You’ve organized a can’t-miss event. You’ve settled on a venue, enlisted performers or speakers, and dialed in on details. And you’ve set up your ticketing options. Now, you’re faced with the most daunting challenge: getting people to attend. Event promotion doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, there are plenty of free event promotion options that can drive serious sales. Here are the top six to consider when promoting your event.

At this point in a new year, your event management resolutions are faltering. Old challenges — and some surprising new ones — have already made you question your goals for your event’s growth in 2019.

But you’re not the only one facing these challenges. In fact, we surveyed more than 1,200 event professionals across the United States and Canada on their common struggles in 2019, and three core challenges rose to the top.

Use these trends to brainstorm new ways to tackle your most persistent challenges — and take solace in the fact that you’re not alone.

In a meetings world where attendee expectations are changing faster than the event app technology, anticipating the needs of groups is essential. PCMA and Marriott International joined forces to commission innovation consultancy Fahrenheit 212 to look into their analytical crystal ball and determine what trends would result in long-lasting shifts—and more importantly, what business event strategists can do to meet those evolving needs.

Believe it or not, your website acts as a sort of membership salesperson. In fact, it’s probably the best “employee” you have! It never complains, and it always lets you know what’s going on. How does your website tell you anything? You can learn a LOT about what kind of information your visitors (aka, potential members) are looking for through website analytics, and therefore be equipped to give them the information they need to join.

As the first major show of the year, CES serves as a barometer for the experiential marketing industry, offering clues on the kinds of budgets, builds, technologies and design styles marketers can expect to see across events over the year. While foldable phones, rolling television screens and futuristic transportation modes made national headlines, the spheres, colors and consumer-style activations—including Google’s “The Ride,” which scored mega buzz—were among the experiential trends that caught our attention. Here’s what we noted on the ground in Las Vegas.

In his book The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, Daniel Coyle explains that humans use “belonging cues,” or behaviours, that create safe connections in groups. You’ve felt these before: eye contact, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group. If a group isn’t inclusive, you sense it immediately.

While the featured speaker at your conference may only be on stage for 40, 60 or 90 minutes, as a meeting professional, you are most likely “on stage” throughout the entire conference. From corporate clients to team members, venue partners to service providers and conference chairs to attendees—the variety and number of people you are in contact with seems to be endless. Making a stellar first impression on them should always be at the forefront of your mind. This is because once one an opinion has been formed, it can be hard to change and will dominate someone’s view of you regardless of how often it is contradicted by new experiences. Therefore, your “stage performance” prior, during and after a conference should be a top priority for you and its success will depend on four basic elements.

Many in our industry have heard me speak about strategic meetings management, General Data Protection Regulation, business travel, and other industry-related topics. Most recently, I have been asked to speak about personal career branding, and how as an industry we need to have a greater awareness of our personal brand, and how having a brand can help or hurt your career trajectory. 

The annual CES tech expo with 182,000 attendees and more than 4,400 exhibitors, has just wrapped in Las Vegas. Alongside some of the stranger contributions to humanity on display, including Internet-connected diapers and a $7,000 smart toilet, were a few new products that will definitely make meeting planner’s lives easier.

On Monday, January 7, at the Professional Convention Management Association's Convening Leaders conference in Pittsburgh, more than 3,000 meeting planners and industry suppliers got proven lessons in how to be uniquely valuable in their marketplace from Seth Godin, a renowned marketing expert and author of 19 best-selling business books.

Nowadays, it seems like everything is going digital - including events. More and more companies and organizations are hosting virtual events and more and more people seem to be attending those events. But does that mean your organization should move from a traditional in-person conference to a virtual one?

In his keynote address at the Professional Convention Management Association's Convening Leaders conference in Pittsburgh, marketing guru Seth Godin implored associations to create and tell unique stories about their events. But it was a breakout session later in the day where attendees learned the details of how to actually do it. 

“No economic good will be successful if we don’t have social good,” said Sherrif Karamat, PCMA president and CEO, in a small breakout room before the final speaker (more on actor Geena Davis later) took the stage to address the approximately 3,800 people who traveled from 36 countries to be there for the flurry of networking and education sessions. More than 900 also watched parts of the presentations on livestream.

With food costs rising, chefs and event planners will have to work together to create exciting menus at just the right price. “Cost is going up. Gas prices are going up. Delivery costs will be reflected in the prices,” says Brian Stapleton, vice president of food & beverage at Aramark. “It is going to require chefs to be creative and source some things differently.” Chefs may have to turn to lesser cuts of meat and use different cooking methods or seasonings to create menus that will wow attendees, says Stapleton, who began his career as a sous chef in 1985. He’s worked at hotels across the U.S., including The Carolina Inn, Siena Hotel and various The Ritz Carlton properties.

If you want to get ahead of the changing expectations of your meeting and convention participants rather than just play catch-up, a new report from Marriott International and the Professional Convention Management Association is essential reading. “The Future of Meetings & Events” reports on five global macrotrends, how they are affecting the expectations of attendees, and how planners can recalibrate to adapt.

Experiential Design is not new. In fact, we have been doing it for thousands of years. Each time tribes gathered together to celebrate, or travelled to meet, converse and trade, experiences were intentionally designed and history was written. We have connected through ritual, regalia, food, storytelling, performance, pageantry and entertainment all designed to drive emotive human responses. From caves to castles, these connections built and overturned empires and changed the course of history as participants enjoyed spectacles of shared art, music and artistic extravagance.

Meeting professionals often find themselves managing multiple priorities. After all, we all have a variety of responsibilities that need to be handled adroitly. That is simply the nature of our work today. Unlike factory workers of 100 years ago, hardly anyone today focuses solely on one specific task repeatedly. Today, we are all knowledge workers to greater or lesser degrees. Meeting planners, especially, are required to balance time management, self-management and effective allocation of resources. At no time, however, should such workplace skills be confused with the current, if ill-advised, phenomenon known as multitasking.

At this week's PCMA Convening Leaders conference at David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, leaders of the Meetings Mean Business coalition—which showcases the tangible value that face-to-face meetings, conventions, and trade shows provide to people, businesses, and host communities—revealed what coalition co-chair Julie Coker Graham called the group's "activation strategy" for 2019. "Our goal is to try to mitigate the threat to the events business" from potential economic slowdown as well as travel restrictions that can reduce international business travel, said Coker Graham, who is also president and CEO of the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Does your association or chamber send out a weekly or monthly newsletter? If so, you know how challenging it can be to come up with fresh and valuable content, time and time again. (We speak from experience.) But having those newsletters is a great way to not only engage your membership, but provide your members with value on a frequent and consistent basis - so it’s important to keep those communications flowing.

Event professional’s New Year’s resolutions are often predictable variations of the same goals: selling more tickets, achieving a better work-life balance,  or learning how to relax. It’s human nature to want to grow and improve — but resolutions are doomed to fail if you keep making the same ones year after year without a game plan. Keep reading to see which of these New Year’s resolutions you’ve likely broken in the past — and how just a little tweak might make this the year that you finally follow through.

The Social Media Trends for Events survey found that marketing was the number-one use for social media among event professionals, with 96 percent of respondents using it for outreach. More than 75 percent of respondents also used social media for customer engagement, news, and community building.  

Great conferences aren’t created overnight. Really successful events take a year or more to plan and decades to build their reputation. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t manageable steps you can take today to make your upcoming conference a remarkable experience. Keep on reading to discover five simple ways to deliver an iconic conference experience today.

It’s only been a day and I’ve already had to harness my willpower (big time) at times to stick to some of my goals. Why is resisting those carbs so hard? They say it’s not the destination but the journey. Yet, even though our intended destinations are clearly visible, the road can remain unclear. So what do you do when your goals are made, and it’s time to hit the road? What steps to you make to get to your destination? Do you go left or right in this journey of completion?

Will 2019 be the year you leverage social media to make your events safer, more compelling and downright fun? A new survey shows that planners are missing opportunities to connect, sell sponsorships and build community.

The personal touch attendees expect from meetings is now largely being delivered with the help of machines. Yes, the event business has officially entered the realm of high-tech. From smart apps to the Internet of Things (IoT), event professionals must either master programming along with spreadsheets and CRM database building—or hire someone who does. Smart Meetings covered all the must-have tech advances this year to help you stay at the top of your game.