A memorable and successful event can radically increase your brand and help promote customer engagement. The primary benefit of event marketing is that it allows ample opportunity for content generation, customer engagement and ultimately an increase of sales, outside of the event itself. Event marketing is one of the most powerful outreach techniques used by businesses today. Here’s how you can efficiently utilise it to help boost your sales.
Develop an effective event marketing plan
Not only will this save you a lot of time and effort in the long run, it will help you see which aspects of your event marketing bring in the most business. This helps later in the marketing process where less successful methods can be trimmed out, and the more successful aspects of your event marketing tactics can receive increased focus and attention.
Create an event within an event
By creating both an experience for the larger crowd at an event and the individual customer, you are seizing the opportunity to engage directly with your customer and educate them about your product. This helps ensure that customer interactions have an initial impact of quantity, followed by a meaningful impact of quality. Recognisable and effective event branding, such as creative or digital event signs, can help draw in the larger audience before the presence of a representative to discuss your brand personally to individual customers. The final approach can then be tailored to each client’s needs, in turn helping to boost your sales.
Make the most out of social networking
The meteoric rise in popularity of Facebook and other social media platforms, coupled with the increasing reliance on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets has created an invaluable opportunity for event marketing. Initial uses encouraged customers to become fans (either by ‘liking’ on Facebook or ‘following’ on Twitter) during the event. In the earlier days of social networking, this was done by having a computer at an exhibition for people to log in to and actively join your campaign through their social media pages. What has since proven popular and effective is to offer a direct reward (either a prize or a premium) for supporting your product through social networking sites. You can then promote your event through Facebook, for example, and provide the opportunity to offer exclusive promotions for fans of your product or fans that attended a specific event. Whether it’s a free t-shirt, or the opportunity to meet a celebrity, this has proven to be an incredibly effective way of directly engaging with customers through social media in a mutually beneficial capacity.
Don’t be afraid to hire outside help
Whether it is marketing and design experts to help create your perfect exhibition space, recognizable and effective branding, or the collaboration with another product or service to help cross-promote, collaboration can be extremely useful and beneficial in helping to boost sales at marketing events. Bringing external sources of knowledge can help provide fresh perspective and expertise on your product or service. By teaming up with another brand, with which you share a common marketing identity (but a different overall product, as well as offering a different customer experience), you can double your potential audience immediately. A mutually beneficial collaboration with effective cross-promotion won’t dilute your message or brand identity, but rather strengthen it by increasing its presence at marketing events, and ultimately helping boost sales.
This is a guest post by Reno Macri. Reno is a Managing Director at Enigma, a leading event marketing company in UK, specialising in stand design and build, retail designs, graphic productions, signage systems, event branding design, conference set design and much more. He specialises in experiential marketing and event productions. He would love to share his thoughts on upcoming marketing ideas and design trends.
“Image source – Flickr , usage under Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)”
