Why Generic Marketing Sabotages Your Event Registrations

I’ll be honest, I’ve been guilty of it too. Sending out a generic email or recycling last year’s social copy just because I didn’t have the capacity, or because leadership asked me to, since “it worked last time.” 

While we’re checking boxes, our potential attendees are checking out. They’re scrolling past our posts, deleting our emails, and choosing competitors who actually speak to their needs. Checkbox marketing has become just noise in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

It takes real effort and organization to avoid it throughout the year, but unless you want your registration numbers flatline while your unsubscribe rates climb, you need to avoid it like the plague.

I’ve seen this firsthand, and I want to share what I’ve learned about how these seemingly harmless shortcuts are sabotaging your event success and what we can do about it.

Meeting My Audience Where They Engage

The checkbox approach says, “post everywhere because more exposure equals more registrations.” In reality, you’ll be spreading yourself thin and wasting your time by not tailoring the content format to the channel and event audience.

For my audience, LinkedIn works for thought leadership, Instagram reels are great for exposure, and email drives conversion. I don’t flood Instagram just because it’s trendy. If a platform doesn’t align with my audience’s discovery habits or content preferences, it’s a distraction, not a strategy.

I’ve even pulled most of my content from certain platforms when engagement dropped without meaningful conversion. Better to excel where your audience lives than to be mediocre everywhere.

Understanding What Motivates People

A corporate planner with a £1M budget and a university events officer are both looking for venues, but their motivators, challenges, and KPIs are completely different. The corporate planner needs ROI justification and executive buy-in. A university events officer worries about budget constraints and demonstrating value to students. If I treat them the same in my messaging, my marketing will be irrelevant.

We build attendee personas based on interests, challenges, seniority, and past event engagement. This allows us to scale relevance with precision. We don’t just say “events for you”, we show how we can solve their real problems, especially once the sessions and programme go live. 

In the meantime, I’m building a content plan to convert SEO interest into community engagement and campaign messaging into measurable results. It serves the dual purpose of enhancing discoverability and deepening brand connection. 

Moving Beyond Assumptions to Real Data

Instead of investing time creating personas and doing actual customer research, I often see marketers making decisions based on assumptions. You create content around those assumptions and wonder why engagement is flat.

Digging through data may sound daunting or time-consuming, but it isn’t if you know what to look for. 

For events, attendee behavior is a goldmine, and fortunately, many of these touchpoints are measurable. Track what sessions people click on in emails, what content they engage with, and what questions they ask during registration. At Mash Media, we host a global trade show with 9 conference theatres, called International Confex. This is what I do post-event. This behavioral data reveals genuine intent, not just demographic information.

The impact has been huge.

We have even renamed features and created new pavilions based on registration interest data from previous years. Instead of guessing what attendees want, I’m letting them literally show me through their choices. This directly translates to more targeted marketing and higher conversion rates.

Feeding Unsubscribes, Not Building Excitement

I used to think segmentation was a nice-to-have. Now I know it’s non-negotiable. 

When you blast the same call-to-action across your entire database, you’re not sparking joy to attend. You’re feeding unsubscribes. Every generic blast moves you one step closer to the spam folder and one step further from their calendar.

I ask myself this question regularly now: Could I swap this content with any other show’s marketing without anyone noticing? If the answer is yes, I’m not building excitement, I’m just adding to the noise.

There’s a fine line between viral and niche in event marketing, but I’d rather create content that truly resonates with my target audience than generic posts that could belong to anyone.

Instead of just announcing who’s speaking, I show attendees what they’ll gain. My ‘Voices of Confex’ series, including teaser videos from different event areas and behind-the-scenes interviews with speakers, put the attendee experience front and center and built an emotional connection with our community. 

This type of content works really well as it integrates social proof, authority, emotional appeal, and reciprocity.

I’ve found that excitement is rooted in purpose, not promotion. When you create with intent, it’ll drive engagement and excitement amongst the crowd that really matters. You’ll get relevant sign-ups.

Scaring Away Registrants with Set-and-Forget Automation

This year, my automation nearly scared away potential attendees. I set up an automated registration approval email that said, “Please allow up to 5 working days for approval.” 

The message made sense for someone who registered months in advance. But not so much when they register the morning before the event.

Let’s just say it was a jump scare when an industry friend called to point out the issue. I immediately thought about all those last-minute registrations that automated message might have scared away, people who probably thought I wouldn’t approve them in time to attend. 

Lesson learned, and now I’ve got a diary reminder set for next year to swap out that message well before the event.

This is what happens when we prioritize convenience over the attendee experience. We get so focused on efficiency that we forget there’s a human on the other end of that email who might be deciding between our event and three others.

Building Real Relationships, Not Just Collecting Surveys

I don’t believe relationships start or end with a form being filled out. The biggest mistake I see (and used to make myself) is treating post-event surveys as the end of the relationship instead of the beginning of something deeper.

I build community through year-round newsletters, content hubs, and co-created content with partners and speakers. After the show, I continued the conversation with tailored follow-ups and video content that shows I listened to their feedback.

This way I take the conversation beyond ‘what did you think of the event’ to showing them ‘I heard them and am inviting them to keep shaping the journey with me’. 

I’ve been meeting with delegates from feedback forms to help shape conference content for the following year. This transforms one-time attendees into invested community members who eventually become loyal advocates.

Remember: acquiring first-time attendees costs more than repeat attendees. Unless you want to start your registration process from scratch for each event, and maintain those relationships.

Marketing that Fills Seats > Checks Boxes

Breaking free from checkbox marketing isn’t about having unlimited time or resources. It’s about shifting from efficiency-focused thinking to relationship-focused strategy.

Yes, it takes real effort and organization throughout the year. But the payoff is attendees who genuinely want to be at your event and not just people who happened to see your generic email blast.

I’ve learned that when you take the time to understand real motivations, speak to specific challenges, and build genuine relationships, you create something much more valuable than a registration. You create anticipation.

Your conference stops being just another event on their calendar. It becomes a solution to their problems, a connection to their community, and an experience they genuinely don’t want to miss.

That’s the difference between marketing that checks boxes and marketing that not only fills seats but brings people back year after year.