A great deal of the success of your event depends on its marketing strategy. Unfortunately, the abundance of available marketing channels, platforms, and technology can add to the dilemma and cause a variety of pain points. As a result, pinpointing an effective strategy for event marketing becomes cumbersome.
But fear not, event marketer. This extensive guide gets into the nitty-gritty of event marketing and event management. Whether you’re organizing a small lunch or a large-scale trade show, these tips will help you promote it efficiently.
Event marketing deals with the planning, promoting, and executing of an event to promote a particular product, brand, or service. Though in-person events were the norm, COVID ushered in a new era of real-time online events and live streaming to attract the widest number of potential attendees worldwide.
Like any type of event, you only get what you put into it. Event marketing is the bridge between the event itself and garnering interest from customers and clients. To attract the most event attendees, you need an event marketing plan, including a marketing budget, marketing campaign, and effective use of event marketing marketing tools and resources.
A superior event marketing campaign entices potential customers to attend but goes above and beyond — inspiring, entertaining, and teaching along the way. The road to successful event marketing can take many paths, but they all lead to the same result — hype, execution, a call to action, and excitement for future events.
Event marketing has rapidly changed in recent times. The sheer volume of virtual events coupled with changes in consumer behavior means that consumer attention comes at a premium. Every single day, companies seem to offer more virtual events and expos than ever, which means there’s more demand for consumer attention than ever.
Navigating the event marketing landscape requires organizers to rethink how they approach their audiences. When done right, event marketing can help organizations drive brand awareness, build meaningful communities, and generate revenue through events.
In the recent past, the line between field marketing events and virtual events has blurred. With most companies and event organizers choosing a virtual delivery model for events, here's how to develop a strategy that caters to the most commonly hosted event formats.
Conferences are live events centered around a specific industry or theme with many guests in attendance, typically hosted by an industry body or events company. Industry conferences promote dialog, offer insights into new trends and opportunities, and facilitate exchanges of new ideas among industry professionals. Examples include Impact, HR Technology Conference & Expo, and MarTech among others.
Customer conferences, on the other hand, are hosted by companies for their customers and prospects. These are critical touchpoints for companies looking to educate their customers, share important product updates, and launch new product lines or services.
Dreamforce by Salesforce is an example of a large-scale customer conference that brings together Salesforce customers, partners, prospects, and employees to share new insights on products, partners, and best practices.
Trade shows — also known as expos or exhibitions — are large-scale, industry-focused events where participants or exhibitors showcase their offerings to clients and customers. Tradeshows and expos are ideal for driving brand awareness and generating new leads. One of the key attributes of a successful tradeshow is the quality of networking opportunities on offer — second to none.
Workshops (or seminars) are educational events dedicated to a specific topic or theme, but they are much smaller than conferences and tradeshows. These workshops offer a hands-on approach to training while also imparting new skills to event attendees.
A portmanteau of web and seminar, webinars are content-dense events adapted for online participation. Over the past few years, webinars have become the virtual event of choice for companies to introduce their brand to prospects and customers.
Customer training events are purpose developed by companies to train customers on their products. They’re also called workshops, boot camps, or seminars and are typically positioned at the bottom of the marketing funnel. Some of the common delivery formats include lunch and learn sessions, webinars, and product boot camps.
Training is valuable because it offers companies the opportunity for brand integration and to understand and interact with their target market. They are also incredibly effective for boosting retention and maximizing lifetime value.
Event marketing enables brands and marketers to drive brand awareness, engage with their target audience, and generate revenue. But that’s not all. Here are five additional benefits of event marketing.
Customers buy from brands they trust. It’s a deciding factor for up to 80% of consumers. From the credibility perspective, events demonstrate your domain expertise via content sessions and workshops. Industry influencers attending or speaking at your event can also serve as a discreet vote of trust to drive future ticket sales and act as a pillar of your event's digital marketing tactics.
Oftentimes, online marketing efforts fall short of delivering the desired results, despite designing campaigns that should have worked. In such cases, the audience is hesitant or not interested in what you have to say purely because they don’t know your brand well.
Event marketing gives you the opportunity to make yourself visible to your prospects through sponsorships, exhibitions, and speeches. Interacting in person builds that familiarity and helps you establish an online rapport later.
Events are an excellent part of a marketing promotion strategy and allow you to reach the most relevant cluster of your target audience: the decision-maker or the person who influences the decision-maker. Having a one-on-one with them enables you to generate qualified leads.
Determining marketing ROI isn’t always easy. Along with generating leads, events allow you to connect with prospects and convert them into customers. Simultaneously, you can upsell or cross-sell your complementing or add-on products to existing customers.
You can speak with your customers and understand how they use your product, the features they expect, and the challenges they face with the product. Coupled with traditional follow-up surveys, collecting this unstructured feedback gives you a better glimpse into your customers’ minds and helps you improve your offerings.
Event planning and event marketing should blend together seamlessly. Without one side of the equation, the other can falter. As you begin planning your event marketing strategy, be sure to avoid these five common event marketing mistakes.
The event industry underwent a transformation in 2020. Virtual events quickly became mainstream, and hybrid events are far more common. With this shift, the success of an event relies largely on the attendee experience. What worked in the past can now cost you, so consider experimenting with your event marketing strategy.
Events can attract different segments of your target audience, but your event marketing strategy should cater to a specific audience. While a vaguely defined target audience might bring more attendees, it certainly won’t help you meet your revenue goals.
Your content creation should be influenced by your audience’s preferences. For instance, a B2C event promotion might not require a podcast for promotion, so including podcasts in the content strategy could be a waste of time and resources. Consider the value your content will bring to the audience before creating it.
The marketing cycle for your next event begins right after your current event ends. Prioritize post-event communication as much as pre-event buzz.
Apart from sending thank you emails or promoting the event through an email campaign, retain your attendees’ interest via post-event surveys. When necessary, repurpose event content and create events and activities for the next edition.
While analyzing event performance, focus on important metrics such as registrations, revenue goals, leads, etc. Actionable metrics that tie to specific and repeatable tasks and KPIs are preferred.
Through these metrics, you can understand how to improve and optimize processes instead of getting caught up in vanity metrics such as social media likes. Vanity metrics do not reveal significant information about your bottom-line results.
Before we get to the strategic aspect of event marketing, let’s take a quick look at understanding audiences and how they behave.
These three steps can help you lay the groundwork for your event marketing.
Benefits, not features — that’s the mantra product marketers live by. When designing your event strategy, focus on the “why” instead of the “what.” Here is how you can do that for attendees and sponsors.
Understanding customer behavior is essential to your event marketing strategy. Create a strategy based on how a prospect discovers your event and decides to attend it. Knowing the motivations that drive their decisions as well as demographic, geographic, and psychographic traits will help you gain a better understanding of your attendees.
Learn about the technology they use and the content they find relevant to guide them down your marketing funnel. Creating buyer personas to segment the buyer’s journey for different customers will help you operationalize this information.
Potential sponsors and attendees have different intents when participating in an event. Knowing the various touch points each will have with your organization is essential to building an omnichannel framework to guide them through the marketing funnel.
For example, although social media is a common touchpoint for both sponsors and attendees, it's easier to sell a virtual attendance ticket via a social media ad campaign than it is to sell a sponsorship package.
For sponsorship, you can use social media as a top-of-the-funnel touchpoint and use content like webinars, interviews, etc., to appeal to decision-makers.
Once you have laid the groundwork, you can incorporate these nine pillars into your event marketing strategy. By doing so, you can create an airtight event marketing plan, allowing your event to flow smoothly.
Your event website is the face of your event. It’s a one-stop shop for event information such as updates, registrations, and inquiries.
Depending on the nature of the event, you can opt for a standalone event website (trade shows or conferences) or a dedicated landing page (webinars or lunch and learn sessions).
Content serves as the foundation for your event marketing strategy. It’s the fuel that keeps the marketing engine running. Create a cohesive content strategy considering each touchpoint and diversify the content formats to cater to each persona.
Email marketing remains one of the most effective organic distribution channels. It helps companies keep their audiences updated throughout the event lifecycle. Whether it's a new speaker announcement, seasonal discounts and offers, feedback requests, or the latest content share, email marketing allows you to do everything in one place.
Most social platforms allow you to upload videos, run polls, and reach a diverse audience base —but only if you choose social media channels wisely. For instance, a B2B trade show can benefit immensely from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, whereas fashion conferences can use Pinterest and the above platforms to attract the right audience.
Influencers boost your credibility among their followers. When leveraging influencer marketing for events, micro-influencers are always a better choice. You benefit from their expertise and have the opportunity to tap into their following, driving better reach and engagement for your posts. For conferences and trade shows, speakers can be your key influencers.
Sophisticated targeting capabilities make digital advertising essential parts of event promotion. The in-depth analytical capabilities give you insights into your campaign performance. You can also identify content that is driving conversions.
An engaged community amplifies your marketing efforts. User-generated content like testimonials, event photos, and social media posts, or valuable inputs through surveys and feedback is especially valuable. Email lists, social media groups, and messenger app channels are also effective for building and retaining a community.
Experiential marketing is an onsite event experience that engages attendees through physical branding materials to help them get acquainted with your brand and its offerings. It's also known as participation marketing and is essential to providing a memorable event experience.
Insights gathered from your analytics solution complete the omnichannel marketing loop. Make sure to track important data points across the attendee journey and the event. Data can get overwhelming. So, choose relevant metrics that help you measure the outcome of your event marketing strategy.
Marketing an in-person, virtual, or hybrid event is a challenge. You must understand your audience, the channels they use, and their preferences before the event marketing process begins. You can use the prep guidelines, common mistakes, and event marketing pillars provided in this guide to help you create a successful omnichannel event marketing strategy.
At Hoppier, we help brands redefine how attendees and employees engage with events. Use Hoppier to create personalized event experiences for your attendees — provide branded swag bags, offer exclusive lunch and networking sessions, provide gift cards, or close out your event with a memorable cocktail dinner. Start planning your next event with Hoppier.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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