Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
Why Your Social Posts Aren't Filling Your Events (And What Actually Will)
In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, host Kendra Corman dives into a common challenge many businesses face—getting people to actually register for events. From galas to webinars, it’s easy to assume that a few social posts will do the trick. But as Kendra reveals, likes don’t equal registrations, and engagement doesn’t always lead to action.
She shares a real-life client story that sparked this conversation—one where a business expected 150 signups but only had three, just two weeks before the event. Through this story, Kendra breaks down what went wrong and how to fix it.
The Problem with Relying on Social Media
- Why social engagement doesn’t translate to registrations
- How algorithms limit visibility even when people “love” your brand
- The danger of assuming that posting equals inviting
The Power of Direct Communication
- Why email marketing still delivers the highest ROI
- The unmatched impact of showing up in someone’s inbox
- How physical invitations can cut through the noise of the digital world
- Why you own your email list, but not your social audience
Creating an Effective Event Promotion Strategy
- How to balance social, email, and direct mail for maximum impact
- The importance of storytelling and multiple touchpoints
- Why you should think of event promotion as relationship building, not just announcement making
- How to plan and audit your 2026 event communications strategy
Key Takeaways for Marketers
- Stop treating social media as your main event driver—it’s a support channel
- Use email to reach your audience where they actually take action
- Craft a holistic plan that combines storytelling, repetition, and relevance
Whether you’re planning your next gala, golf outing, or webinar, this episode is a wake-up call to rethink your promotional approach.
Are you ready to turn your next event from under-attended to unforgettable?
Tune in to learn how to create a strategy that connects—and converts.
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Hi, I'm Kendrick Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corman, and today we're going to be talking about a doozy, and that is events and event registrations. I had a client call me freaking out because they had not registered enough people for their event, right? So I said to them, I said, well, what are you, what are you doing? And they said, Well, we posted it on social, we created a Facebook event and we put it on our website. Like, all right, well, did you send out any emails about it? Did you send out any physical invitations? And their answer was no. And they had like three people registered and wanted like 150. And we were two weeks out. Granted, most of the invitation or most of the registrations come in the last two weeks, but you usually don't go from three to 150 in the last two weeks. So the problem is that there's a disconnect between likes and engagement to registrations. And you have to reach people on a more personal and direct level. And that's going to be email and direct mail. So when you're hearing or when you're saying we're posting on social and that is our event strategy, that's not ideal, right? That might get a little bit of visibility. That might get you some reach. That might get you a couple of additional people, maybe. But what you want it to do is support the other communication methods that you're doing. What you have to think about is when it comes to email, people are signing up for your emails, right? It's permission based. So they gave you permission to be in their inbox. A lot of people who are Gen X like me, we manage our lives out of our inbox, right? That's what's going to have me register. That's going to have me put it on my calendar so that I'll be there. I don't manage it off of my TikTok that I'm scrolling through late at night as I'm sitting in the living room decompressing in between reading chapters of my book. Posting just isn't enough to stay top of mind. And part of that is because people aren't seeing all of your posts. Yes, you can tag them. Yes, you can post to your heart's content, but they're not seeing everything. I have a client who she sees almost all of her organization's posts because she likes and engages with every single one of them. So the algorithm shows them to her. The majority of people don't see or engage with them at all, right? Which is crazy. So I want you to remember that likes on social do not equal commitment or action or registrations, right? You want to send people that physical invite or that email because you know you're gonna see that. You own that mailing list, you own that email list. It's a lot more powerful and you're not beholden to the algorithm. And I think that that's the real thing that people struggle with, right? You're not seeing what your customers are seeing, which are 800 other things other than your stuff. And that's the trick there. So here's a question. If someone didn't see your social post about the event, did you actually invite them? Different way to think about it, right? Isn't it like something if a forest, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it make a noise? We don't know because nobody was there to hear it, right? Same thing with social posts. If you didn't, if they didn't see it or they didn't comprehend what it was, did you really even invite them? That's the trouble with that. So again, social media, you don't own the platform. You're competing with everybody else in their feed and you don't actually know what's in their feed, right? And what they're seeing. And they scroll past a lot of the posts without truly engaging. Maybe they see it's your post and they love it because they love you. But that doesn't get action. The power of showing up in someone's email inbox or even a mailed card and invitation, you own that. That you have less competition for, even though I know I get 150 emails a day. Although I think today was like somewhere around 300 so far. It's been insane. I have a client that sent me an email and said that her email newsletter is officially the highest return on investment marketing activity she's doing. That's mind-boggling, right? And she's doing a lot of different marketing stuff. The highest return on investment is by far her email marketing. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about when that when you're putting off your newsletter, when you're thinking about your proposal for how you're going to be inviting people. Okay. Because you want to think about how many people are actually seeing your social posts, right? I think on Facebook, it's like six percent of your audience might see your post. Six percent. Whereas how many would see an email? For some, it's 20, 30. Actually, just one client just showed me her open rates are 62%. That's insane, right? That's so powerful. So I'm not saying it's you have to do email, forget social. Social doesn't work. It does. It works on reach, it's definitely a combination player, right? You want to send the email, you want to post on social, you want people seeing both messages so that they take action. Of course, storytelling wins every time. And so you want to engage people to make them want to come to your event, whatever that happens to be. And you want to make them aware of it, get them to give you interest in the event, give them a reminder. And then, of course, you got to give the last chance because that's when like 80 or 90% of the people actually sign up for things. Again, this is really, really important when you're doing it. So think about every event promotion, every, every golf outing, every gala, every webinar as relationship building, not announcement making. Changes the way you think about it, doesn't it? Changes the way you're gonna think about the tactics that you're gonna put with that. So if you are planning events headed into 2026, I know it's it's only December, right? Um, but you're planning your 2026 calendar. If you have these events on your calendar, please, please, please make sure that social media is not the only outlet that you're using. Think about how to reach your target. Think about understanding your target audience, where they are at, what kind of communications they like to see and will see, and share them information that way. Because you want to make sure that you're touching them multiple times. So that might be social, right? It might be email, it might be mail, whatever that happens to be. So review your event promotion strategy, definitely audit that. Make sure you're not relying too heavily on social. Start building or revitalizing your email list if you haven't already, and then create a promotion plan that includes all of these multiple touch points across the year. I'll get off my soapbox now, but I really wanted to stress this because as we were headed into the fourth quarter, I had a lot of clients that were frustrated about event attendance and communications. And part of it was they just weren't communicating it in ways that their audiences needed to see it and hear it to actually take action. They were posting it in social and not getting engagement, not people weren't going back and finding that post in that link, and they were missing out on things that an email could have fixed. So thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corman. I hope today's little conversation, an imperfect marketing brief, taught you something good that you will be applying to your future events. If it did, it would really help me out if you would rate and subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Until next time, have a great rest of your day.
