How to Plan and Promote Successful Brand Event Marketing Campaigns
Event marketing is a powerhouse tactic for brands striving to captivate audiences, generate leads, and cement themselves as an authority. Social media, email campaigns, and paid ads – all are important to your bigger picture strategy – but events are your unique opportunity to create face-to-face relationships and let your brand take centre stage in a memorable, impactful way.
Whether you’re getting ready for a keynote speaking engagement, holding a major product launch event or putting together a brand activation as part of local event marketing, this way-too-long blog post is here to guide you on how you can use brand event marketing to make an impact that lasts longer than corn field crop circles (and drives measured, quantitative business results).
What is Brand Event Marketing?
Brand event marketing is the practice of promoting a product, service, or brand through in-person or face-to-face interaction. These are well-planned events designed to reach and connect with attendees to create a collection of loyal followers.
Examples of Brand Event Marketing:
- Product Launch Events — Ideal for releasing new products and bonding with customers.
- Experiential Events – Build experiences that immerse in the senses of your brand.
- Pop-Up Shops – Temporary retail experiences designed to create hype and exclusivity.
- Community Events – Brand Activation and Gifting for when you want to give back to your audience in a way that has purpose.
There is something special about every type of event that will offer you the chance to not only build up your brand, but also build new relationships as well as cementing your place in your industry.
Why Event Marketing is Important for Your Brand
However brand event marketing isn’t just a fun day out for your audience – if you follow these pro tips it could be a key driver of ROI. Here’s why you should consider events in your strategy:
Get Personal with Your Audience
Events are probably your brand’s best shot to make kindred face-to-face clashes, which are hard for a digital campaign to mimic. Your team can engage with guests, get guests to try out your product and emotionally connect in a memorable manner.
Example:
Picture debuting a new coffee with an interactive tasting. Guests sample your mix, walk away with swag and are more likely to be invested in your brand long-term.
Drive Brand Awareness
Whether through tailored event swag, social buzz or media mentions, there’s a huge opportunity to extend your brand reach through events. Shareable experiences: Unlike other marketing or promotional efforts, shareable experiences like a trade show booth or an Instagram-worthy pop-up live on long after the event ends.
High-Quality Lead Generation
Events bring people who are already convinced that your niche interests them, which makes you have a lead mine. Have QR codes, email forms and the ability to sign up people for additional communication available to those attending.
Pro Tip:
Keep some follow-up emails in your back pocket at all times. “Thanks for coming” A brief message saying “Thanks for coming” shows you appreciate their engagement with your content.
You Need to Establish Your Authority on a Subject
Your brand will suddenly have authority simply by throwing events like this – seminars, panels, or workshops. You can’t help but build trust and position yourself as a thought leader in your space by directly sharing insights.
Collect Feedback and Insights
Live events are an opportunity to get in front of your audience and engage directly with them. Ask questions, see how they react, and you can glean some really interesting stuff that may influence your future product or service.
Key Tactics for Successful Brand Event Marketing
The opportunity that event marketing offers is huge but much planning and effort is required to make it a success. Abide by these fundamental guidelines to ensure your events are a slam dunk for your brand.
Set Clear Event Goals
What is your purpose for the event? Thing is, are you looking to increase your brand’s awareness, get new customers or keep your existing customers coming back? It will help your team stay aligned and guide everything — the event type to promotion — that you roll out.
Choose the Right Event Format
Your event style must match your objectives and your ideal audience. For example:
- Need some viral impressions? To some, the solution is a one-off, Instagrammable pop-up shop.
- Gunning for the trade? You might even want to put on a seminar or sponsor a grassroot level conference.
- Launching a product? Organize an invite-only VIP launch party.
Design Memorable Experiences
Memories remembered how your event felt. Make an impression, focus on engaging with:
- Interactive components such as live demos or workshops.
- Great, immersive storytelling about your brand’s mission and values.
- Personal touches, whether that means personalized gifts or sincere thank-you notes.
Leverage Technology
Virtual and hybrid events offer greater accessibility and scalability, and we have seen a growing interest in both. Leverage platforms that offer built-in networking functionality, live chat, and analytics to engage with and measure success.
Promote Relentlessly
The success of your event begins well before the big day. Generate hype with a multichannel promo campaign:
- Email Campaigns – Let’s not let your attendance numbers fall by the wayside, blast your RSVP reminders!
- Buzz on Social Media – Leverage countdowns, previews and event hashtags.
- Influencer Relationships – Work with influencers or industry experts to increase reach.
Get Leads and Network After Your Event
But don’t drop the ball after the event. Send personalized email follow-up thank-you notes to the people who attended. Send out exclusive content, polls, or photo scans to keep your event fresh and nurture your leads along.
Real-World Example
Success Story:
A rapidly growing tech brand was seeking to generate awareness around the launch of its newest product. They ran an exclusive, invite-only event, featuring journalists, influencers and top customers to use the product first hand. Even better, attendees amplified the experience on social media, generating almost 10x the expected impressions. Their deliberate strategy resulted in trade and consumer media coverage, a pre-order spike and huge social buzz.
Top Event Marketing Challenges & How to Solve Them
Budget Constraints
It can add up to pull off an event. To manage costs:
- Work with sponsors to defray costs.
- Choose virtual over in-person when physical events strain resources.
Difficult Turnouts
Observing with low turnout can be frustrating. Combat this by:
- Selecting dates that do not have big competitors’ competition.
- Providing early bird rewards for people to rsvp.
Measuring ROI
Measuring the success of an event is difficult. Start with measurable KPIs, which can correlate to leads generated, website traffic or social media mentions. Use your tracking features of your paid promotions to monitor these metrics out-of-the-box after your event.
Boost your Event Promotion with Confidence
Brand event marketing is, at its core, all about producing experiences that make people want to act, and feel good about acting that way. By having clear goals, a memorable delivery, and a plan of what to do next, you can ensure that your events continue to ‘evangelise’ your brand long after the guests have said goodbye.
