6 Surefire Steps to Maximize the ROI for Your Event Marketing
Today, as more of your customers’ attention gravitates to digital mediums, face-to-face interactions are becoming more invaluable to your brand’s growth. Brand activations, experiential marketing events, and traditional event marketing efforts are a powerful way to move the needle for your business. In fact, the Event Marketing 2018: Benchmarks and Trends report indicates that 87% of C-Suite executives believe event marketing is crucial to the future success of their company. Whether you’re activating a rebrand or launching a new product or service, successful events require a tested and strategic approach to deliver a return on your marketing budget. Consider the following 6 surefire steps before you plan your next event:
1. Refine The “Why” of Your Event
The first step for your next event is refining your “why”. In the lead up to your event, we help brands like yours strategically determine unique value draws that will attract your ideal attendees. For example, our global keg rental and logistics client, Global Keg, wanted to have a presence just outside the Craft Brewer’s Conference. And more specifically, they wanted to build brand awareness and acquire more qualified leads in the shadow of the industry organization putting on the event. We helped them do just that by providing an audience-first, unique value-driven approach in their offerings to attendees: a fun, free event called The Global Brewerfest. This event’s ultimate purpose was to bridge the gap between the craft breweries at the CBC and the international markets in a way that promoted industry unity and provided inclusive networking opportunities for all breweries around Global Keg’s products and services.
2. Harness Your Company’s “Fish in a Barrel” Moments
What are the “fish in a barrel” opportunities for your business? You can best introduce new prospects to the unique benefits of your brand in person where and when you find the highest concentrations of your target audience offline. For context, Global Keg’s event occurred just outside America’s largest craft brewing industry event, so potential prospects surrounded them. The Global BrewerFest pulled in these prospects by featuring unique offerings to attendees that weren’t found anywhere else. Since a large percentage of Global Keg’s growth has taken place outside of the US, we helped them seize the opportunity to bring borderless beer to an event that previously only represented craft breweries in the US. They had the only dedicated international presence during the conference, demonstrating their genuine ability to help breweries go global.
3. Maintain Professional Authority
Whether you need branding for trade show displays, marketing materials, branded swag, or an effective way to talk about your brand, get the necessary help to present your event with authority. To make the right impression and attract the right leads it’s critical that you work with a creative branding agency. Building successful customer relationships requires companies to establish a strong brand identity at their events and in the lead up to the big day. For Global Keg, we designed a custom logo for their event, a landing page, and created all of their related physical and digital marketing materials. The harmony of event branding increased trust among new leads and developed more brand advocates thanks to guidance from a professional branding agency.
4. Build the Right Kind of Buzz
Finding the perfect channel to promote your event depends on your current marketing strategy. In our experience, the best results are achieved by combining a Google Ads strategy, PR strategy, and targeted social media advertising to funnel interested audiences to the registration form on the landing page. For Global Keg, social media was the perfect channel to generate publicity and target the right demographics considering we’d built up their Facebook following to 10,000 in less than 10 months. We implemented a powerful hyper-targeting strategy to help them collect over 800 of the most qualified pre-registration leads before the event with only two weeks of lead time, plus an additional 1,200 leads during the 2-day event.
5. Broadcast Live and Gather Content
After all the build-up to the event, it’s time to activate your brand with a bang. An easy way to multiply awareness and engagement beyond your event is by broadcasting live to your followers on social media in real time. During the Global BrewerFest, our team was on-site to fulfill our live streaming strategies from the event while gathering video and photo content. In addition to getting popular industry influencers to show up at the event using Instagram Stories, we amassed social and digital content of the event’s success and dished out serious FOMO to any followers who didn’t attend.
6. Nurture New Leads with Value
Capitalize on the success of your event by following up with the new leads you’ve collected. The follow-up effort of re-marketing enables your brand to stay on the top of your clients’ and customers’ minds. Then, deploy email marketing and social media targeting strategies to nurture those new leads, drive more conversions, and help your team close more sales.
Successful brands use these 6 steps to improve event marketing results. Of course, the right event type, marketing strategy, and tactics will depend on your goals, industry, and marketing budget. We recommend getting started by having a conversation with experts who deliver more ROI and red hot leads. Whether you’re interested in supercharging your event marketing, or need to deliver a stronger return on your marketing efforts, our team is here to help.