Let's face it: the main goal of each event organizer is to sell tickets and drive registrations. Apart from some exclusive events with limited invite-only participation, most event organizers will want to have as many attendees as possible.

The question is, does event tech help them in that regard? Barely. Event tech will take care of the agenda, sponsors, mobile app, ticketing, badging, etc., but it has never been considered its task to help event organizers sell tickets.

Or, at least, that was the case until Monday this week. run.events Influencer Marketing module, publicly released on 19 Feb 2024, is made with that very goal in mind: to help event organizers and marketers sell out events.

What Is in the Event Marketer's Toolbox?

If you ask an average event marketer what is in their toolbox, you will hear answers that usually fall into two categories: paid and organic social media marketing. Sometimes three, if event marketers decide to include traditional media, such as radio and TV, in the mix.

Paid social ads are easy to grasp but difficult to implement. They are supposed to reach a new audience, but proper targeting is becoming increasingly difficult. Social networks are more and more relying on AI, and tools such as Meta's Advantage+ Targeting might increase the audience's reach, but it will also decrease its relevance. With current levels of digital noise, which are at an all-time high, it is becoming extremely difficult to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, and event marketers are forced to find creative ways to cut through that noise, deliver their message, and sell event tickets. For all we know, it will only get more difficult in the future.

Don't get me wrong, paid social media ads are here to stay, regardless of the digital noise we are witnessing. But it will take much more than simply allocating Facebook or Google budgets and creating a few nice graphics to actually sell event tickets this way in the future.

Organic social marketing, on the other hand, caters to the current audience: attendees from previous editions, social media followers, newsletter subscribers. It is an extremely important group: if they have attended your event once, there is a good chance that they will do so again, so you need to cater to them with social media posts and newsletters.

But they aren't considered as likely to bring new people to your event, or at least not in large numbers.

Why is that the case?

Your Tribe Is Your Gold Treasure, But You Need to Turn Them Into Influencers

run.events took on the task to activate your existing network, your tribe if you wish, and turn them into your influencers, who will help you sell out your event. Let's see whom you typically have in your tribe:

You have your speakers. They are industry experts, known people with a lot of followers. You want to tap into their follower network: those are your likely attendees who might want to register for your event.

You have your existing attendees. Let's say you have sold 500 tickets and you'd like to sell another 500. The probability that your existing 500 attendees will know the other 500 is extremely high. You just need them to talk to each other about your event.

You have your event sponsors and exhibitors. They have their customers, who are also your potential attendees. But you also want their competitors to know about them sponsoring your event - that might bring them to sponsor themselves, and their own customers to attend.

You see how enormous this potential is? You just need to get them talking! And this is what run.events Influencer Marketing is really good at.

I hear you saying: "Yeah right, you think we didn't try that? Only a few of them reacted."

True. We had the same experience. But, try to look at it from their perspective - they all have packed calendars, and here you are, asking them to send you their headshots and bios, then you spend hours creating graphics for them, and then you send those graphics, and then they need to decide where to post it, and take time to write some accompanying text to those graphics, and then to add the right link to the post...

It is an effort. Most of them are not willing to do it because they don't feel it is their job, plus, they believe that none of their peers will be doing it, and they don't want to be the only ones.

On your side, you have no idea who of them has actually done it, nor can you measure any result from all this work and all those efforts. And those results cannot be anything but... moderate, in the most optimistic case.

But, How Does run.events Change This?

What if I told you it doesn't have to be like this. What if I told you that you can activate approximately 50% (this is from our own experience) of your existing network to actually work for you?

Using run.events Influencer Marketing, all they need to do is two mouse clicks. Really, only two. They can do more if they want, but that's optional. Plus, they will see who else has already done it, and the FOBO (Fear Of Being The Only One) effectively turns into FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). 

How does all of this work?

This isn't black magic, this is typical run.events engineering excellence:

• You prepare a graphic template, and you leave placeholders for their names, titles, companies, profile photos, sponsor logos, or whatever you would like to have in those graphics.
   
• You prepare a default post text that they can post into their social networks. They can change that text later if they want, or they can post it as is.
   
• You use run.events to send a message to the speakers, attendees, or sponsors who fulfill criteria that you define. They will get an email, and all they will need to do is click once on the button in the email, and click once for each social network where they want to post it. For the moment, we support LinkedIn, which is the most logical choice for business events, but we are working on supporting additional social networks in the near future.
   
• You can even integrate this with run.events Gamification, so that members of your tribe who participate get their coins even before the event, which they can spend for swag, goodies, or drinks at the event itself. This is is a great incentive for them to participate in your campaign, but also a beautiful example of how different run.event modules work together for your benefit.

And voila, suddenly a bunch of people who are usually reluctant to do so are posting into their social networks about your event, and driving your ticket sales this way.

The best part? All of those engagements, all of those clicks, didn't cost you a single penny. Cost of acquisition? Zero. It's just a part of what run.events is.