Event Marketing with HubSpot's Powerful Tools

Hosting events, whether online or in person is a powerful strategy for companies to adopt. Hosting events offers many benefits across sales, marketing and customer engagement.

Here’s why they are important:

1. Increases brand awareness
2. Generates higher quality leads
3. Engages directly with your audience
4. Showcases your products and services
5. Drives conversations and sales
6. Strengthens customer relationships
7. Facilitates content creation
8. Offers insights and feedback

What tools do you need?

HubSpot offers a wide range of powerful tools that will allow you to plan, market, execute and report on your events all in one central place. You can create and automate marketing email invitations and follow ups, create and schedule social media posts, manage paid ads, build eye catching landing pages, capture information, and track your efforts all in real time. HubSpot’s tools ensure all attendee data is centralised, allowing for personalised communication that drives engagement. Post-event, you can send automated thank you emails, create a blog post and analyse performance with detailed reports to better future events.

Pre Event Execution

Planning

Decide whether you’ll be hosting an in-person or online event. Consider where your audience is and what type of budget you have, this will help you determine what type of event you want to host. Next, outline what the topic of your event will be, compile a title, description and what your audience will gain from your event.

HubSpot Campaign

Use the HubSpot campaign tool to create, manage and report on your event with all your event assets in one central location. Add the event name as the campaign name, assign a campaign owner, start and end date, campaign goal (your attendee goal), campaign audience (audience list for invites and any additional audiences) and campaign notes.

Start adding all your assets to the campaign as you build them out in HubSpot.

HubSpot Lists

HubSpot allows you to import lists or create a list using filters. There are two options: active lists and static lists. Active lists will automatically update their members based on the criteria you have pre determined using filters. Static lists include records (contacts) who meet the specific criteria at the point of list creation and will not update automatically.

Using the HubSpot lists tool, create your event list of people you would like to invite to your event. Once you have created your form on your landing page, create a list for registrations by creating a new active list and adding the criteria “form submission” and choose your event registration form. This way you can keep an eye on your registrations and send them any pre and post event communication with ease.

HubSpot Emails

Using HubSpots drag and drop email editor to create an eye-catching informative email invitation. HubSpot emails allow for two options for this type of campaign, regular emails and automated emails. Regular emails is a once off email that you can send to your audience list. Automated emails are set up to send to certain contacts when they meet the enrollment criteria, this can be used if you are using an active list that is constantly updating. Include the event title, description, what people can expect and a CTA that links to the register form.

HubSpot Landing Page & Forms

Create a landing page where your audience can register for the event. Your event landing page should include the event title, date, time, location, event description, what your audience can expect and a form to register.

Create a form, remember to indicate which fields are required for registration. It is recommended to include first name, last name and email at minimum.

Once you have created your landing page and form, create a thank you page that allows users to know their registration has been successful and they should look out for further communication regarding the event.

HubSpot Social Media & Ads Management

Organic Social Media

Simply connect your social media accounts to HubSpot in the settings tab to create and schedule organic social media posts to promote your event. Using HubSpot social media tool you will be able to set up and run your social media campaign for the event, never miss a mention and report on your posts.

Paid Ads

Using the ads tool you can also build targeted ads and track them along with all your other event marketing assets.

HubSpot Pop Ups

The last feature to mention that will help you market your event is HubSpot pop ups. You can add pop-up forms/banners to an external page by simply installing the HubSpot tracking code on your website or by installing the HubSpot Wordpress plugin on your Wordpress website.

You can choose which pages you want the pop-up to display on and fully customise it to fit your brand CI and tone.

HubSpot and Zoom Connection

This one is for the Zoom lovers hosting online events. Navigate to the HubSpot App Marketplace to install the Zoom app, follow the prompts and connect your Zoom account to HubSpot. From here you can set up a workflow that syncs registrations from your HubSpot landing page to Zoom and vice versa. Below is what you can expect your workflow to look like.

Post Event Wrap Up

Create and send out a thank you email to everyone who registered for the event, you will use the registration list that was mentioned above. In the case of an online event, it is recommended to send the webinar recording along with the thank you mailer.

Create and schedule an organic social media post to wrap up the event, this could include some key insights, a picture or video from the event.

Use HubSpots blog tool to write a blog post about the event, this can be used to spin out social media posts as well to keep your audience engaged and create interest for your next event.

Final thoughts

Hosting events online and in person offers numerous benefits for companies looking to scale. HubSpot allows you to set up and market your event all in one central location with their powerful tools. Having all your assets and event information in one location allows you to report on your event marketing efforts and the success, as well as optimise your events in the future by critically analysing the data.