3 Key Psychological Strategies for Event Marketing

Senior Marketing Manager at Tag Digital, Stephanie Bruce, shared some tips on how to utilise the power of psychology in your event marketing campaigns during her session at International Confex 2024.

As technology continues to get better and better, human psychology provides the foundation for understanding consumer behaviour and creating effective marketing strategies.

We’re all constantly bombarded with information and content through various digital channels. As marketers, we need to find ways to break through the noise and make sure we’re seen and heard, by the right people.

Psychology is all around us, so event marketers, let’s use it to our advantage.

How can you apply psychological strategies to event marketing?

There are 3 key strategies that can be applied to your digital marketing campaigns.

1. Social Proof

Social proof is the positive influence that is created when people find out that ‘everybody’s doing it’ – this is what you call herd mentality. Understanding and applying social proof can be a game-changers in boosting your digital marketing campaigns.

As an event marketer, you can highlight that “80% of previous attendees are returning for 2024” to leverage social proof to encourage people to sign up for your event.

Similarly, when promoting an event, organisers often share the groups of people who have already signed up – using the brand or companies’ credibility and attaching it to your event.

Another example of how you can utilise social proof as an event professional is by sharing testimonials of attendees or exhibitors at your previous event.

This generates buzz around your event or product and it’s always more impactful when someone else is reviewing your event or products/services and sharing the excellent results.

2. Anchoring

As consumers, we latch onto the first number, word or piece of information and compare everything that follows. Nothing has a value until we give it one – this applies to event marketing too.

Anchoring, or the principle that initial exposure to a number or value influences subsequent judgments, can be used effectively in pricing strategies and value propositions.

How can anchoring be applied to event marketing?

If your audience sees the opportunity to get the full value of an event ticket at a reduced cost – for example, during an early bird promotion, they will be more likely to buy then and there. For your events, you could say ‘Get your tickets for £130 instead of £250’. If a consumer looked at this ticket price when it was £250, they might think it’s expensive, but when they see it’s down to £130, they are much more inclined to buy a ticket.

3. Scarcity

We want to capitalise on consumers’ fear of missing out. We place a higher value on something that is limited. We can use countdown and urgency based messaging in our advertising for example, ‘Hurry, there are only 50 tickets left’ or ‘3 days remaining for discounted pricing’.

If there is a countdown or urgency based messaging attached to your paid advertising, this impacts how users engage with your marketing.

Incorporating these psychological strategies into your marketing efforts not only helps in conveying the value of attending your event, but also in creating a sense of urgency to encourage your audience to take your desired action.

Event professionals can craft more compelling and persuasive messaging by understanding the psychological underpinnings of consumer behaviour, ensuring their event is one that attendees, exhibitors or sponsors simply can’t afford to miss.

We will be sharing more of the topics covered in our speaker session at International Confex 2024, including how to appeal to a B2B audience with storytelling. Sign up now to be notified when this is released.