Getting the Word Out

Event planning is a high-stress job with a lot of time-sensitive components. If you don’t reserve the charter buses in time, your attendees will be stranded; if you don’t pin down the keynote speaker, she’ll commit to someone else. So it’s no surprise that sometimes event-promotion tasks fall by the wayside. A couple of broadcast e-mails and a glossy brochure are often the full extent of the effort.

Those are, of course, valid methods of getting the word out. Depending on the type of event you’re marketing, they may be fully sufficient. Many corporate conventions and meetings have “captive audiences” who are guaranteed attendees. These situations require little more than internal e-mails and fliers.

Susan Milteer is an account executive at Edina-based Event Lab, a full-service event management company that deals mostly with corporate and nonprofit events. She says when her firm is hired to generate creative production ideas for internal company events, the marketing portion of the work usually falls to someone in the client company.

“A good 95 percent of the time, it’s the responsibility of the corporation or the convention,” she says. “We don’t usually interact directly on the employee level.”

But for most gatherings, attendees must be wooed, convinced, confirmed. And that takes some doing. How do company event planners attract attendees? They create a long series of marketing pieces that increase in intensity as the event approaches.

“We generally contract for our meetings about a year and a half out,” says Cathy Berg, director of meetings and conventions at ACA International in Minneapolis, an association for credit and collections professionals. “The first promotion is at the [prior year’s] event, or we may do some very soft promotions earlier. There may be a very small marketing piece [distributed] at another related event, also. Then there may be a ‘mark your calendar’ promotion about six months before the event. And finally, the main promotions start about four months before.”

The specific methods marketers employ depend to some extent on the type of gathering and the audience they want to attract. But local event planners say that no matter what the method, there are a few indispensable tricks that get the job done.