Event Marketing & Experience

How to Use Event Marketing and Promote Your Products

Victoria Rudi
March 1, 2018

Table of Contents

Let’s talk about your marketing efforts.

How do you usually promote and sell your products? Do you invest in social media ads? Are you redirecting all of your actions to inbound marketing? Do you pour money into creating sophisticated advertising?

Good—all of this counts.

But what if I told you there’s a way to increase the impact of your marketing plan tenfold?

Look, you’re doing all the right things, but you’re still missing the bigger picture.

We are living in an increasingly fragmented society, strongly shaped by the digital layer. People have decreased attention spans and less interest in paying attention to your online messages. This interest drops even more when the information attendees are receiving has a commercial character.

The good news is that you have access to a powerful promotional tool called event marketing.

Events emerge as a necessary counterbalance to the disconnected world that digital marketing created.

Companies and brands should take event marketing more seriously, and here’s why:

Event marketing or marketing at the speed of change

According to the EventTrack Event & Experiential Marketing Industry Forecast & Best Practices Study, 87% of consumers say that events are more effective than commercials.

If you want to improve your customer outreach efforts, think about developing an event marketing strategy for your company or corporation.

By doing so, you’ll increase your chances of achieving the following milestones:

Jumpstarting your brand awareness. By running events or positioning your brand events as an industry reference, you’ll get a higher number of leads to find out about your company.

Attracting qualified leads. You can’t be sure about the quality of your leads who drop their emails through your forms. Yet, when it comes to event marketing, you can have more control over the type of attendees you can have.

Driving sales and revenue growth. The ultimate goal of event marketing is to help you increase the number of sales.

Building meaningful business relationships. Events offer you the optimal environment for creating and fostering valuable connections with your attendees that may take form of relevant business exchanges.

Creating value. The secret to successful event marketing is the same as for inbound marketing. It works when it’s authentic and it adds value. However, when the value you produce exceeds your attendees’ expectations, you are one step closer to achieving your business-related goals.

If you still aren’t convinced, here’s a quick breakdown of the system that makes brand events indispensable for your promotion strategy:

How event marketing works

Strengthen your industry position

Event marketing is your ticket to positioning your brand as a thought leader.

By planning and running successful brand events that truly resonate with your attendees, you’re establishing or strengthening your industry position as a thought leader and game changer.

Foster engagement and retention

By using event marketing as your strategy, you can enhance the business relationships you already have with your existing clients.

It allows you to show your loyalty and commitment to your clients by offering them a series of attending privileges and unique experiences. Brand events are the perfect occasion to make your existing clients decide to stick with you, and maybe even take the next step and opt for a more advanced plan or new product.

Provide custom brand experience

Your buyer personas want to learn more about how your products or services can solve their problems.

Event marketing provides you with the perfect context to explore this new way of communication and interaction with potential clients by designing unique brand experiences.

According to Chris Cavanaugh, executive vice president and CMO of Freeman, we are witnessing a growing trend in terms of custom brand experience, called the “festivalization of meetings,” described as a “merging of special events, entertainment, content, and learning.” In other words, brand events will help you generate incredible experiences by mixing entertainment and education.

Become a buzz generator

Do you want people to talk about you? Well, what better way to achieve that than by running brand events that add real value to your attendees’ professional and personal life? More than that, event marketing is a great news generator.

Do you want to see your brand’s name in popular media outlets? A great benefit of brand events is the possibility of making your name known and actually producing news about your products and services that’s truly relevant.

Considering all these aspects, here are the steps you must take to promote your brand through event marketing:

How to promote your products during an event

Step #1. Invite the right people

Assess your target audience.

Is your event designed for those people who can’t articulate their problems or for those who are searching for solutions?

Do you intend to run the event for your potential leads who have already decided they want to purchase a solution, and are considering different brands?

Or is it a mixed event?

It’s important to define your goals. Subsequently, this will help you decide the attendee personas profile and invite the right people.

Step #2. Ensure massive value

Your event shouldn’t revolve around product presentations only. To get people on board and help them understand your unique value proposition, you must offer them something in exchange.

Your event marketing should be solution-based, not product-based.

That’s why you must identify and understand attendee problems you can solve during your event. Subsequently, you can invite valuable speakers that will offer quick wins and meaningful insights, empowering the guests with the necessary tools to overcome their challenges.

Step #3. Don’t sell; enchant

Nobody likes to come to your event and be the victim of constant, obvious marketing campaigns such as, “Buy this right now.”

This won’t work, and it might alienate or offend your guests.

Instead, you can think about designing unique, in-person brand experiences. By doing so, you’ll get your guests to actually speak about how cool your products or services are.

Before planning your brand event, talk with your marketing team and define a series of engaging experiential marketing settings.

Step #4. Set up the post-event follow up

To provide a truly coherent brand experience, you must engage constantly with your attendees, post-event included. So before planning your brand event, decide how you’ll communicate with the attendees afterward.

For an efficient follow-up strategy, apart from the standard thank-you emails, engage with your audience by sharing relevant content you discussed during the event presentations, videos, etc.

Don’t forget to use a powerful event management software that will help you with the mailing campaigns. In addition, remind your guests about your products or services by offering them a special discount or incentive for attending the event, which will make them feel special.

Wrap up

So if you’ve never though about event marketing as a product or brand promotion tool, maybe it’s time to consider it.

Engage your potential leads in face-to-face interaction and enchant them with unique brand experiences. Guarantee massive value and always maintain the post-event relationships. Try event marketing and get involved at a personal level with your target groups.

Discover how Eventtia helps world-leading brands digitize and scale their events

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Discover how Eventtia helps world-leading brands digitize and scale their events

Victoria Rudi
Senior Content Specialist
With a Master’s degree in Event Management and a keen follower of SaaS technologies, Victoria is an event content master, producing insightful and valuable for Eventtia’s blog and beyond

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