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Promoting an event is a delicate piece of marketing that requires precise targeting, timing and, of course, great copy and materials.
The closer the deadline gets to the start of the event, the more you need to lean on last-minute marketing strategies. These final moves can make all the difference.
Last-minute marketing strategies can also help you during those crucial holiday times, when attracting additional business can make or break your entire year. These strategies can help pull those last customers in, even after the holidays are over.
Given the speed that last-minute marketing strategies need to happen, marketers have to be very efficient, which poses many challenges.
This discussion will look at how to use last-minute marketing strategies to promote an event or special sale. We’ll also identify challenges associated with these quick marketing moves and how you can overcome them.
Many events are seasonal, which creates some confusion between seasonal marketing and last-minute marketing strategies.
Seasonal marketing is presenting certain products, services, offers and marketing messages to customers based on the time of year. This includes marketing for specific holidays (Christmas, New Years’, Memorial Day, etc.), as well as seasons of the year – fall, winter, spring, summer.
It doesn’t even have to be an official holiday or time of the year. It could be your own seasonal event that you create and promote each year.
On the other hand, last-minute search marketing is where you have only a short time frame to promote an event, such as a seasonal sale.
It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve waited until the last minute to promote. It can also be the last push you need to drive more people during the event.
Last-minute search marketing takes advantage of keywords and phrases that target customers use specifically during this special event.
This could include seasonal keywords like “Christmas decorations” in December or “chocolate hearts” around Valentine’s Day.
It can also mean keyword phrases that relate to the event itself. If it is a physical event, people may search where it is, when it starts, pricing questions, availability and so on.
Answering these types of event-based questions and concerns will encourage people on the fence about whether or not to attend.
Using search engines is a valuable last-minute marketing strategy. Search engines are by far the most popular channel for people looking for information on events.
To understand the importance of search marketing in your last-minute efforts, let’s look at proven tactics that work for attracting audiences in those final days of an event.
Creating a sense of urgency is a powerful marketing tool. It motivates customers to act quickly and convert sooner than they usually would.
Your customers may not be aware that an event or sale is about to end. By including a countdown timer on your landing pages, you have a surefire method for driving more purchasing decisions.
Countdown timers are prominent, visual cues that show customers how much time is left on an event. When they know that time is running out on a sale, they’ll be more encouraged to make a purchase right then, instead of waiting to shop around elsewhere.
After all, everyone loves a great deal!
You can also use countdown times to signal to customers when an event is going to begin. For instance, “Only 3 days, 17 hours and 15 minutes left before our mega end-of-year sale!” Customers will make a mental note of this event and be more likely to return once it goes live.
CTAs have a proven ability to increase lead generation and conversions. These are critical components in any marketing that you’re performing.
If your landing pages and marketing messages lack a stellar CTA, performance will suffer greatly. Your conversion rates, marketing revenue and business all depend on your ability to develop compelling CTAs.
What exactly goes into writing a successful CTA? There are three vital components:
However, you also need to test different variations of your CTAs to find the exact wording that resonates best; this is the science side. Even a single word choice, like changing your CTA from “Buy Now” to “Shop Now,” can make all the difference.
Influencer marketing is wildly popular today and is one of the best last-minute marketing strategies. Social influencers have a large number of followers that check-in with their content every day.
When you want to ensure that audiences see your last-minute event promotions, influencers can be a great channel.
Plus, you’ll get exposure to other audiences following that influencer. This will do wonders for your brand awareness and can help you grow your own social media following.
Social trust is yet another reason that influencer marketing is one of the top strategies this year.
Consumers are always hesitant to believe what brands and companies say because they are trying to make a sale at the end of the day. This is why you’re immediately defensive when someone comes to your door or cold calls you about an offer.
There is no trust.
People that follow an influencer have established this social trust over months of engaging with their content. In some ways, the influencer is thought of as a friend.
When they promote a product, event or service, it feels like a personal recommendation. The information is immediately trusted, even if the influencer openly remarks that they were paid to promote the product.
With this trust, there is a higher chance for their audiences to become your customers, even on short notice – a huge benefit for your last-minute marketing strategies!
Also referred to as remarketing, retargeting is the act of trying to encourage past customers and site visitors to return.
Remember, not all of your site visitors will buy or otherwise convert on the first visit. You may need to engage prospects several times before they convert.
Retargeting strategies aim to bring these visitors back to ensure that this conversion happens. You can also use remarketing to bring past customers back for repeat purchases.
Since these are individuals you’ve already interacted with, you tend to have more information regarding who they are and what types of products or services they are after. This makes it easier to target them with hyper-relevant ads and marketing messages.
In terms of last-minute marketing strategies, your retargeting lists (in other words, the people that have previously interacted with your brand) are a great resource. These individuals are most likely to want to participate in the event. They might even be your most valuable last-minute targets!
Event promoters need to focus on what value people receive from attending the event. Whether it’s a tech conference, networking event, holiday sale, charity gala or otherwise, there is something that attendees get from attending.
When you’re conducting your last-minute marketing, you need to focus on this value. Any marketing message or promotional material you release needs to showcase the event and highlight its value.
Are they receiving discounted items? The knowledge that will help them in their business pursuits? The opportunity to meet others in their field? Whatever the value is, you need to make it apparent.
Don’t make your event promotions generic or lacking in details. If it’s an event for fun, include everything there is to do at the event. If it’s a charity 5Km run, mention the cause and how much will be donated.
The more you promote this value, the more likely you are to generate last-minute participants.
When you still have a few unsold tickets left, turning to Google Ads can be a great way to unload them.
As mentioned, search ads are an excellent tool for connecting people with relevant information regarding your events.
You can also target more generic searches, such as “Things to do in Houston, TX this weekend” or “Networking events near me.” This will help draw people in that are looking for something to do while your event is running.
In fact, local search listings can be one of your ace-in-the-hole strategies. Many people want to search for businesses in their immediate area. In one study, over 75% of people who searched for something locally from their smartphone visited that business within 24 hours!
For sales-related events, look for keyword phrases that include the products or services you offer with buzzwords like “deals,” “cheap,” “on sale,” etc.
For example, if you’re running a sales event for athletic wear, your keyword targets may look like:
These searches suggest someone looking to save money on the products that you have on sale. Your ads will draw them in and they’ll see you have a discount event going on, which will create that sense of urgency that leads to more purchases.
A slow site can turn off potential customers before they even see your event promotion. If the site takes too long to load, they’ll quickly click away.
During peak shopping seasons, like the December holidays, sites can get bogged down with increased traffic. This can also happen if you’re promoting a substantial event with lots of interest.
If you can’t scale your site’s performance during these periods, you could lose out on valuable sales and conversions!
You can work with your website development team to identify any features, pages or other elements that struggle with site speed. Editing these pages can improve the overall speed of your site.
If you’re unsure how fast or slow your site is, there are plenty of free tools to test it. Be sure to test both desktop and mobile load speeds. Mobile audiences are particularly impatient and won’t wait around for a site that isn’t optimized for their device.
Seasonal and yearly events create valuable data each time the calendar page turns to that date.
If you’ve run the same event in the past, you have lots of valuable data to make this year’s occasion better than last.
Look at data from your past events to see what worked and what didn’t. You can use these insights to avoid the same pitfalls and capitalize on what made these previous events successful.
This is especially useful for sales events. You can look at your transaction records to see which items were the biggest hits and which were busts. This information will help you craft better promotions that include all of those hot items.
You can also use these insights to improve your last-minute marketing strategies. If you keep track of who participated in previous years, then you have a list of people who will be easily persuaded to join again.
Plus, you’ll have a better idea of what types of last-minute strategies actually work and attract those valuable late-comers.
Time is a constant pressure in the lives of marketers. You have to juggle so many deadlines and projects and you only have so many hours in the day to get all your marketing tasks completed.
This pressure is all the more apparent during last-minute marketing efforts because you may only have a week or even less to get those crucial last event attendees to participate.
Decisions during this time have to be made quickly, which isn’t always easy. You want to use your data and other tools to make the best possible moves, but you won’t have much time to really analyze it and find those valuable insights.
This is where PPC Signal assists you in your last-minute marketing.
PPC Signal is an AI-powered tool that uses algorithms to monitor and analyze your pay-per-click search campaign data.
It looks for interesting and notable changes in the data that suggest trends, shifts and outliers. Any change in your data that requires more attention will be caught, analyzed.
The system then alerts you to these changes in an easy-to-use dashboard. Each active signal is immediately brought to your attention.
There are several advantages to using PPC Signal to empower your last-minute search marketing strategies.
You can filter your active signals by campaign type. This will help you isolate the insights that are most relevant to your last-minute marketing strategies.
You can also filter by device type and location to target those all-important local and mobile users!
Other filtering options include hour-of-day, ad group, signal type, metric type and keyword.
These settings allow you to focus on the data that matters most to you and your event promotion. You don’t have to cycle through changes to other campaigns.
It’s about helping you make those fast decisions to improve the performance of your last-minute push for more event traffic.
With this tool, you can detect opportunities and risks that impact your last-minute search marketing strategies.
An opportunity could be a keyword that is generating higher clicks than usual. This shows you which searches are generating interest for your events. You can use the information to fine-tune your final marketing push.
A risk could be a campaign that is dropping in conversion rate. This signals that something is wrong with the landing page. It’s failing to produce sign-ups, sales or other valuable actions.
Maybe the page is taking too long to load or the information isn’t valuable enough. No matter the reason, it needs to be resolved swiftly.
You only have a handful of days to capture your audience’s attention and convince them to participate in the event. You want to make the very most of that time. So, don’t let downturns and risks interfere with your performance!
By capitalizing on the opportunities and resolving the risks, you’ll be sure to fill those last few spots for your event.
As we covered, you must look at your data from previous years to see what strategies worked best.
PPC Signal relies on your historical campaign data to detect noteworthy performance changes. It’s not just taking into account current data, but the past as well.
This makes it easier to bring data from past years into the conversation. By comparing the past to the present, you can see where you’re hitting or exceeding last year’s mark and where you need to improve.
When you click to Explore an individual signal, you’ll see precisely how the data has performed in the weeks leading up to this change. Even you can add multiple metrics to explore the data simultaneously.
You can then view the data as a table and export it to your spreadsheets. This is another way that PPC Signal makes your life much easier and more efficient!
Not all seasonal trends and events are as obvious and noteworthy as Christmas, Black Friday or Valentine’s Day.
There may be smaller seasonal trends in your data that are less obvious because they aren’t tied to a defined holiday or season.
Nonetheless, these seasonal shifts in performance are valuable opportunities to increase sales and conversions.
With PPC Signal constantly monitoring and analyzing your data, no trends will go unnoticed. This gives you complete foresight into your campaigns and allows you to more accurately predict when demand for certain products, services, offers, etc., will spike.
In a rush to try to drive those last-minute event participants, marketers can sometimes make the mistake of focusing on results and not costs.
While you want to generate those last-minute sign-ups and attendees, you don’t want to overspend. If you pay too much for these conversions, it will hurt your revenue.
PPC Signal does an excellent job of letting you know when your costs are too high or your strategies are wasting your ad budget.
This guarantees that you acquire event participants at the right price. In turn, this will improve the ROI of the event itself!
Last-minute marketing strategies offer that final push to maximize event attendance. More participation equals a more successful event.
With the clock counting down, marketers need to quickly and efficiently make this last ditch effort worth it.
Search marketing is one of the best tools on your belt when it comes to last-minute campaigns.
However, to make the most of this paid channel, you need to be very accurate with your targeting and management.
PPC Signal is a life-saver in this respect. By automating the monitoring and analysis of campaign data, the tool enables marketers to act swiftly and make better last-minute decisions.
Don’t let the countdown clock put unnecessary pressure on your event promotion strategies. Instead, invest in PPC Signal and make time your ally.
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