Online Event Marketing Channels by Popularity
We recently ran a survey on the evvnt website asking event promoters which online promotion channels they use to market their events. Here are the results which show a number of interesting trends:
YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE HERE – The Questionnaire
Clearly, social media is making a big difference for UK event promoters – Facebook, Twitter and email are the most commonly used event promotion channels, even more, popular than promoters’ own websites!
Interestingly, however, promoters are still struggling to use Location and Check-In services (like Foursquare, Gowalla, etc) to promote their events, even though these services would, on the service, seem to work well for venues and local events.
A couple of interesting stats:
- Facebook is the most commonly used event marketing channel, used by 92% of promoters.
- Flickr is the least commonly used social network for event promotion, used by only 3% of promoters.
- Event promoters are more likely to use Twitter to promote their event than sending out an email flyer.
Categories for Event Marketing Online
We also wanted to look at some more general trends amongst event promotion styles so categorised the more detailed event marketing channels into four major categories:
- Social Media (which includes Facebook, Twitter, Location/Check-in Services and MySpace);
- Self-Produced Content (the promoters’ own websites, blogs and email campaigns)
- Other Websites (event listing sites and forums)
- “Advanced” online promotion techniques (including promotions via 3rd party ticketing providers, SEO and paid advertising)
A couple of interesting Stats:
- Only 49% of event promoters claim to use listing sites and forums
- Only 12% of event promoters use advanced online promotion techniques to market their event.
- A third of event promoters create their own online content to market their events.
Mobile and SMS
Mobile apps and SMS are failing to inspire event organisers, possibly due to cost, targeting and time to use.
How Many Different Online Channels Do Promoters Use?
We also looked at how many different event promotion channels a promoter, on average said they used. Across the board, promoters checked an average of 3.67 out of the 12 online marketing channel options.
If you look at the breakdown in the chart below, which shows how many promoters claimed to use more or fewer online marketing channels, you can see that the 3.67 channel average isn’t due to a huge number of 1s and 10s, but actually due to a large number of responders choosing between 1 and 4 channels.
This indicates that promoters tend to focus on just a few marketing channels they can use effectively, rather than spreading themselves across a dozen different channels that they don’t necessarily have the time or resources to maintain.
On average, event promoters use between 3 and 4 online marketing channels to promote their events. [Tweet this stat!]
Video has one market leader for Events
These stats say it all, YouTube is the market leader for Events simplicity however production of eents content is still a challenge
Promotion Patterns by Browser and Operating System
Finally, we had some information about the browser and the operating system of our survey responders and for fun thought it’d be interesting to take a look at how this stat changed depending on what sort of computer system the promoter was using. Internet Explorer (IE) doesn’t run on Macs and Safari is rarely found on PC machines which explain the null data in those corresponding columns.
Although there aren’t significantly major differences between the different browsers and operating systems, it is interesting to see that users of Internet Explore (IE) and Safari, which are the default web browsers on PCs and Macs respectively, claim to use slightly fewer online marketing channels to promote their events than users of Firefox and Chrome, which are browsers that must be downloaded and installed before use and typically have a reputation of being used by more web- and tech-savvy web users.
One possible conclusion from this data is that users who are familiar enough with technology to want to install their own web browser may be more comfortable using more online marketing channels, while promoters who rely on the default web browser on their computer are less comfortable with a wide range of online marketing channels.
Do you find these trends match your experience? Do you use an above average number of online promotion channels? Is Facebook your most used promotion channel? Let us know!