Really, if you don’t have a plan, all the resources you allocate to a digital marketing action will surely be useless. Maybe you don’t need a digital action, or maybe you need professional support.

Strategic planning in communication is fundamental. It consists of determining some objectives, some strategies that mark the route of how to do it, a detailed action plan, and a vision of the final results that we expect.

Elements to take into account in the digital strategy for events

The target group

We don’t want to reach everyone. You know who you want to reach with your communication plan and you’re going to have to give up the rest. This is essential to focus and optimize all the digital resources you have at your disposal.

It’s all about identifying the digital profile of your target audience. We have tools to know their sex, age, location but also their interests in the network.

But surely the most relevant differentiation is between the public that already knows you and the one that does not. The former may have already visited your website, they follow you in your networks or better still, you have their phone number or email address. The action plan for these two types of public must be 100% differentiated.

The strategic objectives

What do we intend to achieve from our target audience? Our aims may be different depending on each audience and the final objective expected from our event.

• Branding: Be careful with this. If you are online in a minor or major way you are always doing branding, but the decision to concentrate a campaign on advertising or other objectives can radically change your communication plan.
• Getting leads: When we refer to getting new users, in the first instance it’s about getting their attention to get an email or an interaction with our web or social network contents.
• We expect a concrete action: We bet directly for our audience to do something very concrete as it could be to fill a registration form

On-Off

Today we no longer argue that online and offline actions are complementary. The communication plan must include a global strategy and establish synergies between the two areas.

Before, During and After

The action plan of your strategy should take into account where you are in your communication process, and I wouldn’t dare to say which phase is the most important.

Apparently the critical moment of communication is the BEFORE since you depend totally on being able to capture the participation of your target audience, although it is DURING the event when you can really seduce them, and AFTER when you can make them loyal.

Inbound marketing and content marketing at events

We are saturated with information and instead we are very clear about what we want and we know how to find it on the net. It’s about being sought out and not about us going to find our clients.

Generating interesting content related to our event is a key resource for our communication strategy. On the one hand, it makes us stand out as experts in our sector, and on the other it provides good positioning in search engines.

The new google algorithm and the users’ navigation culture indicate that the content has to be very natural and oriented to who is going to read it and not saturate it with SEO positioning resources. Indeed, if we manage to gain the trust of users as experts, let’s not spoil it with terminology and resources that may seem like spam.

Likewise, quality content will allow us to create links with other experts in the sector who will be interested in negotiating link exchanges or supporting our own content and beyond. This way we generate a vicious circle by which a great content allows us to increase our prestige and at the same time our positioning in google.

The online communication channels in events

You do not necessarily have to be exhaustive using all the channels available for online communication. The important thing is to have analyzed the potential and characteristics of each channel in relation to our product to influence those that will give us greater projection and better results.

It is also important to have an open Pinterest channel to which we do not pay much attention, but it is important that it has a minimum of quality so as not to give a bad image of our project. If not, it’s better to close the channel.

The challenge is to be very good and very active in the channels that do work for us, and to express their potential to the fullest. This implies a great effort and this is also one of the reasons why we are going to have to choose.