Digital Marketing is fast becoming a core element of any business in the events industry. Social Media is more important than ever before, and the launch of our new awards show earlier in the year – The HOT 50 Awards, required a coordinated multi-platform digital marketing campaign with this in mind.
The success of the HOT 50 Awards marketing would not have been possible without the use of 5 key tools that were utilised throughout the campaign.
1Twittimer
Twittimer is crucial in being able to coordinate your campaign as it lets you schedule tweets and photos through multiple Twitter accounts. Its friendly and easy to operate user interface allows anybody to plan entire campaigns in one sitting.
It’s also helpful if you find social media to be a bit of a headache and want to only spend a few hours a week on it.
Free, with paid packages available.
2Mailchimp
The most popular tool on our list is Mailchimp, and it is well-known for good reason. Mailchimp is your first stop when planning a digital campaign as it allows you to produce and send emails, either as a one off or as part of a marketing campaign. Mailchimp prices vary based on the amount of people you wish to send emails to, but there is no limit and campaigns can be created to specifically target certain people in within your database. The analytics available from Mailchimp provide you with feedback about how well your marketing campaign is going, giving you open rates, click rates as well as much more in-depth data that is produced as part of a report each time you send an email campaign. The most handy part of Mailchimp is that its simple to use editor allows you to create your own email from scratch or use existing templates to create a professional looking end product.
Easy creation of emails and an efficient way of getting them to your audience means that Mailchimp is THE tool you need in your digital marketing arsenal.
Free up to 2,000 subscribers.
3The Wallrus
The Wallrus is a tool that allows you to create a personalised social media wall that broadcasts real-time tweets and Instagram posts using specified hashtags. With social media being a core element of event industry, it is pivotal that your events fully integrate and synergise with your social media campaigns, and The Wallrus excels at that. As far as features are concerned, the tool runs fully in browser and allows you to customise your wall by adding your logo, changing colour themes & your own background. The wall also comes equipped with 4 separate screens, with some focusing more on photos and others on tweets, as well as one instructing people how to get their tweet on the wall. You can also moderate the wall by providing blacklisted words, or manually removing / adding tweets to the wall as you wish.
Social Media isn’t just a means to an end of getting people to your event – it is a crucial part of it and utilising it throughout your event means that people keep talking about YOU.
Free, with paid plans available.
4Hashtracking
So your event is over and you’ve finished your marketing campaign, but how well did it do? Hashtracking provides clean and efficient Twitter & Instagram tracking services, so that monitoring your hashtags social media campaigns has never been easier. The service also provides you with powerful data about how well the campaign went, who was receptive to it and ultimately gives you an idea of how much of a reach your company has in the digital world.
Free 10 day trial, paid plans thereafter.
5NeverBounce
MailChimp may be the most crucial tool for digital marketing, but NeverBounce enhances its efficiency. NeverBounce provides mass email verification and cleaning services so that you can be sure that your database list is full of people who will engage with your campaign, rather than unverified, often disabled email addresses which clog databases.
If MailChimp is your sword, NeverBounce is your whetstone used to refine it.
Free analysis, packages available thereafter.
