Promoting an event is never an easy task and requires spending time and resources to make it successful. To alleviate some of the burden, you can have your attendees take on a lot of the heavy lifting for you. That may seem impossible at first, but it’s quite achievable through referral or advocate marketing. If this sounds unfamiliar, keep reading to learn more about what referral marketing is and how it can take your event promotion to the next level.
What Is Referral Marketing?
Referral marketing is a strategy that uses your existing customer base as an advocate for your business and your events. Your customers can share their positive experiences with your brand’s products and services to other potential customers, lending more credibility to your business. Referral marketing, or word of mouth, can increase the number of attendees that come to your event and help you promote your event through multiple channels.
What Makes a Successful Referral Marketing Campaign?
For referral marketing to work, your referrers or existing customers must also benefit from you. This partnership involves you providing incentives to your audience to spread the word about your business. You could offer free swag or exclusive resources to encourage your audience to promote your event and build a positive relationship with them.
Should the Incentives be in the Form of Cash?
Not necessarily. Referral marketing can work using an exchange of services, perks, or resources. In exchange for promoting and talking about your event, you can incentivize your audience in the form of coupons, discounts, gifts, goodies, tickets, and more. In fact, we don’t recommend using money at all. For a successful referral marketing campaign, look to package your incentives in an enticing way without using monetary gifts.
Do These Incentives Bring Any Loss to My Business?
While these incentives do come with a cost, you can account for them with a growth in your customer base, bigger attendance levels, and increases in sales and business that referral marketing will bring. Using this model, you actually gain a lot more than what you paid for. You effectively increase your sales and expand your customer base significantly, which is considered a win-win situation for you and your referral advocates.
How to Implement a Referral Program for my Event?
Referral campaigns can come in many forms, and they should work well with your event marketing strategies. They can be in the form of QR codes on registration cards that are unique to an attendee. These codes can be used to start hunting for more attendees.
Another example is the use of an online referral program that involves attendee-generated unique links. Your referral advocates can use these links to allow their contacts to register for your event. You can be quite creative in how you approach your campaign as long as you follow the core principles of referral marketing.
What Are the Different Types of Referral Channels?
Referral channels no longer end at friends and family. If your referral advocates are working professionals, they can use their network to promote your event and your business. Social media is also an effective platform where social influencers act as a legitimate type of referral channel.
Final Thoughts
There’s no limit to what referral marketing can do to promote your business and your event. In fact, not many people realize just how powerful a tool referral marketing is in growing a business. If you want your event to be successful, there’s no question that referral marketing is the key to achieving that goal.
If you’re interested in referral marketing, there’s only one name you can trust to help you with your campaign. InGo lets you utilize referral marketing in a way you’ve never seen before. Our event marketing strategies involve growing your even communities by connecting millions of members through digital word-of-mouth.
