Event copywriting can be difficult to wrap your head around. There’s always an endless list of things to do when copywriting as it is. The list includes crafting personalized CTAs, creating a fear of missing out, writing attention-grabbing headlines, among others. What more if the copywriting needs to be tailored to specific events.
The good news is that effective event copywriting is possible. This blog post will help you write those great event copies that yield the best results. Let’s get started!
What Is Event Copywriting?
Event copywriting is the act of creating marketing messages about your event for an audience. These event copies are usually shared on different platforms like your website, social media, and other channels.
The goal of event copywriting is to promote your event, of course. But you also want your reader to take a specific action. That action can be purchasing your tickets or signing up for the event.
Statistics show that 85% of B2B marketers cite high-quality content contributing to increased marketing success. Creating high-quality, attention-grabbing copy can be a good content strategy for your upcoming event’s success.
10 Event Copywriting Tips to Boost Event Visibility
Now that you understand what event copywriting is and why it is necessary, you’ll learn ten event copywriting tips that will help you craft suitable copies:
1. Write with Audience in Mind
Writing with the reader in mind is arguably the most important part of an effective content strategy. It is counterproductive to write the way you know or the way you understand because it won’t speak to your audience.
Start by understanding your target market and how they speak and act. You also want to know the style of writing that appeals to them.
Your target market refers to, of course, your potential event attendees. To understand them, create attendee personas or fictional representations of your ideal audience.
You can also use the analytics section of your digital platforms—E.g., Meta, Google Analytics, etc.–to determine the characteristics of your audience (this, of course, will only work if you choose the right platform to reach the right people for your event).
The insight section tells you the age range of the people on your chosen platform, gender, the cities they are in, etc. It can help you learn about the expectations of your audience, current trends, and news that affect them. Armed with this information, you can create copy that captures their attention.
For instance, if you find that the majority of your social media audience falls between the 18-44 and 25-34 age brackets, you know you need to speak like a young person. Here’s an example of social media copy for an event for young people:
Notice the simple and straightforward copy. The casual and playful language through emojis and contractions (“ain’t”, for example) are also worth-noting.
If you write with your audience in mind, you’ll help ensure your audience understands what you’re saying. As a result, you increase your chances of them taking your desired action.
An AI content generator tool comes in handy here. Ask Writer, for instance, can help you choose the right words for your specific audience. You just need to provide the right prompts when using the tool. Specify what you’re writing about, the goal of your content, and the target audience.
2. Consider Brand Personality
When writing event copy, you should also consider how you want your brand’s personality to come across.
Your brand personality refers to the specific characteristics you want people to associate with you. To determine what your brand personality is, go back to your mission and vision. Based on those, come up with three to five adjectives you’d like your audience to think of when they see your brand. For instance, your adjectives could be fun, exciting, and approachable, or serious, authoritative, and formal.
But how do you create copy based on your brand personality? Come up with a list of words, phrases and sentences based on the three adjectives you opted for. These are the words and phrases you can use when writing your event copy. When creating this list, you want to consider your target audience, too. So, refer to the data you gathered to implement the first tip in this article.
So, let’s say you decide the adjectives “fun,” “exciting,” and “approachable,” should be associated with your brand. Also, based on your research, your target audience are millennials. The following words can, therefore, be included in your list:
- Entertaining games
- Come join us!
- Enjoy
- Socialize
- Excellent company
- Have fun
- Interesting lectures
Of course, don’t incorporate words on your list into your final copy if they have nothing to do with your event. For instance, if your event doesn’t incorporate games, then the first phrase on your list, “entertaining games,” shouldn’t be in your copy.
Your written copy shouldn’t be the only thing that aligns with your brand personality. The accompanying visuals you use should also show the type of brand you are. We’ll talk more about visuals later on in this article.
3. Follow a Writing Style Manual
A writing style manual is vital for consistency. Just imagine this scenario. You’re promoting your event across your multiple platforms. For efficiency’s sake, you ask one member of your team to write your social media copy, and another member to write your email copy. When the draft marketing collateral comes back to you, you find the social media and email copies use different writing styles. For instance, one spells out the numbers while the other doesn’t.
These are the types of scenarios a writing style manual can help prevent. As a brand, you want to ensure consistency when writing. It just shows professionalism. Plus, that’s the only way your audience will associate your brand with a specific writing style and format. Consistency is a key principle, not just when writing about events, but also when writing about products. It’s a crucial component in B2B, ecommerce, or SaaS marketing because it’s good for brand recognition.
So, make sure your team follows a writing style manual in event copywriting. The manual specifies your brand’s tone of voice, grammar rules, sentence construction rules, and anything else that guides your brand’s writing. If you already have one, great! Just make sure all the members of your team have access to the manual. You can make it available on the company intranet or even website.
Mailchimp, for example, has a style guide page on its website:
If you don’t have a writing style guide just yet, create one before writing copy for events. Your brand’s writing style guidelines ultimately boil down to your preference. But, of course, you should also still consider your target audience’s preferences and your brand personality when writing them.
4. Write Good Headlines and Taglines
Headlines can be the icing on the cake for event copywriting.
A whopping 8 of 10 people read headlines. You need to make your headlines catchy enough for your target audience to read through the rest of your copy.
When writing headlines, follow these tips:
Make them short and concise: In general, short headlines are preferred because they are faster to read and they keep the audience’s attention more. The general rule is to keep it to a maximum of 60 characters (including spaces) when you’re writing for online platforms. Most digital platforms cut off headlines at 50-60 characters.
Display your value: It’s best to present the benefit your audience can derive from the event. This will draw your audience in and get them excited about it.
Here’s an example of a good event headline:
Triple Whale’s headline is short and concise. It tells us that the event is about influencer marketing, which is the unique selling point. It also showcases the benefit an attendee can derive from the event. If you attend, you can “break out your influencer marketing gameplan.”
Now, let’s look at taglines.
Taglines are longer than headlines. They supplement the headline by giving more information about the event. Taglines can be as long as 160 characters.
Here’s an example from Outsite.
Outsite’s tagline explains what the July events are about a bit more. Since the headline did not elaborate on the benefits attendees can get from the event, the tagline specifies these benefits.
With effective headlines and taglines, you can get your potential attendees excited about your event. As a result, you might even get them to share your event with others.
5. Strengthen Event Copy With Examples
When writing event copy, you may have to deal with a lot of reader’s uncertainty. After all, anyone can just say anything under the sun. You want to make your copy believable, and examples are the most powerful way to do this.
Here’s an illustration of how you can incorporate examples into your copy.
The Matilda Hotel, for instance, wanted to promote its art festival with the email below. Since it had already held the same event the year before, it included images of that event in this email promoting the upcoming one:
The images of smiling and happy people are proof of several things: one, that the previous arts event was successful, and two, that people did actually have fun. So, people are more likely to register for the event or buy tickets since they’ll think they’ll have fun, too.
6. Use Other Types of Visual Content to Your Advantage
Visual content is an effective way to engage your audience and a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. But sometimes, you need more than just a quick photo or video to get the point across. That’s where other types of visual content come in handy.
Here are some ideas for incorporating them into your event copy:
- Infographics: You can use infographics for everything from explaining how people can register for the event to telling readers about some speakers. They take up less space and are easier to understand than paragraphs, allowing you to fit more information into less space.
- Charts: They are a great way to present data in an easy-to-digest manner. You can use charts to highlight the benefits of attending your event and draw the big picture.
You can also use charts to supplement your call to action. For example, if you want people to sign up for your event, you could use a chart showing how many people have already signed up and how many more slots are remaining.
- Memes/ GIFs: They are a great way to break up the standard text of your event copy. They can make your copy more fun, engaging, and relatable to your audience. You can use them to build a community around your event or pique people’s interest in the subject you’ll be discussing. You can, for example, use a meme to critique a concept.
However, ensure all your visuals are relevant to your audience and your event type. Also, if your copywriting team doesn’t know how to create these types of visual content, you can seek the assistance of the graphics team. If you don’t have a graphics team, tap into a freelancer or a graphics design company.
We’ve so far talked about general event copywriting tips. The subsequent tips below are more tailored to copy crafted for specific marketing platforms.
7. Use Tailored Language in Promotional Emails
A crucial part of event marketing is writing effective emails. Promotional emails are an excellent way to spread the news about your event. You can also use them to generate excitement and communicate important information about the event.
However, your email language should be tailored to suit your audience. Here are some tips on how you can use tailored language in promotional emails:
- Know Your Audience: When you know what your audience wants, you can tailor your promotional emails better. So, you can write emails your audience is more likely to engage with.
Personalize the content: Personalization is a great way to make your customers feel more connected to you and your brand. You can personalize your email with a personable tone that feels genuine and authentic. For example, you can use a casual greeting, address them by name, and include a personal anecdote or story about their interests.
Don’t forget to use action words in your CTA. After drawing the customer in and telling them about your event, you need to ask them to sign up for the event, buy tickets, or whatever they need to do to attend.
Use the words “today” or “now” to create a sense of urgency and drive them to action. Here’s an example:
You want to make sure you send your emails to the right people, too. An email checker allows you to verify the emails on your list. Use it to your advantage.
8. Write Shareable Social Copy
Social media posts are a fantastic way to create awareness about your event and get people to sign up for it. But don’t just aim to reach your followers on social media. Aim to reach your followers’ social networks, too, for maximum event visibility.
To do this, you need to write shareable copy. This means your social media copy has to be catchy and entertaining enough for it to get shared.
As much as possible, your copy should be short and sweet. Long copy on social media will only turn people off. But if this is absolutely necessary (maybe you want to specify all the benefits your event can bring to attendees like Gainsight did below), just incorporate visuals to break the monotony brought about by the long text:
The image Gainsight used doesn’t just help break this monotony. It also helps catch the reader’s attention. Note the use of the catchy phrase “the biggest customer success festival in the world.” Besides, nice images like the one above can help you get more Instagram likes, Facebook shares, and retweets.
Don’t just limit yourself to images. It’s best to tweak your social content for each social media channel. So, for example, for Instagram, you might want to use entertaining Instagram Reels instead.
Finally, ensure you’re using the right hashtag. This way, people can easily find your post in the first place and share it.
9. Craft Descriptive Copy for Event Pages
Event pages are all about giving people the confidence to commit to attending your event.
But how do you do that? By making sure your audience knows what they’re getting if they attend the event. In other words, you need to describe the details of your event in a concise, easy-to-understand way. You also need to explain what makes the event worth their time.
So, on your event page, specify what your event is, where it will be held, and who will be there. Then, you can talk about the benefits of attending. Will attendees learn new SEO trends? Will they learn how to craft more effective content marketing strategies?
Wrap up by telling them what makes this event stand out from other events. Maybe they have a chance for a one-on-one with authority figures in your niche? Or maybe they can try out your new product that can help them optimize their content?
To convince attendees to take action, incorporate social proof into your copy, too. Check out this great event page copy from Web Summit. Notice that it specifies what other authority publications have said about the event:
The copy also includes other forms of social proof like the over 71,000 people who attended previous web summits from over 160 countries.
10. Use Tools for Effective Copywriting
It might be a bit overwhelming to implement the tips we’ve so far talked about. The good news is, there are tools you can use to make writing catchy, educational, and SEO-friendly event copy easier. Here are some of those tools:
SEMrush: It’s considered an all-in-one SEO and content marketing tool. With SEMrush, you can do keyword research and competitive analysis, plan social media content and get reports. Use it for creating SEO-friendly event copy on your site and creating shareable content on social media.
Sharethrough headline analyzer: This free service checks your headline(s), tells you how strong it is, and offers tips to help you improve it.
Writer: This helps you cross-check grammar, spelling, readability, and sentence structure. It ensures that your copy is high-quality and sound for readers.
Thesaurus: Often, copywriters need more concise ways of saying a word. This is where Thesaurus.com comes in. It’ll help you find the right words that fit your audience.
In Closing
Creating proper event copy is key to a successful event.
You learned ten tips to craft effective event copy. Write for your audience, consider your brand personality when writing, and follow a style guide.
You should also craft catchy headlines, stabilize your event copy with examples, and use other types of visuals. If you’re writing promotional emails, your language should be tailored to your audience. Don’t forget to make your copy on social media shareable. Also, craft descriptive copy on your event pages. Finally, use copywriting and SEO tools to your advantage.
Follow these ten tips, and you’ll take your event copywriting to the next level. Good luck!
