Photo Credit: CS21NNN for Adobe Stock
In today's digital age, creating excitement and engagement around your event on social media is crucial for its success. In a recent webinar, Sophie Pink, digital and social media manager of the IMEX Group, and Mary Budwick, director of brand strategy for RacquetX, discussed insights for building buzz and attracting your target audience online. Watch the full webinar now, and read on for some highlights.
The importance of storytelling
In order to resonate with people on social media, brands have to be relatable. For trade shows that have been around for a while, such as the meetings industry's IMEX America and IMEX Franfurt, that means connecting emotionally to your audience, as well as having a strong brand identity. For newer events like RacquetX, a gathering for all racket sports, that means finding your niche and explaining why the gathering was created.
"It's building that brand awareness and saying not only, 'Here's why we exist,' but also, 'Here's why you should be a part of it,'" said Budwick. "Our storytelling is walking people through the journey of what they will see on-site, and also the other 362 days of the year where people aren't on-site, why they should care about what we are building."
Content not only should be relatable, but engaging
"Even through the screen, people feel really included and it's really exciting to see people become friends because of it online," Pink said.
While Pink noted that some posts can be purely for entertainment — citing a video of the staff dancing on the show floor to a Tina Turner song that performed well, taken days after Turner had died — they should always be relevant to your followers.
"Do trending things, do fun things, but always hook it back to your audience because otherwise you'll lose them," she said.
Successful social strategy
RacquetX has implemented a number of campaigns that have garnered attention and turned it into participation. On the B2B side, the host held a webinar series with speakers from various corners of the racket-sports industry. The benefits were twofold, as the panelists would share clips from the episodes on their own channels, driving more attention back to the event.
"It's really our way of engaging different brands, different companies, different industry leaders," said Budwick. "And it's a way to keep the conversation going on the days that we aren't on-site."
On the consumer side, the brand's channels became a source for all things Olympic racquet sports during the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, featuring interviews with the athletes, a running medal count, a schedule and match updates. The campaign also allowed them to promote squash, which will be played for the first time at the Olympics at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
"It got people talking and it got people watching different sports, which is what we care about," she added.
Promoting large events, it can be challenging to tailor a campaign to resonate with different audience segments. To ensure you have the right messaging, Pink recommends engaging with attendees and speakers at other conferences.
"The IMEX team is really encouraged to go to different industry and nonindustry events as well, so we gain a lot of insights there," she said.
Even for a festival dedicated solely to racquet sports, there is a wide range of demographics, i.e., sport enthusiasts, amateur athletes, professional players, club directors and business owners.
"We identified the key messages for them, the benefits of them attending and what channels do they respond to best," Budwick said. "That's been a really big help because the things that you're going to say to somebody who's just really into pickleball is different from what you're going to say to a racquet-sport director at a major country club or major company."
Content calendars and KPIs
As anyone who runs a professional social media account knows, the internet can be unpredictable. Sometimes the posts that perform best were posted on a Friday afternoon in the summer, or were written down in the Notes app following a grocery list.
"You want it to be structured so badly," said Budwick, "but the way social media runs, the way trends run, the way the algorithm is, one week something can work so well and the next week everything has completely shifted."
Though the algorithm can be fickle, analytics are trackable. For RacquetX, one of the key performance indicators to watch is their nonfollower reach.
"If we're looking at it from a brand-strategy perspective, if you're putting out messaging and it's consistently only going to your followers, you can adjust things. You don't have to explain what the event is every time you post," Budwick said.
This metric provides valuable insights for communications, as well as for new followers and potential customers. The director of brand strategy referenced a month when their profile's reach was around 200,000 accounts, 97 percent of which were not already following their accounts.
"These are completely new people who have never seen us before or don't really engage with our content," she said. "We can then tweak our messaging and ask ourselves, 'How do we convert this?' 'How do we turn these [accounts] into followers?'"
Other stats that she tracks are link clicks — especially when registration opens — and the cities their platform is reaching.
On the IMEX side, Pink keeps a close eye on engagement rates and interacts with people who are commenting on and reposting their content.
"That's such an important thing for us, that community that we've built," she said. "Our overall KPI is to manage and maintain that level of customer service, even on social media."
Registration and CTAs
Surprisingly, IMEX doesn't do a hard launch when registration opens for their events in Frankfurt and Las Vegas. Their approach instead is to have a year-round campaign so they can be at the forefront of attendees' minds without being aggressive.
Pink added that you don't want your brand to be on everyone's 'for you' page all the time; you want them lightly talking and lightly touching on things that you know your industry and your audience are interested in. "Maintaining that throughout the year is so valuable," she said.
RacquetX takes place in March every year, so the team starts to drop hints about the theme, activations and brands when registration opens in October. As the festival gets closer, more and more information is revealed.
"You want people to get excited about it and have that boost early on. But also, things change and things get more exciting," Budwick said.
When their content is encouraging attendees to sign up, they switch up the verbiage with "secure your spot," "see us on the court" or "see them on stage," in lieu of the static "register now."
But as Pink pointed out, it's vital that the objective is obvious, and not to get caught up in cute lingo.
"I always think that a very strong call to action actually hooks people," she said. "So in whatever form that is… it's always important to be really clear on what your call to action is."
User-generated content
When creating promotional material, sometimes it's best to let your attendees speak for you. RacquetX optimizes its reach by partnering with influencers in the tennis and pickleball space. The key here is to give them all the necessary information and material, but allow them to write the caption or script so that the messaging feels authentic.
"I tell them, 'I want you to create something from you. You have built an audience already who likes you, resonates with you, and you know that audience,'" said Budwick.
The other crucial component is to identify creators who have overlapping demographics and who share the same values.
"A lot of times it's easy to create user-generated content there because, again, it's leveraging their audience as well and we have a similar vision," she added.
The same logic can be applied when working with sponsors.
"We see the most boost, we see the most new followers, we see the most engagement when we're able to collaborate with brands and with speakers," Budwick said.
Leveraging such content also can be an asset while on-site at your event.
"I will always reshare stories on-site because we want to encourage people to post about what they're seeing, but also because they're taking pictures of the stuff that they're most excited about," Budwick said.
A bonus is that it can help take the burden off the small but mighty social media teams behind these events. To incentivize attendees to share their on-site experiences, Pink suggests launching a content challenge.
"We don't want there to be a fear of missing out, we want to show the joy that's at the show," she said. "It's really lovely to see people take things from your show and highlight it."
Sharing user-generated content isn't only for social media purposes; it can also reveal a different point of view to the event planners.
"There's something so cool in seeing it through somebody else's eyes," Budwick noted. "I know this show like the back of my hand, but for somebody for whom this is their first time, it's incredible to see what their experience was like and what resonated with them the most."
Even after attending so many IMEX shows, Pink still notices new moments from others' posts, saying, "You might run the event, you might organize it, and there are things that you're going to miss."