre-event, during the event or post event, you can highly leverage both Blogging & Microblogging (e.g. Twitter). It’s a great idea to launch your event blog (may be even before your conference website) while you are launching the website/microsite for your event. In addition, you can leverage other relevant blogs (create blog badges like Proto did) to promote your events. Live conference blogging is a great tool to create valuable content for event promotion in addition to enriching the experience of the delegates.

Mailers:

One of the old methods, sending event invites through mailers is still a very effective mean to reach out to the relevant people. However, more than the message, it’s the database of the recipients, which determines the success or failure of your email campaign. While signing up for media partners (who promise to send your event mailer to their database), don’t just be enticed by the volume of their database - relevancy of their member base is much more important. One of the important areas which generally get ignored in case of mailers is the ‘subject line’. E.g. for one of our recent conferences on Online Marketing, we had an option to choose between ‘OMCAR 200 - Online Marketing Summit’ or ‘7 Days to OMCAR 09 - Online Marketing Summit. Join Now!’ Guess, which one did we use (no prize for correct answer)?

Leveraging Content (Photos, Presentations, and Videos etc):

Even today, most of the events don’t last beyond the day on which they happen. However, there is an incredible opportunity to leverage the content (in the form of session takeaways (an important reason for live blogging), photos, presentations, videos) to promote the event & the organizer’s brand - can significantly contribute to the next year’s conference or other conferences by the same organizer. So, please plan to capture and use the wealth of content which gets created during the event. For e.g. our own Social Media Channels - Speaker Presentations, Event Photo Galleries, Session Videos have driven thousands of views for various events. Another great example to check out is NASSCOM’s SlideShare channel - over the last 2 years, it has received over 150,000 views across various event presentations.

Online Press Releases:

I think the time for traditional, offline Press Releases is gone - many can’t afford it and for most of others, there are much better alternatives. Online PR is no more an option and given most of it is free; there is no reason why you’ll not leverage it. They don’t just allow you to directly reach out to global audience (if that is important) but also help you improve your Search Engine rankings. Given their value, I strongly recommend diverting most (if not all) of your offline promotion budget to paid PRs (e.g. PRWeb.com) and to Online Advertising. Here is a list of Online PR sites you can use to promote your event.

Events Directories:

Again, submitting your event to various event directories doesn’t cost you any $. It only brings new delegates and helps you improve your Search Engine rankings.