Your conference speakers are among the most valuable partnerships you have for event marketing. People buy tickets to see their talks, after all! Most speakers have their own audiences that are already in love with their content. Wouldn't it be great if they were eager to promote your event to them?
In this guide, we'll explore some ideas to make event promotion & community marketing a win-win for organizers & speakers!
Create shareable speaker profiles on your website
The most basic way to honor your speaker's efforts is introducing them properly on your event website. Instead of just mentioning their name in the schedule, create a speaker profile where you outline their talks and bio.
This way, each speaker has a personal link that they can use to share their talk with their audience. It just makes more sense for them to share their own profile than the general conference landing page.
Don't forget to create a nice social card / Open Graph image for the page, so people are actually likely to click on it on social media.
Introduce them on social media
Create social media postings highlighting all of your speakers, using branded graphics that feature their headshots, names and talk titles.
You may want to collect some quotes of your speakers about their talk's topic to share as well, or highlight their existing content.
It shows that you value your speakers and their work – which you hopefully do. Feeling appreciated makes people excited about the experience to speak at your event, and it's only natural they'll invest more effort to promote it.
Pro tip: Don't only boast about your keynote speakers and make sure to show you care about newcomers as well to support long-term relations.
Create content together
Depending on your speaker's availablility, it's a good idea to create some content like blog posts or interviews together. Why not host a pre-conference Q&A or a Meet the Expert session on social media? This could help the speakers refine their talks, and connects them to your event brand.
In any case, this is content that your speakers will be likely to share, because they actively contributed.
Feature your speakers in your ad campaigns & press releases
Using speakers in your ads and PR assets is also a sign that you are excited they are speaking at your event. It's a win-win for both of your brands to create some buzz around your speakers, and use their popularity to pique interest in your conference.
Create custom coupon codes for every speaker
Sharing a custom coupon code that's exclusively for the speaker's audience (like SIMONSINEKINSPIRECONF10) makes it easier for speakers to include your event promotion in their newsletters. It delivers a little extra value to their audience, distinguishing it from a simple ad.
You could also create custom marketing visuals for them to share the coupon code or personalized ticket links.
Provide a personalized marketing toolkit
Make it as easy as possible for your speakers to share their talk & your event by providing them with ready-to-use marketing visuals. You could put together a personalized package of graphics that they can use to share and promote their talk.
Include graphics in various sizes for different platforms and variations to choose from:
- Speaker highlight graphics with their headshot, name and talk title
- Graphics with their personal coupon code
- Visuals showing the whole lineup of speakers
In any case, you should keep speakers in the loop about the conference hashtags, ticket discounts and other important pre-conference details as well.
Why you should invest in speaker relations
Your event's success is linked to the success of your speakers: You want to sell all your tickets and your speakers would like to speak in front of a large crowd! Finding ways to make marketing easier for both of you means you can cast a wide net of awareness for your event.
This will probably need some more upfront investment from you to create marketing material and communicate with your speakers. But it's worth it: Making sure your speakers feel valued makes the experience better for everyone – including attendees that can enjoy talks by motivated, engaged people!
If you need some assistance with creating all the visuals you need, you might want to check out our creative automation solution Placid. We have a lot of customers from the event space that automatically generate branded creatives for their conferences, webinars & more.
Placid lets you generate social cards, visuals for postings or even ticket PDFs or ID badges from custom templates, using our APIs or nocode solutions for e.g. Zapier or Make.