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Top 5 Event Marketing Strategies & Ideas – with Examples

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Event Marketing has become an integral part of successful business marketing strategies. It is the best way to generate leads, educate prospects and customers, build brand awareness, up-sell customers and increase customer engagement.

Event Marketing helps the brand stand out in crowded marketplaces. Businesses can combine various event promotion ideas with digital campaigns and create a future-proof and more meaningful relationship with the buyers.

Whether it’s an informational webinar, an exclusive appreciation dinner or you’re sponsoring a trade show, events provide a unique opportunity to interact with the customers on a more personal level. Direct interaction is important to foster a prosperous relationship.

In the blog ahead, we will discuss event marketing, its benefits and the types of events with examples.

What is Event Marketing?

Event Marketing is an event, activity, function or strategy companies use to promote their brand, products, and services with real-time engagement. Events can be offline or online, and companies can participate as participants, hosts or sponsors. Companies and marketers use both, outbound and inbound event marketing techniques for promotional purposes.

Event Marketing should not be confused with Event Management as it involves direct communication with business representatives that usually takes place in person.

Event marketing holds enormous potential for the overall business marketing strategy that not only takes organizational skills and a lot of time but also a substantial budget depending on the type of event.

Event promotion ideas may target both, potential and current customers. An event includes a company participating in a trade show, sponsoring someone else’s event or hosting an event or a conference that could go for multiple days.

Benefits of Event Marketing

After learning the basics of event marketing, let’s explore the benefits of applying event marketing strategy in your business.

• Sales and Event Marketing:

  Event Marketing helps businesses sell products and services, whether you own a B2C or B2B company. Being physically present at the event allows you to establish relationships with the customers that impact conversion rates or the number of sales. It is easy to market your product in the event as customers can get answers to their queries then and there.

  An event that has a team of knowledgeable employees, gives you a chance of closing more and more deals, increasing sales and coming up with more effective event promotion ideas to be applied in future events.

  Be prepared to handle the volume, hire extra staff to keep things running smoothly. You will not only increase sales in the event but also you can gain more regular customers if you make a good impression.

• Increases News Mentions and Brand Exposure:

  A well-organized event can gain lots of media attention. Attend local events and check which media team or representative is covering and promoting them. Collect the contact information for media representatives and use them for your event.

  The more unusual and bigger the event will be the better the media coverage and promotion will be. Make your event stand out of the crowd by coming up with different ideas and angles. The event promotion ideas that you put in organizing event will also benefit your business, people will remember the promotion even if they don’t attend. They may stop by to check your business products later.

• Reaches a Targeted Audience:

  If the event is about some specific product or service, among regular viewers, there would be some potential customers who would be interested in the same product. You can easily attract these customers by promoting your product in the event. For example, if you own a salon that specializes in hairstyles and extensions, you present the product, explore the options by asking questions, and you likely attract anyone interested in getting hair extensions.

• Interaction with Customers:

  When you organize an event, you get a chance to meet with your customers on a personal level and market the product directly. Customers also get to see the products first-hand which leaves a memorable impression and helps you create a relationship with them that you can’t achieve using any other form of marketing.

• Grows Brand’s Database and Leads:

  There is a possibility that not every prospect turns into a customer at the event, but you get an opportunity to add their details to your database and catch up with them later. Those prospects become lead and you can convert them by following the regular sales process.

  As per the study performed by the CMO Council and the Exhibit and Event Marketers Association, 64 percent of respondents used the organized events to find new business opportunities and prospects, and 63 percent used the same for lead sourcing.

Various far-reaching benefits of event marketing provide you with an opportunity to increase your product sales, grow your brand’s awareness and position through invaluable face-to-face relationships.

Event Marketing Strategies & Ideas for Your Next Event

Event Marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies being used to make businesses achieve their business goals. The event marketing tips mentioned below help businesses express and cultivate their identity and create more marketing ideas for event planners. Let us discuss some popular event marketing strategies and ideas.

1. Social Marketing

   Social Marketing has been the best way of connecting with the influencers or the people with a strong presence available online. The tactic helps a business get the right attention. Find the influencers who have a great following on social networks and work within your industry.

   For example, if you are organizing an event to hire more volunteers, the influencers you join hands with could talk about how that particular event will be amazing, why one should attend the event or just why they would volunteer for the same.

   Influencers on social media have the best marketing ideas for events. You can utilize social media at all the stages of your event, from pre-event marketing to post-event when you have to conduct a survey and gather attendees’ feedback and follow up with them.

2. Share with the Media
   

   Press releases have been around for a long time, and they are still one of the effective means of getting the media attention that helps the business achieve event goals. By releasing a formal press release you can invite local media to attend your event.

   Press releases help you promote your event particularly when you are using advanced and innovative ideas at the event. You can also use press releases to find potential influencers for more promotional opportunities and reach an audience outside your regular marketing channel.

3. Influencer Marketing

   Influencers can help you in making your event more appealing to the attendees. Look for the influencers that have a huge fan following on any social media network. They can promote your event to their audiences, which can be many thousands of people more than the ones you could solely reach using your marketing channels.

   The other thing that you can do is to invite the influencers to your event, for free if it is chargeable or with some other incentives otherwise. This can help you promote your event, before, during and after as well.

   Influencers can be more effective if you are marketing in certain industries as media or fashion and beauty.

4. Email Marketing

   Another most effective way to boost the number of audiences at your event is email marketing. Business needs a well-considered strategy to make it work.

   Sending emails is an easy way to get in touch with people who have registered for your event and, also to contact the attendees for the post-event survey after the event.

   You can use your previous contact list to invite more and more people and use other people’s lists to promote your event.

5. Dedicated Landing Pages

   Create a dedicated landing page for your event and that too optimized for conversions!

   Further, you can try to drive your regular website traffic to this event page by posting blogs and creating engaging content, as well as you can drive extra traffic to this page directly from other social media sites, display ads and many more.

   Landing page can be a source for more registrations for your event, you can then go for other marketing methods such as posts on social media and send out emails.

   There is no need to finalize the details before creating a landing page. This is the only way to find out if people are showing interest in attending the event. This can help you to build your authority and improve SEO in advance for the major marketing push.

After going through the mentioned event marketing guide, we have learned about the most common event marketing strategies and ideas that help businesses in setting up their event marketing calendar, we must go through some examples to make a better understanding of the event marketing concepts.

Event Marketing Examples

Event Marketing helps businesses raise awareness of their event. It helps brands get learning opportunities, make new connections, and create memorable experiences for business prospects. Although there are multiple other ways to market a product or service using digital means, there is still nothing that replaces the experience of face-to-face interactions.

Let’s go through some successful event marketing examples that will surely inspire your promotion ideas.

• Publisher Conference – Sales Acceleration Event of Content Marketing Institute

  User conferences usually focus on nurturing prospects, engaging customers, and building thought leadership, whereas, publisher conferences act as a revenue driver for media and entertainment companies. They provide vast educational sessions, bring together a wide community of readers, and are bolstered by partnerships.

  A popular publisher conference ‘Content Marketing World’ organized by Content Marketing Institute has a different theme hosted every year. These types of events are critical for the brand perception built among potential customers. Being that the reason, Content Marketing Institute assigned the theme selection tasks to the operations department, PR team, and the entire events team, to make sure it aligns with their business goals.

• Event Roadshow – Marketo’s Innovation in the Nation
  

  Event roadshows are one of the most presented live marketing events that physically spread out across a specific given region. Event activities include conferences and business meetings. They are the major elements to keep the customers engaged in different geographic territories.

  The event roadshow, ‘Marketo’s Innovation in the Nation’, held in 11 different cities internationally was tailored in tune to the unique culture of every location. The expansive theme of innovation provided a foundation for every stop, getting the event organized at different places and tailoring each one to a particular set of audience is what secured its success.

• Virtual Event – Google I/O
  

  Virtual events act as a digital channel for participation in a live seminar or lecture. For example, the streaming of a business conference. The digital event is especially useful for participants with budget or travel restrictions, giving them a chance to get involved.

  At Google I/O, the event organizers installed a 360-degree camera for keynote speech recording, so that the virtual attendees could watch the event live from all over the world. They even posted the videos on YouTube and made the whole experience easy to access for free.

• Networking Event – Lean Startup’s Networking Event
  

  Networking events give businesses opportunities to form new connections and bring people together. Events can be formal or informal as they reflect the host’s brand. In the growing digital world, these types of events are being more popular as face-to-face meetings become increasingly sought.

  In the Lean Startup’s Event, the business offered inspiring networking events such as an evening at the Mob Museum, to make higher quality guest interactions done more often. The brand used the global community as its major theme. They also released a frequently updated guest list, so that the attendees believe that they would find like-minded people when they arrived.

• Seminar – SQLBits
  

  Seminars are focused on training sessions or educational events, given on a specific topic. These are usually hosted by popular industry thought leaders.

  At SQLBits, attendees were keen to increase their knowledge of cutting-edge technologies they otherwise wouldn’t get access to. Their highlights comprise a guarantee of more than 10 hours of training per attendee with over 150 specialist sessions that helped with a deep dive into the material.

Event marketing examples mentioned above will surely get you some effective event promotion ideas. Using the advanced modern event software, you can get better marketing ideas for events, collect and analyze data, and get the clues as to what event you should go for hosting clients and prospects.

Conclusion

To conclude, we can say that event marketing is the most effective way of marketing your brand and its products and services. We just need to create an event marketing plan template and apply an advanced event marketing strategy.

Events should be thrown as per the audience’s interests. Use the event marketing tips mentioned above and review some common threads that you can apply to your upcoming event.

As you have learned about multiple types of events, put your ideas together, organize an event, incorporate your brand’s values into it and make something wonderful happen!

Create your Event App using Appy Pie’s Event App Maker and make your event management process as easy as pie!