Event Marketing: Creating a Holistic Approach

Event Marketing: Creating a Holistic Approach

Image source: Pixabay

As more and more businesses use events to increase brand awareness and audience engagement, it’s becoming ever clearer that consistent and unified marketing strategies are now playing a more vital role than ever before.

Whether you’re hosting a small event or a large-scale conference, in this post, we’ll be providing you with actionable advice on how to create a holistic approach to event marketing to ensure its success. From pre-event promotion online to on-the-day branding, you’ll find plenty of great ideas for maximising audience engagement in both physical and digital spaces.

Create consistent branding

Before you even begin to look at promoting your event, it’s imperative to establish a clear and consistent brand presence. Your brand image lies at the core of your business, so ensuring it’s powerful, cohesive and persistent is going to lay the foundations for impactful event marketing. Your event website, blog, social media channels and physical branding should all convey the same branding message: who you are, who you’re targeting and where you want to be. From here, you can build a holistic marketing strategy that will push your brand to the forefront at an event, be it a one-off product launch or an annual exhibition.

Nail down your event website

With consistent branding in place, it’s now time to start drumming up interest and excitement around your event before the big day. With pre-event promotion, it’s crucial to start early and make sure you keep up the momentum leading up to the event. The first step is nailing down your digital approach by setting up an event website or page that will be the cornerstone of all your marketing efforts. This page should have compelling content about the event, quality images that can be shared on social media, and regularly curated blog content to entice your audience in – and, of course, a clearly visible pre-registration button.

Get social with your audience

Image source: Pixabay

From your event page, you can then push further into the digital marketing sphere, utilizing social media and email marketing to build anticipation and excitement for the event. Create a structured format for releasing information leading up to the event – as you’ll want to create curiosity and excitement by drip feeding key information. From staggering announcements about keynote speakers and teasers about event schedules to creating a unique event hashtag and posting event-related videos and blogs on social media, there are plenty of ways you can tap into the demands of your audience. Also, utilizing existing databases with pre-event emails and early bird discounts can be highly effective in creating a buzz around your event and helping you incentivize pre-registration. Increasing the frequency of social media and mailing as the event draws closer will also help to keep your event at the forefront of potential attendees’ minds.

On-the-day marketing

With people through the door, you need to execute a physical brand presence throughout the venue, which is where your approach to on-the-day marketing will prove invaluable. To keep things unified, bring your digital branding into the physical space by using display materials like branded dump bins and banners, as well as branded merchandise, flyers and goodie bags for attendees to take away. At the same time, enhance attendee engagement and experience with interactive digital marketing, such as micro-blogging and questionnaires throughout the day – as these will also allow you to be reactive to the needs of your visitors.

Build on your success after the event

Once the event is over, the work doesn’t stop. Now more than ever event organizers are building on the success of events and audience engagement through post-event marketing. If you want a holistic approach to event marketing, then don’t wait until your next event to get busy. Keep audiences engaged with branded communication after the event with post-event surveys, post highlights from the day on social media and of course, don’t forget to thank everyone for attending and making your event memorable. This will all go towards demonstrating that you value their time and input to the event, but it will also help buy-in for future events, too.

By building the right foundations with strong, consistent branding and a well thought out strategy that utilizes both physical and digital marketing from the concept stage right through to the post-event analysis, you can create a fully unified marketing strategy that will significantly increase your brand awareness and user engagement.

Author: Siobhan Scotti

Bio: Siobhan Scott is Marketing Executive at shop4pop.com. With over 40 years’ experience creating and producing full event and retail campaigns for large national clients in a variety of industries, they’ve been able to transfer their expertise from Simpson Group to the new web-to-print website – shop4pop.com