Chat with Cat: Is there enough buzz around your event?

You recruited the perfect planning team. They searched and researched, begged and pleaded--and now you have the perfect slate of leaders too. You booked a space; you set up the registration; and you even wrangled up volunteers to help with staffing.

Your event is ready to go, but will anyone come?

Promoting your event is a HUGE part of making it a success, and the promotion can begin even before the first details are settled. I recently attended a fantastic webinar hosted by HubSpot, a site dedicated to giving its users expert help regarding internet marketing. The webinar was titled: "How to Promote an Event with Inbound Marketing."

If you're curious about the concept of inbound marketing, I suggest you check out the resources available at the link. I've also included a link to the full webinar presentation below, but first I wanted to point out a few of the suggestions I thought would be the most useful:

• Get people talking: Before you even establish workshop offerings or key leaders, begin the conversation in social media channels geared toward your ideal participants. Use features like LinkedIn's Answers section to ask people what sort of topics they would like to see discussed or what speakers would draw them to this event.
• Enlist your conference partners: Great turnout is as beneficial for your sponsors and your speakers as it is for you. Make it easy for them to drum up interest by providing them with copy to publish on their sites, customized landing pages, and HTML badges that link directly to your conference information.
• Give them space: Set up a media room for participants and press to use. Make it a quiet space with plenty of outlets and wifi so those interested can blog about your event, upload pictures or even create and edit interviews with key leaders. Fresh content published during your event will generate publicity for any future events.
• Bring it together: Aggregate all the content from your event in a one-stop web page. Post photos, Tweets (track your event's hashtag), videos, podcasts, presentation and resources. (Check out slide 41 of the full presentation.) People who didn't come will wish they had; those who are there will want to show their friends; and after the conference, people will have a place to go to get excited about next year.

The full presentation by Ellie Mirman covers many of the more obvious ideas (like making sure your event has a website) and also mentions more free resources available. It's about an hour long, but it has some great information. Best of luck to all you planners!

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Cat is the Sales Associate at Montreat Conference Center. She loves helping people plan the perfect Montreat Experience and would love to hear from you about how this blog can help you.

Cat can be reached at catw@montreat.org.