How to Use Events to Drive Business Growth and Customer Engagement
If you use events as a channel to generate brand awareness, create leads, and win more business, then you’ll want to make the most of every opportunity to engage with prospects.
Larger companies tend to grab more of the audience by investing in bigger spaces and bolder designs while offering better promotions to draw in more of the audience.
But that’s not always a viable option, and it can add thousands to the budget, which you simply may not have.
Here we look at cool tricks to market your brand at events that can achieve the same results for a fraction of the spend.
Whether you’re at an outdoor festival, trade show, or indoor exhibition, they hit the mark.
Beacon technology
Beacon technology allows you to market to people within a set proximity, expanding the reach of your brand beyond your paid-for promotional area.
Take sporting competitions, music festivals, or public celebrations, for example.
There are thousands of people wandering past you all day, but the additional crowds mean that visibility on the ground can be poor. It’s easy for your brand to get lost.
There may also be music, video screens, and performers — all there to grab attention and take it away from you.
So what’s an alternative way for your brand to compete? Via mobile phones.
Beacon technology allows you to push communication to devices that come within close proximity of your space.
It’s a great channel for promotional messages, offers, and competitions to draw in your audience and give them a reason to visit your stand.
Now you’re instantly extending the size of your stand, and you have an uninterrupted platform for getting your brand message the attention it deserves.
There are a couple of things you’ll need to make this happen, though:
- A beacon technology provider. Beacons are Bluetooth Low Energy signals that interact with an application like an event app or Google Chrome App to push information to a device. Once the device receives the information, it can track the device within the transmission area.
- Good event site WiFi to make sure that you can access your applications and ensure that your beacon messages get through.
Beacon technology can also be incorporated into name badges, wristbands, and other wearable devices to allow event organizers to track attendee movement and give insights into how people move around event sites for future planning.
Shareable content/experiences
Our next trick is to go beyond the reach of an in-event audience by producing sharable content.
This could be first dibs on trying a new product, a promotional offer or freebie, a guide, or an exclusive video.
Take time to think about what your audience will engage with and share amongst friends and social media platforms.
If you’re going down this route, then creating an event-specific landing page can help you to measure its success, plus give users a seamless event experience, helping with conversion rates.
Using event-specific QR codes and making the landing page shareable with friends outside of the event can really help make your content go viral, increasing your reach multiple times over.
A good tip here is to hire video screens to broadcast the content or experience at your event to assist with getting the punters in.
Know how event incentives can increase participation. It may sound obvious, but everybody loves a freebie, so if you can afford to offer something for free, then numbers will really start to soar.
Some great examples of this strategy include when Uber gave away free taxi rides to festival go-ers at the South by South-West Festival in Texas.
The reach of this event sensation extended not only around the event itself but beyond it onto social media platforms.
Or a free coffee in a branded cup, given out where students hang out, is a tactic used by the University of Law to recruit students to their postgraduate law conversion courses.
Students talk, post on social media, and promote the experience for the brand, helping to drive more and more signups.
Promotions like this have delivered a cost per engagement of £4.80 and a 280% uplift in the pipeline.
It works, and it doesn’t have to be costly, just desirable.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Giving your audience a chance to immerse themselves in your brand fully helps heighten their empathy through the use of emotions and increases your conversion rates.
If you sell a product or service that can be visualized, then why not take your audience off to a whole new world and, at the same time, help them start to build positive feelings and loyalty for your brand?
It is said that memories are linked to emotions.
Creating VR and AR experiences that engage with emotions will impart a more lasting impression.
With a separate viewing screen strategically positioned for passers-by to watch the immersive event taking place, you can draw in more punters and extend your reach even further.
Whether you opt for an arcade-style competition, a sporting experience, a brand experience that’s custom-built, or an augmented reality advert promoting your product, people love new technology.
If you do opt for VR or AR, then be sure to create additional social media content from the campaign to extend the return on investment even further.
Author: Ashley Smith, Director at Fli-Fi Ltd
Fli-Fi is a temporary WiFi and connectivity provider that works with experiential marketing agencies and brands to implement cutting-edge event technology strategies.
