Event Marketing Strategies: Why you must include Events in your Marketing Schedule
Event Marketing Strategies are Invaluable to your brand
Implemented correctly, events can be one of the most effective marketing strategies. They offer a unique opportunity to foster a deep emotional connection with your target audience. And they can do it faster than any other marketing tool.
When a person attends an event that inspires and engages them plus provides an opportunity to learn, it creates a memorable and enjoyable experience that, as humans, we are designed to seek out from life. When a brand creates this opportunity for its target audience, particularly with so much of our lives now being conducted online, it can foster an emotional bond with the attendees. The value of this should never be underestimated,
At Sleek, we know how events & experiences can transform curious attendees into passionate brand advocates. These are people who will enthusiastically promote your brand to their peers for years to come based on their experience of your event. This is the most valuable and authentic form of marketing.
There is something profoundly human about bringing people together, with a shared interest, and providing them with the opportunity to connect with one another. It can genuinely bring your brand to life for your target audience.
Raise Your Brand Awareness
Event Marketing Strategies are an excellent way to get customers and prospects to discover your brand and reinforce or create your brand’s message. By hosting an experience, be it educational or social, you are giving people the opportunity to interact with your brand and the people behind it. You are bringing it to life.
Events provide a truly immersive and interactive experience in which consumers and customers can get a genuine feel for your brand and what it looks like in person.
One of the best reasons to use events to build brand awareness is that people talk about events. Consumers, customers, media, staff and influencers talk about events in person, on social media, and in the press, making events an evident way to educate and alert people of your brand, service and products.
Remember, if you host an event that exceeds attendee expectations, people will remember it. Creating an experience that people remember will also make them remember your brand.
Even more, people love to share their experiences, event based marketing strategies are an easy way to generate social media traction. The better the experience you create, the more brand awareness you will generate through your attendee’s content sharing on social media. This can grow your audience even further than just the delegates attending your event.
Generate Qualified Leads
Events are a straightforward and effective way to fill your sales pipeline with genuine opportunities.
If your event marketing strategy is to generate qualified leads, then it’s important to get your sales or business development team involved. This will ensure you have a long list of quality prospects to invite, and a specific understanding of the types of people who should be there and the messaging and content surrounding the event.
To understand more about your audience that is attending your event, an effective technique is to pre-qualify event sign-ups using custom questions; this provides a better understanding of who will be attending, their background or company they work for and what their interests or challenges are.
Engaging customers and potential customers at events initiates personal interactions. These personnel, one-on-one interactions build brand loyalty, open up more conversation points and help customers humanise your brand. Events also provide one-on-one interaction with no distractions; you can capture a client’s attention far better than over a phone call. And when connecting one-on-one, you have a unique opportunity to impart (or upsell) the benefits of your products and services.
Even if a prospect doesn’t immediately convert at an event, there is the opportunity to add them to your database. They have the potential to become a lead, who you can nurture through the sales process.
Identify Yourselves As Thought Leaders
Holding a conference, seminar or a meet-up to present your thought leaders, establishes your business as a driver of new ideas and collaboration. This provides value to your community and helps to demonstrate your business as a valued resource.
Bringing people together to discuss a topic that they’re passionate about, allows attendees to become more emotionally invested in your business. It means you have the opportunity to assert your position as an expert in your given field by offering thoughtful discussions, knowledge of trending topics, and an in-person one-of-a-kind experience.
Creating panel-styled, networking or conference events is a creative way to establish your brand as a go-to resource for industry knowledge and expertise; this can bring like-minded people together and create a community around your brand.
Educate your audience
A goal of most event marketing strategies is to educate your audience and allow them to learn about how your product or service can better help them. With so many different ways to learn (blogs, podcasts, YouTube clips, webinars etc.), it is more important than ever to create a unique, intriguing experience that puts your brand above others.
Conferences, exhibitions, breakfast briefings, round tables and panel debates are all great events to host for this type of objective.
Build your content for future marketing campaigns
Events are perfect places for quickly building up a library of high-impact content that you can use in your on-going marketing strategy and campaigns. For example, you can:
Collect customer testimonials
Record your speakers
Survey attendees and use the data to create a unique report
Create a time-lapse video of your event
Put together a highlights reel that captures the important and memorable moments of your event
Take photos to use as promotional, marketing collateral
All of these pieces of content can then become assets in your content marketing plan, and most can also be repurposed or split into even more assets.
Understand your audience
Perhaps the biggest benefit to any marketer; by prioritising event marketing strategies, you get to communicate with and understand your audience more effectively. You can easily identify with what content they engage with, what they need to know more about from your brand, who they want to hear more from, how they currently interact with your brand and how you can better communicate with them.
It is valuable insights like these that you cannot gain from other marketing strategies and make events an essential part of your marketing plan.
#SpeaktoSleek
Using an events agency to assist with your marketing strategy will provide additional insights and avenues to allow you to connect with your target audience. Events are a great way to present your brand, product and service in a way that personalises and showcases your company stories, values and offerings. They also allow you to connect and communicate with your community, unlike any other marketing platform.
Speak to Sleek about creating an event that will suit your audience and allow you to engage and communicate with your audience like never before. Talk to us today.
If you’re unsure - if your event should be in a hybrid or virtual event format - catch up with our blog here.