Quick Tip Guide: 5 Essentials of Thriving Event Marketing

Quick Tip Guides is a new series of short advice pieces focusing on a particular area of marketing. In this first edition we look at the benefits of Event Marketing and how to achieve effective and successful events.

Event marketing has long been an established tactic for reaching your target audience. Event marketing is a crucial avenue for businesses when communicating brand messages, thanks to its ability to interact and engage with audiences, allowing you to achieve your marketing goals. With brand loyalty becoming increasingly important, events can be greater utilised to build relationships with clients and grow the business. Further reasons why event marketing should be a part of your marketing campaign are:

• Brand awareness and/or product launch
• Brand rejuvenation or product reposition at a certain point of its life cycle
• Development of relationships and lead generation
• Maintains customer loyalty and creates upselling opportunities

If one of your marketing goals is presented above, then a strategic event marketing plan should be the next step to take. Naturally, an event requires promotion as well so you’ll need a marketing communications mix of PR, social media and other promotion tools. Here are some essentials for a thriving campaign:

• Understand your customers’ need to know which venue to choose, the types of activities they would be interested in and what message you want their audience to remember.
• Rather than saying “I want to increase brand awareness and boost sales”, it would be better to say, “I want 30% of our target audience to know about our brand in 3 months and 50% of those who know, to purchase our product in 6 months”. Be specific, measureable, attainable, and realistic in a timely manner.
• Plan your social media from the very beginning to connect with your audience before, during and after the event. Since it’s real-time, attendees would have a live environment through which to engage with the company and other attendees, its word-of-mouth!
• Have a post-event plan in place to ensure opportunities are followed up and momentum is maintained.
• Measure the campaign ROI, evaluate its outcome and listen to feedback to improve your performance next time.

If you want to know more about event marketing or need any support on ideas that you have come along to our next Marketing Leaders Lunch