You may have heard of event marketing, but never actually put it into practice for your business. If you’re wondering ‘what is event-based marketing?’, we’ve got you covered with some top tips for event planners and the benefits that you could see from using them in your marketing strategy.
What is event-based marketing?
Event marketing is the process of developing an in-person or online event to promote a product, service or organisation. These events can include trade shows, exhibitions, presentations, workshops, and more, depending on your industry. Find out more about types of event marketing.
Using events as a marketing channel gives your business a unique opportunity to capture the full attention of potential customers. Therefore, encouraging your brand to build relationships and generate those all-important leads.
What is event organisation?
Event organisation refers to the practicalities of creating online or in-person events based on your product or services to attract a specific audience. It involves everything from planning and scheduling an event to arranging the venue, speakers and promotion.
Event marketing can be beneficial to all types of business, from niche B2B organisations to large-scale B2C e-commerce businesses. We’ve outlined the key benefits that event marketing can have for your business:
Build brand awareness
Whilst you may be familiar with marketing being all about bringing in leads and generating sales, there’s much more to it than that. Building brand awareness, especially for newer or smaller businesses, should be a high priority for your marketing activity.
Event marketing is a marketing channel in itself and can be leveraged to build brand awareness amongst attendees. Use events to generate excitement and interest about your brand and what the event has to offer. An effective way to build both brand awareness and trust is to engage with thought-leaders in your industry. Invite them to talk at your conference or ask them to host your exhibition!
Brand awareness is key to developing authority in your industry and helping you to grow as a business.
Generate leads
Although lead generation shouldn’t be the sole aim of your marketing activity, it’s an important business goal. Luckily, event marketing is a great way to generate strong leads.
In the world of digital marketing and the growing number of social media apps and digital channels, it can be difficult to hold the attention of a potential customer. Unlike some other marketing channels, through event marketing, you’re more likely to generate leads that will actually convert due to the fact that your potential customers are actively engaged with your brand during your event. The longer that your audience engages with your brand, the higher your customer acquisition rate is likely to be.
Build authentic relationships with others in your industry
By organising events, your business will not only be able to build authentic relationships with your customers, but also with industry experts and other organisations.
Strong commercial relationships and the potential to benefit from other brands’ influence and reputation can be invaluable to your business. From building relationships with industry thought-leaders to identifying potential influencers in your space, there are many positive relationships that can develop as a result of event marketing.
Gather customer feedback and insights
So far we’ve focused a lot on customer acquisition and brand awareness. Alternatively, event marketing can be a great way to gather customer insights about your audience.
Although it may seem that real-life events are a thing of the past, there are still a huge number of benefits to hosting in-person events such as trade shows. You get invaluable access when you host an event for your potential customer. Use this to your advantage to help understand their needs, wants, and pain points. This, in turn, can inform business and marketing decisions to ensure that your product or service is meeting the needs of your customers. Using feedback questionnaires, polls and even traditional face-to-face conversations can help deepen your understanding of your customer.
By allowing customers to trial your product or service, you gain honest opinions. This is ideal for collecting feedback and implementing it into your business.
Target customers
Coming back to the question of ‘what is event organisation’, an important part of the process is identifying your target audience. Event marketing allows you to organise an event that actively targets your desired audience. Examples of targeting customers through event marketing include:
- Hosting events in specific geographical locations that align with your target audience demographic
- Choosing types of events that appeal to the interests or age of your audience. For example, organise an interactive, high-tech event for audiences with an interest in gaming and video technology.
Event marketing looks different for everyone
There is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when it comes to event marketing. Different types of events will work for different audiences, brands and industries.
