Event Marketing Basics
Sukhi Ghuman and Michael Wong

Overview
• Marketing basics
• Things to consider: purpose, audience, tone
• Things to keep in mind when planning your
session
• Ways to communicate to your audience
• Introduction to social media

What is Marketing?
Marketing is:
“Creating, communicating, delivering, and
exchanging offerings that have value for
customers, clients, partners, and society at
large.”
- American Marketing Association

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wilderdom/3340381990

Marketing Basics
• KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
• Direct your content to the user
• Before preparing content, you need to
examine three basic principles:
– Purpose
– Audience
– Tone

Purpose
• Why are you producing the content?
• What information are you trying to
communicate?
• What are your goals?

Audience
• Who is your audience?
• Why are you communicating to them?
• What does your audience want to see?
– “What’s in it for me?”
– Take the user’s perspective
• What communication channels do they use?
• Who can help champion your message

Tone
• The tone is the voice/language that you use to
communicate to your audience
• Be consistent with your tone
• Conveyed through words, structure and
graphics
• Formal vs informal language

Inverted Pyramid

Web Reading Tendencies
• People tend to skim information
– Make headlines, titles or email subject lines punchy
– Lead with the most important information
– The idea is to empower the reader to continue if
they want – they can click to read more

Headline, Hook and Description
• Headline (event title)
– short catchy phrase
• Hook (short event description)
– brief sentence or two, meant to entice people to
read on
• Description (full event description)
– main part of your content

Headline, Hook and Description
• The headline and the hook work together
– information doesn’t need to be repeated
• The headline and hook are short teasers that
encourage users to read the full story.

Event Example

Event Example

Headlines/Hooks
• Several ways of writing headlines and hooks
– Call to action
– Summary
– Question
– Humour
• Headlines should be concise and catch the
reader’s attention

Email Subject Lines with Teeth
• The first 5 words are the
most important
– People tend to skim
• “What’s in it for me?”
– Tell people why they
should care
– Be specific
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luccawithcheese/3342881972

Best Practices
• Put yourself in the shoes of the reader
– Always keep your audience in mind
– Look at your content from the reader’s perspective
– Avoid acronyms
• Put your main points first (inverted pyramid)
– Be concise and well organized
– Don’t use overly complicated sentences, unless it
best serves the purpose of the audience

Intro to Social Media
• One marketing channel you can use
• What social networking tools do you or your
audience use?
• Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZyUaQvpdc

Questions?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/f-oxymoron/6877620005