Targeted Digital Advertising: The New Frontier for Association Event Sales
(This article was originally published at ProfitableAssociation.com. It has been edited for length and scope purposes.)
Odds are, if you are managing comms or digital for an association or nonprofit, you’re probably already using some form of targeted digital advertising. But have you ever used Facebook or Google ads to find new attendees or exhibitors/sponsors for an upcoming event or conference (virtual or in-person) your group is holding?
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 lists of attendees, 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 attending, sponsoring, and/or 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.
Let PRC help you with your targeted digital advertising and association event sales needs! Contact us today for more information or to request a proposal!