FOMO Marketing for MICE Businesses: Harnessing the Fear of Missing Out 

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FOMO Marketing for MICE Businesses: Harnessing the Fear of Missing Out

In this article, we discuss what FOMO means in the marketing industry, how to create this fear of missing out for MICE Businesses, and what it can be used for.

There are all kinds of acronyms used to describe experiences, emotions and phenomenons. ‘FOMO’ is an example that began as a colloquial term and has now been adopted as a concept that can be used in the marketing industry. 

FOMO stands for ‘fear of missing out’ and is a term that is used in a range of contexts to describe the feeling of worry or envy that you get when thinking about an event or occasion that you’re not attending. Initially, it was just used to refer to personal or social situations, such as experiencing ‘FOMO’ when you see your friends going out for a meal that you couldn’t attend. But the ‘fear of missing out’ can also act as a motivator, encouraging attendance at events because of the worry of what you’ll miss or how you’ll feel if you stay at home.

This sense of missing out can have a significant influence on behaviour, sparking envy or desire and encouraging action that ensures you don’t feel ‘left out’ in the future. When it comes to motivating target audiences, the marketing industry uses a range of persuasive tactics to try and prompt action, and the concept of FOMO is one way that brands can engage and encourage their potential customers to convert.

What is FOMO in Marketing?

In the marketing industry, FOMO still refers to a ‘fear of missing out’, but is used as a way of tapping into the desire that the majority of people have to belong or be included. When brands create a sense of community, excitement or exclusivity with their offering, their target audience may experience FOMO and be encouraged to convert to customers in order to avoid feeling like they’re missing out.

All kinds of brands and companies can conjure FOMO in their target audience, but the MICE business is particularly well placed to do so because they involve attendance at some kind of event or meeting. Unlike brands from commercial industries, your target attendees aren’t just feeling left out because they don’t own a product; they’re missing out on attending an event, producing a particularly strong sense of FOMO.

How to Use FOMO in Marketing

If you’re involved in the marketing strategy for the events, conferences, meetings or incentives that your company hosts, creating a sense of FOMO can be a fantastic way to increase attendees and engagement, as well as generate more interest in your events. In order to properly understand how to use FOMO In marketing, it’s first important to understand what actually goes on from an emotional and psychological perspective.

Some of the most effective customer engagement and motivation techniques are rooted in emotion, which is why the FOMO effect in marketing can be so effective. Almost every human being has an innate desire to belong and feel part of a community. The experience of being ‘left out’ can be distressing, which is why many people will go to significant lengths to avoid this feeling.

When it comes to how to use FOMO in marketing for the MICE businesses, you want to generate a sense of excitement and exclusivity around the events that you organise and promote. Potential attendees should be motivated to attend by making them feel like they’ll be missing something important if they don’t, which can help to increase attendance and also boost ticket sales as soon as they’re released.

Increased attendance is the main benefit of using FOMO in marketing, but the process of promoting your event as particularly desirable and attendance-worthy also brings the benefit of improving its reputation. The very nature of a FOMO marketing strategy involves creating and sharing advertising material that shines a very positive and exciting light on your event, so the natural result of this will be increased interest and greater awareness, if it’s done right.

How to Create FOMO in Marketing for MICE Businesses

Now that we’ve covered how you can use FOMO in your MICE marketing strategy and how it can benefit your event, we’re going to share some of the best approaches to use when creating FOMO in marketing.

Build Anticipation

Anticipation leads to increased interest and engagement, so one of the best ways to start encouraging potential attendees to want to come to your event is to build anticipation for it. This is most effective when you use multiple marketing channels, as it gives potential attendees regular reminders of what’s coming and what they might miss out on.

Countdowns are a classic way of building anticipation in a marketing strategy, which can start as early as a year before the event takes place. Sharing countdowns to when tickets go on sale is an especially good way of laying the groundwork for creating FOMO, which you can do on your website with a constantly updating widget, as well as through email and on social media.

Another great way to build anticipation for events is by teasing at the different elements of the event, such as speakers, workshops and even traders. You can announce the most exciting features periodically, building anticipation for these announcements by letting followers or recipients know what date and time these will be announced.

Introduce Limited Deals

Creating a sense of scarcity and exclusivity is key in FOMO marketing, which is why another really successful technique is to introduce limited deals as part of your ticket sales. This might be offering a discount for the first 50 attendees, choosing certain days to offer cheaper prices, or even providing attendees with a discount if they refer someone else within a set time.

Make sure that you advertise that these deals will be available ahead of time to build anticipation for them, and promote their availability across your marketing channels so that no potential attendees miss out.

Describe Previous Event Value

If your event is a regular occurrence, a great way to inspire a sense of FOMO in potential attendees is to highlight what they missed out on by not attending previous events. When done correctly, this should conjure the feeling that people missed out on the last event, which in turn will increase their likelihood of wanting to come to the next one.

You can be as subtle or as explicit about sharing the value of previous events as you want, depending on the tone that you take in your marketing material. Simply sharing the highlights of your previous events might be enough, or you can really emphasise the message with content captioned ‘Here’s what you missed’.

Share Attendee Reviews

One of the best ways to create FOMO in marketing is by sharing reviews from existing customers, or attendees in this case. There’s no better way to honestly promote the value of your event, and hearing positive experiences from others will encourage a more emotive reaction from people who are still on the fence about attending, hopefully inspiring them to take action.

You obviously want to share positive reviews and ideally ones that focus on why the attendees enjoyed your event particularly and what they gained from it. You can share these as text on your website, social media or in emails, but an even better approach is to record short video interviews where attendees share their feedback and review the event. Not only will these be more engaging, but they’re also more believable as they’re coming from a real person.

Highlight What Will Be Missed

In the same vein as our earlier advice about sharing what was missed by not attending previous events, you can also use FOMO in marketing by highlighting what people will miss if they don’t come to your next event. This is another particularly effective approach, as it directly addresses the ‘fear’ that potential attendees may experience if they choose not to buy a ticket.

A direct approach is most effective with this method of creating FOMO, as long as it’s in line with your brand’s tone of voice. Social media ads, website banners and the content of your event landing pages can be used to display messaging that directly confronts the viewer with what they will lose or miss out on if they don’t attend.

Ask the reader if they want what your event is offering and then explain that they won’t get it unless they come to it. For example “Want to connect with some of the top innovators in your industry? You’ll never meet them if you stay at home” or “Seeking unique insight that will boost your career prospects? You’ll only find it at name of your event”.

You could also take a more humorous tone and present a fictional persona who hasn’t come to your event, and describe the negative impact that this has had on them. You could contrast this with a similar advert highlighting what a fictional attendee gained from your event, with the underlying message that your audience won’t get any of these benefits if they don’t also attend.

There are plenty of different ways to utilise the approach of highlighting what your audience will miss out on by skipping your event. Focusing on benefits can be a successful tactic, but when you’re trying to prompt FOMO, you want to highlight the negative impact that non-attendees will experience.

Show Ticket Sales in Real Time

A classic marketing tactic that is connected to making potential customers experience FOMO is showing sales data in real time to encourage purchases in the moment. If a website browser can see that 20 people have an item they’re considering in their basket already, they’ll be more motivated to also make a purchase. This works especially well if there’s only a limited number of products available. 

In the MICE business, you can harness this technique by having a widget on your website that shows how many tickets to your event have been sold, with the option of also displaying how many are left. You can share updates for ticket sales on your social media as well, letting your followers know when you hit certain milestones so that they feel more encouraged to buy a ticket quickly and join the number of existing attendees.

Offer Exclusive Value

Our final piece of advice for using FOMO in marketing is to make sure that you’re offering your event attendees exclusive value that they’ll only get access to through your organisation. This exclusive value should be central to your marketing strategy and presented as a clear benefit of buying a ticket so that potential attendees are very aware of what they’ll miss out on if they don’t come.

Whether this value comes from the speakers, the advice or the potential networking opportunities, you’ll inspire a greater sense of FOMO in your target audience if you emphasise that they’ll miss out on these opportunities unless they attend.

Summary

FOMO is more than just a colloquial acronym used to describe missing out on socialising; it’s a concept that taps into our innate need to feel included and is an incredibly useful tool to use when encouraging your target audience to convert. Working in the MICE business means that you’re ideally positioned to utilise this approach by promoting your events as unmissable, and using the above techniques will help to generate a sense of exclusivity and value that potential attendees will not want to miss out on.

Key takeaways

• FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a psychological motivator that can effectively boost event attendance and engagement.
• MICE businesses can use anticipation-building methods like countdowns and event teasers to create excitement.
• Highlighting past event success and the benefit of attendance helps showcase the value of the event.
• Strategies e.g. limited-time deals and real-time ticket sales tracking tap into the scarcity principle to drive signups.
• Sharing customer reviews, attendee experiences, and what potential attendees might miss encourages conversions. 
   

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