No business is immune to crises. There are an infinite amount of ways for things to go wrong. You may run a tight ship, but all it takes is one employee to embroil your entire business in a huge scandal (just ask Starbucks).

We’ve just released a crisis management guide that will help you become an expert in the area. It explains the whole process from preventative measures to analyzing the aftermath.

To complement the guide, we’ve put together a list of six specific essentials to make sure, whatever the crisis, you can deal with it effectively.

1. A clear and organized team

A crisis hits and the sooner you act the better. But who needs to know first? Who needs to start drafting a response? Who needs to investigate the issue?

A structured team with set roles for everyone is important. This stops confusion taking hold from the off and keeps everyone on their own task. Work isn’t doubled up on and you can be agile and swift in your response.

The main aim is that once something goes wrong everyone knows what they need to do without being told. You won’t have time to form a team on the spot, so do it in advance.

2. A prepared and trained spokesperson

Speaking of set roles, you need to choose someone who will be your spokesperson. Hopefully you’ll never need them, but if someone needs to be interviewed by the press, you have to make sure they’re capable.

How we perceive a message is heavily influenced by the person delivering it. They could be telling the entire truth, but if their voice is shakey or they look nervous, we instantly doubt what’s coming out of their mouth.

Consider running some drills with them beforehand, question them and prod them about a fake crisis and see how they handle it. It might even be worth it to invest in some public speaking lessons. Very few people are naturally good at facing a hostile press.

3. Clear sign-off process

One of the worst parts of a crisis is how easy it is to make it worse. And a really easy way to make it worse is for someone to say something they shouldn’t have.

Whether it’s a poorly fact-checked press release or a well-meaning but badly phrased tweet, someone acting on their own can quickly make things much worse. Hence the need for sign-off.

Make sure everyone knows who has the final okay on communications related to the crisis (or even all communications depending on the case). Not only does someone have ultimately responsibility and control, but it means you get more than one pair of eyes on any messaging.

[bw_banner_cta type=1 title=“React to a crisis properly.“ button=“Read it now“ url=“https://www.brandwatch.com/guides/expert-crisis-management/“ image=“https://www.brandwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/EN-Thumbnail.png“]Take control of any crisis with our step-by-step guide.[/bw_banner_cta]

4. A first contact list

Usually in a crisis you need to tread carefully with communications. Rushing out a public-facing press release can easily go wrong. Often you can take a bit of time before putting out a detailed response to the world.

But for other stakeholders, be they suppliers, investors, or major clients, you may need to be quicker in reassuring them about what’s going on. There’s nothing worse than dealing with an angry public and jittery investors at the same time.

Put together a list of all the people who will need to be contacted as soon as possible in the case of a problem. Think about the best person internally to contact them and make sure they’re included in all discussions around the crisis. You should even prep your tone and plans for making amends for the problem.

5. Social media response plan and process

According to an ODM study, 65% of respondents think social media makes a crisis worse. But 55% think it makes a crisis easier to deal with after. And that pretty much sums it up.

Information, correct or incorrect, spreads like lightning through social media. This can make make things difficult to control, which is why the guide suggests setting up monitoring in advance.

Make sure you know what to do with social when a crisis happens. Usually holding back on posting and reviewing any scheduled posts are a good start. Bu you also have to think about how you to reply to any messages from customers and the public.

Social media platforms are a double-edged sword in a crisis. Make sure you use them properly and keep them under control.

6. A collectively cool head

Finally, organization-wide panic is a perfect way to make everything go horribly wrong. Usually, with a plan and all of the above sorted, you can avoid anyone going off message.

Either way, it’s a good idea to get your crisis team to meet regularly, refresh your plans, and keep everyone reassured. Make sure everyone knows the right procedures and the sign off structure so that everything goes as it should.

And in the end, you never know. It might never happen.

[bw_banner_cta type=2]Start monitoring for crises.[/bw_banner_cta]

Event marketing can be a daunting task. It encompasses a wide variety of disciplines, which in turn requires a lot of work across multiple teams within an organization.

Promoting a large event or conference can sometimes feel like you’re scaling Mount Everest on a Unicycle sans oxygen, but with the right tools and strategy, you’ll be guaranteed success.

Read on to learn some of the top event marketing strategies and tools you can use to create buzz and increase attendance at your next industry event.

This framework is based on three years of successful promotion for our annual user event, The Now You Know™ Conference, or NYK for short.

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Pre-event marketing: know what you need to know.

Before you start promoting your event, it’s important to make sure you know what your goals are.

For some, it may be driving ticket sales. For others, it may be creating a buzz. For most, it will be both.

Great event marketing needs goals to be set in advance. Make sure they’re clear across every team involved in promotion.

The next thing you’ll want to to think about is what you want to measure and how you’ll do so. The only way to know if your approach is working is to measure performance and make changes accordingly.

For NYK, we measured everything from click-through rates on emails to social media impressions, engagement, paid ad performance and more.

We also set up a Dashboard in Brandwatch to monitor the general buzz around the event and tweaked our messaging based on the insights we derived from the data.

Finally, you need to know who you are targeting in your promotion efforts. Aside from promoting the NYK Conference to your existing clients, we also wanted to invite future prospects, influencers and partners.

Using Brandwatch Audiences, we were able to locate the right people to direct our social promotions to, especially our promoted social ads.

This way, we knew we had the exact group we were looking for and didn’t waste resources or budget on the wrong audience.

Omnichannel event marketing

Once your goals and measurement tools are in place, it’s time to kick off your event marketing plan. The best way to do this is with a multi-faceted approach.

This means promoting the event using various marketing disciplines:

Email Marketing: Develop your communications plan for emails well in advance. Different types of emails will call for different audiences.

Reminder emails to those already RSVP’d will not be pertinent and people you are still selling tickets to will require these frequent updates to maintain buzz.

If you establish your email plan and messaging strategy ahead of time, you’ll be better set up for success in the long run.

Social Media: Make sure you set a dedicated hashtag for your event for all your social media promotion, checking first to ensure it’s not already in use.

Use engaging visuals, videos and animations to draw attention to your tweets promoting the event. Be sure to pin your posts as well.

Brandwatch mainly used social to highlight big announcements and generate buzz surrounding the Conference, such as new speakers, updates to the agenda, special events and more.

You should also take advantage of paid social to extend the reach and awareness of the event.

PR: It’s easy to get too focused on your digital promotion that your forget time-tested traditional methods, like PR.

Leverage your PR team to drive awareness to your event via media alerts and event listings in various business journals and newsletters.

Direct Mail:  In an era where digital is king, it’s easy to forget to power of physical marketing tactics like direct mail.

In addition to email invites and social promotion, consider employing direct mail tactics for your VIPs by sending a physical invite to the event.

For NYK, we try to send out something related to that year’s theme and include a special ticket discount offer.

Website: A compelling website is a crucial component of event marketing.

In fact, it should be the home base for all related information. Whether you host it on your existing website or build something new, the goal remains the same.

This should be where you’re driving all your promotional work, so make sure your event site includes all the necessary information to drive ticket purchases.

This includes, but is not limited to, detailed agenda, speakers, hotel and transport information and all other activities. Don’t forget your social share buttons to help spread the buzz far and wide.

Leverage your existing marketing activities

It’s important to not forget about leveraging your existing marketing activities to promote your event.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel here – what’s important is that you work to align your activities to aid in promotion.

• Add slides or event information to webinars. This way, you’re guaranteed a relevant audience who will likely be interested in other learning activities your company offers
• If you keep a blog, cater a few posts to help promote the event. Brandwatch did this by interviewing a handful of speakers to spotlight their involvement in the Now You Know conference
• If you’re involved in, or attending other events during your promotion period, share information about your own event and encourage people to get involved. Allow for sneak peeks of the agenda to help create a buzz
• If your company manages a help desk or live chat, you can take advantage of this client-facing space to highlight your event. Brandwatch uses Intercom, which allowed us to design a pop-up promoting the event to users as they logged into the Brandwatch Platform

• If you send out a regular newsletter, be sure to highlight your event as often as possible
• Ask your partners to help promote your event. Brandwatch had the help of our certified partners, Twitter, Hootsuite, Conversocial and Spredfast, who all helped promote the Now You Know conference on their social media and through their email lists

• Have an email signature? Create a custom banner for the bottom of the email signatures for you and your staff to aid in the promotion of the event
  

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Promotion during the event

The big day is here and your event marketing has worked – you’ve got a venue full of eager attendees, but your work doesn’t stop here.

It’s crucial you continue promoting the event throughout its duration if you want to maintain buzz.

Keep it live, keep it relevant

For as many people you have attending your event, you have just as many who likely couldn’t make it but are still interested in what’s happening, and it’s important to keep them engaged.
If you engage them now, they’ll be more inclined to attend the next conference.

There are a number of ways to do this.

• Live tweet: Have community managers dedicated to tweeting the goings on of the event on a continual basis. They should act as the eyes and ears on the ground and report back using social media. Use pictures and videos of the event to amplify your presence even further and engage your audience by encouraging them to share on their social channels using the dedicated hashtag. At the NYK Conference, we hold a Twitter contest awarded the top tweets at the event with trophies.

• Live blog: You can go beyond live-tweeting with the added element of a live blog. Brandwatch has a dedicated writer sitting in the main sessions to keep an updated blog on important takeaways worth sharing with a wider audience. Not only does this help keep the event relevant on the day, but it can be a powerful promotional tool for the next event.

• Live stream:Take it a step further and live stream the most compelling (or all) content. Give people who couldn’t attend the change to be involved and take away valuable insights. They’ll remember this experience when thinking about attending the next Conference. Use that to your advantage.
  

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Post-event marketing

The event might be over but your work still isn’t done. It’s important to take all your promotional efforts and close out the event in a way that can be used for future events.

You’ve likely collected a metric ton of photos, videos, feedback, testimonials and more during your event.

There are all valuable elements you can compile into a promotional tool for your next event. Be sure to take stock of what you have and find ways to market it.

For Brandwatch, we hire a film crew and take video testimonials, which allows us to create a compelling recap video that we’ll be able to use in future promotions.

We’ve also been able to collate relevant tweets and blog comments that can be used for future testimonials. Don’t dismiss what you have in your back pocket. Take stock of what you’ve got and use it to help you in your future endeavors.

Promoting an event or conference is an enormous task, crossing multiple disciplines and requiring a good amount of foresight and strategic thinking. But if you follow the steps above, you’ll be quite a few leaps closer to a hugely successful event.

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