Using event marketing to make your brand stand out from the crowd has become a new norm. If you analyze famous setups like Facebook, it is also using online events in the form of "Facebook Live" to engage its audience. It has become substantial to organize engaging events to interact with your audience.
Creating a successful marketing event demands strategic planning. This guide to event marketing can provide you with successful creative event marketing ideas and how to run an event marketing to catch the customer's eyes.
What is Event Marketing?
People often confuse the term event marketing with event management. Event marketing involves the marketing or commercializing a product, service, brand, company, or business through a promotional event. The event can be online or face-to-face interaction in the form of conferences, seminars, trade shows, etc., with the audience.
Event marketing is an experiential marketing technique in which the company owner or ambassador pursues the target audience and convinces them about their products or services. The content of a marketing event, target audience, and culture vary from business to business. You must adopt competitive event marketing strategies to succeed in this marketing technique..
On the contrary, event management is a type of project management in which you utilize your management skills to organize any corporate event or social meeting. It involves coordination and interaction with a team to manage different areas of an event to make it successful.
How important is event marketing for businesses?
Several professionals and business gurus believe that event marketing is the best go-to option to achieve marketing goals. You promote your products, create connections with your clients, drive sales, and create brand awareness. The following event marketing stats indicates the importance of event marketing:
1. The event management software industry is worth $28 billion, which indicates that it has become a valuable tactic to accomplish your business goals.
2. 95% of event marketers believe that event marketing helps them build real-life relationships and aids in boosting sales.
3. 31% of marketers consider event marketing the most effective brand-promoting tool.
The pandemic outbreak has raised a new wave of event marketing strategies. To combat the challenges of the pandemic, marketers have launched successful creative event marketing ideas. If you want to be a pro of this experiential marketing technique, you must dive deep into this guide to event marketing.
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Strategies to Successfully do Event Marketing
1. Figure Out the Importance of the Event
An event's lifeline is whether or not your event is essential for your audience. It would help if you thought about questions like:
1. Does your event solve any problems for your audience?
2. What are your audience's pain points, and does your event meet their needs?
Your event must have an appealing factor for the audience that will motivate them to attend it. By analyzing these factors, you can add more value to your event and make a more strategic plan.
2. Make an Event Elevator Pitch
An event elevator pitch is the summary of your whole event. It explains your event to a lay person and helps to motivate people to join your event. By preparing a convincing event elevator pitch, you can grab the attention and interest for people to attend your event.
Adding personalization to your event elevator pitch is also a good practice. While writing an elevator pitch, don't be very inclusive because a generic pitch doesn't sound impressive. Try to personalize your pitch and add value by thinking from the audience's perspective. Look at your content and think if it can grab your audience's attention. You can reinvigorate your marketing content by hitting pain points.
3. Understand your Potential Stakeholders
Understanding your stakeholders is mandatory to organize a successful event. You can create your buyer personas to understand the wavelengths of your audience. Later, you can plan how to resonate with your target audience. You can also use your website analytics to judge your existing customers. Website builders like Strikingly have built-in features to analyze audience responses. Use this web analytics and utilize the results in your event marketing moves.
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4. Note down the Tipping Point
After doing all the marketing planning, you need to reanalyze why people are interested or not in your event. Pen down all the reasons and judge the targeted audience from their behavior, demographics, and financial status. Considering all the tipping points, the following are some key factors to help you:
- Feedback and Recommendations
- Web Search
- Comparison to other events
- Ticket Price
- Chances of getting and certificate or accreditation
5. Do Process Mapping
Now, you have collected all the data related to your stakeholder and analyzed why people want to join your event or not, and the final step is to design the process. Note down all the elements and action by step process of event marketing. Creating the process allows you to crystallize different event marketing tools to make the event successful.
Use different marketing channels to promote your event. You can promote your event on your YouTube channel, social media platforms, and blogs. Try to make every track's content and theme different instead of broadcasting the same content everywhere. It will help you engage more audiences.
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6. Summarize it
The last step is to give a final touch to your event marketing plan. You have added value to your event, defined your elevator pitch, personalized it, and designed your process. Now, put all these pieces together and implement them.
You can hire different event planners or event managers to arrange everything. They can give you a complete picture of your event and arrange for the people. Make a rough estimate of people that will come. It will help you define a budget and manage the pre- and post-event activities.
Remember that your event's success will depend on how carefully you analyze your audience. Carefully observing your target audience will help you implement all the strategies effortlessly and help you rock with your event.
Creative Event Marketing Ideas
Coming up with a brand new idea to organize an event takes a lot of work. Here is the jackpot of successful creative event marketing ideas that no one wants to miss. Dive through these ideas and boost your creativity:
1. Join a Trade-Fair
You can promote your newly launched products at a trade fair because it is the best place to build personal connections with potential clients. You can also steal the spotlight of the fair by launching your new product, offering free samples, and creating more hype by offering free giveaways. Another idea is to display a product or service demo video at a booth and grab people's attention.
2. Participate in an Established Event
Organizing an event is optional. You can also keep an eye on the significant events in your area and join them. Sponsor an event and reap all the marketing benefits of that event. For example, you do event marketing at a fashion week to promote your beauty products.
3. Host a Webinar
You can host a webinar related to your products or services. For example, if you sell some dietary supplements, you can guide people about health issues due to nutrient deficiency. This way, you will do effective event marketing and generate leads.
4. Arrange an Influencer Meetup
You can invite any celebrity or a public influencer to your event and offer signed products. This way, you can grab a vast audience. People are willing to travel miles for exclusive events. You can also launch your new products on such occasions.
5. Arrange Pop-up Events
People also love to come in flocks at the Popup events. You can ask people on your social media handles or through your website whether they are interested in a popup event. Wait to unveil the place of your arrival before reaching there. Advertise through your social media platforms and create hype with a never-to-be-missed event.
Concluding Remarks
Using event marketing can help you thrive in your business. If you follow the procedure mentioned above, you will run a successful event. Moreover, Strikingly can help you in this process. You can create your event website at Strikingly and promote your event using your blog.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly can also help you gather more information about your audience. With Strikingly VIP plan, you can live chat with your buyers, know their preferences and design your next business moves according to their reviews. Are you ready to buzz with Strikingly and do successful event marketing? Don't waste your time and sign up with Strikingly for free to participate.
