How we got over 5000 registrations in under 3 months. Around 55% of the registrations turned up at the event. Here we is a list with all the promotion Hacks we did.
**Attendee Spotlight → 500 clicks to register **We searched through the registrations and looked for people with a big reach on Linkedin and asked them to be a featured attendee on our website and post them on our Linkedin page. They shared the post and encouraged people to join and network with them at the event. We posted three people a day on Linkedin and typically had around 400-2.000 impressions on those posts and 500 clicked on the link to register. For our last event we automated the workflow using Hyperise, because creating the graphic was a lot of manuell effort. It worked out fine, but especially for the first event I would do it by hand again.
Speaker Announcements → 500 clicks to register Announce all your speakers on social media & share the speaker graphics with them. Engaging your speakers in the promotion is essential, because they often have great reach in your target audience. You can create graphic for every individual speaker & for their panel.
Sponsors/Mission Partners Ask you sponsors to help you with your event promotion. They are often open to share that they are sponsoring on social media, in their newsletter etc.
Invite connections to Linkedin event → 1.500 clicks to register If your audience is on Linkedin, create a Linkedin event & invite your connections to the event. You can ask your speakers and partners to do the same. Every person can invite up to 1000 people per week to the Linkedin event. These numbers add up over time. Here is a guide by Jan how to invite people to the LinkedIn event.
**Duxsoup | Skylead → 150 clicks to register** We were using Duxsoup to automatically connect with targeted accounts on Linkedin and adding a personal invite message to the event. → We connected with around 150 people a day for 2 months and got around 150 signups from it directly. We invited our new LinkedIn friends then to the LinkedIn event again. There is no data how effective that was exactly, but I would recommend doing it nevertheless. We only did that for the first event as it is not really scalable, but it was create to connect with people for the first event.
Email campaigns → around 20 clicks. For the first event we searched for emails from targeted companies using seamless.ai and sent marketing emails to them. Unfortunately, we had low click rates and landed in spam pretty fast. Stopped doing it, but did it for a while at the start. Email campaigns work really well for the audience who already attended one of your events prior.
Linkedin Ads Campaign → 417 clicks to register We started a Linkedin campaign with the main goal to convert people who said they are going to join on our Linkedin Event to real registrations. For our target group the CPC is quite expensive and was not as effective as expected. We spend around $2200. Our CPM were around $40 and our CPC were between $3.7 and $15. This made it not worth it for us, because other initiatives were much more effective.
The World Staffing Award is one of our more creative and most successful promotion hack. The award represents the top staffing leaders to watch & companies to work for in the following year. Over the years we expanded it from 40 nominations to over 4000. It is a public award, which means the nominees can be submitted publicly and the winners are chosen by a public voting.
In the first year we had around 40 nominations and over 3.000 voted for their favorite staffing professional. For the last event we had over 3000 leaders nominated and 1500 companies. In total over 20.000 people voted at the award.
While voting for the award people have the chance to sign up for the summit, too. That works really well.
Click to share URLs → 2150 clicks to register We created click to share links for attendees and speakers. We will asked them to share it on the same time one week before the conference.
Here are the links for you to edit for your event. Sometimes you have to reload it for the open graph to work.
One thing we thought about but have not done:
Try to track everything with UTM links so you see what works best for you.
In our case Linkedin was by far the best platform for the promotion and the Linkedin event generated a lot of registrations organically after a view people said that they will attend.