Odds are you’re probably already using some form of targeted digital advertising to promote your association. You may have even spent some money on Facebook or Google to drive up registration sales for a past event or two.
But have you ever tried to use digital advertising to find new sponsors and exhibitors for conferences – both in-person and virtual? It’s a lot more effective than you think!
Facebook Targeting
Effective Facebook ad campaigns are such because they were able to match creative content with the right audience. In the case of association sales marketing, the trick is to make sure you’re reaching the right set of prospects for your upcoming show.
To start, make sure your Facebook Pixel is up and running on all of your website pages (for more information on the Facebook Pixel, click here). You’ll use this Pixel to create an audience based on traffic from your association’s website and event registration portal. If you’d like, you can also create Lookalike Audiences based on these pages to further your reach.
Next, you’ll want to create a list of sponsors and exhibitors that have participated at your conference over the last few years. It’s likely that many of them – especially if they are large corporations – will have Facebook pages that you can use for targeting purposes to reach out directly to those individuals. You can also create an additional lookalike audience based on people who have interests in these types of companies or organizations.
You can also take your current prospect list – as well as any in-house mailing lists you may have – and create a Customer List Audience as another way to reach out.
Make sure to pair these audiences with some ad creative that explains the benefits of sponsoring/exhibiting at your upcoming event, and watch your sales grow before your eyes!
Google Ads
Depending on your industry, Google Ads can be a really great prospecting tool for event and sponsorship sales. In most cases, however, they are best reserved for remarketing efforts.
If your association is registered as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, it would benefit you to look into your eligibility for Google for Nonprofits. Not only does Google’s nonprofits program give you access to a ton of awesome digital programs for free, but you’ll be eligible for upwards of $10,000 per month in paid keyword search ads – bonus money that you can put towards your non-dues revenue marketing efforts.
As you did with the Facebook ads, you’ll want to set up conversion tracking for Google as well. The easiest way to accomplish this is by using Google Tag Manager, which will allow your organization to create website tags without code. You’ll want to build out remarketing and conversion tags tracking traffic to both your website in general (all page views) and for your event’s landing page (to focus on remarketing efforts) – and then connect these tags to your Google Ads account.
You’ll likely want to spend some money as well on display ads running on both Google’s native channels and the Google Display Network. Not only will you want to set up these ads using the same remarketing audiences you created for the search ads, but you can also take advantage of Google’s custom intent and affinity audiences to further target your prospecting efforts.
Still unsure about how targeted digital advertising can help your association boost its event sponsorship and exhibit sales? We’d be happy to have a conversation to share what we have seen work for other events and markets. Email us today to set up a free consultation.
