Ever feel like your events aren’t attracting the right leads? If so, then chances are you’re not doing enough to entice them to your event. After all, it’s the first time that your leads are getting exposure to and familiarizing themselves with your brand.

For this reason, they’re going to want to see what your brand is all about and how you can add value to their business by solving their pain points. First impressions are key and it’s imperative that as soon as the lead is ready to buy, your brand is the first on their mind.

Attract Higher Quality Leads

Doing this requires you to really understand your leads and deliver a message that appeals to their needs while at the same time portraying your brand in the best possible way. This is a big challenge because, on one hand, you want to promote your brand and on the other, you don’t want to scare any leads away.

So to help you get your head around this, we’ve drawn up 3 steps for attracting higher quality leads at your next event.

1. Understand your attendees

Knowing who your ideal customers are is the first step to building any impactful business and the same applies to events. Events need to be built around your attendees because this increases the chances of getting their attention and laying the foundations for building personal connections with them.

The best way to do this is to create an attendee persona. This is a representation of your ideal event guest based on market research and real data that you’ve collected. Not too far away from a buyer persona, this will include their backgrounds, demographics, and any other characteristics.

However, it will also include some event-related information such as:

Pain points: Identify the major challenges facing your leads, and more importantly, how you can provide them with solutions to overcome these problems. This requires you to conduct as many in-depth interviews as possible with your prospects.

Why are they attending? This is going to be for a variety of different reasons. What’s important here is that you know exactly why your attendee personas are attending so that you can design an experience that’s built around them.

Ultimately, the more you know about your attendees, the more value you can add by creating an event designed exactly to their needs.

2. Deliver the right narrative

Buyers are constantly absorbing new information from all of your competitors. Standing out from the crowd has never been so difficult and that’s why you need to create a narrative that taps into your leads’ emotions, transforming them from leads to loyal customers. Attendee personas form the starting point of this, but it’s down to you to interpret this information and create a narrative that will connect with your audience.

Identify a theme: Do some research and narrow in on theme options that will captivate your attendee list. This phase may entail surveying past participants, doing an online search for industry trends, and looking at what themes competitors have done in the past. Make sure that the theme is refined and tailored to the needs of your leads, and never to the masses.

Focus on the details: Scale down and focus on the nitty-gritty stuff that is going to create a well-executed event for your leads. The small details are what bring the event together. The more detailed and personalized the event is branded, the higher the chances are that it will resonate with attendees.

3. Create quality content

Content is the basis of what promotes your business online. It’s what attracts leads to your brand and helps to build trust and establish that first connection. Just like any other area of marketing the same applies to your event. Your content needs to demonstrate how you can solve your leads’ pain points and above all, it needs to be educative and add value.

Before the event, create valuable content that is going to generate interest in your brand. This is initially what’s going to drive leads to your website and will give them the first taste of your brand. It’s important that the content you publish encapsulates the narrative of the event. It needs to be niche and provide a different viewpoint of what’s already out there. Pointer: if you’re unable to address your leads’ immediate problems then you won’t be able to create quality content.

Key Takeaways

Event marketing is a great way of attracting leads but to really reap the rewards you need to make sure that your events are built around your attendees.

The starting point is to create an attendee persona which is a representation of your ideal event guest.It’s then down to you to use this information and create a narrative that will connect with your audience and address their major pain points.

The best way of doing this is to create quality content that attracts leads to your brand and establishes trust.

Looking to upgrade your event planning game? Check out our online course options here.

Guest Post by Thomas Davey