Event Marketing Guide: Benefits, Ideas and Examples

If you’re struggling to build brand authority and increase product sales, chances are you are missing out on one of the best strategies in marketing. A recent event statistics research reveals that 83% of brands that have invested in event marketing have consistently increased their sales. In this guide, we’ll talk about the importance of event marketing, and how you can benefit from it. We will also give you some event marketing ideas and examples.

1. What is Event Marketing?

Event marketing is a widely popular marketing strategy to enhance engagement between businesses and clients. By hosting and promoting events that are relevant to your audience, you can increase your brand authority and generate leads. In addition, you can use events to spread awareness of your products and corporate values. Overall, it brings you the benefit of publicizing your brand and products while creating meaningful connections with your audience.

Using events as a promotion tool is not a new tactic. However, it became more popular after the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, since in-person interactions were limited during that time, many businesses started to experiment with online events. Surprisingly, by hosting events they were able to reach an even bigger audience. 

2. What Benefits Event Marketing Can Bring to your Business

There are numerous benefits your organization can get from adopting an event marketing strategy. Here’s a list of benefits event marketing can bring to your business:

Build Brand Authority 

Brand authority is related to how much customers trust a company, and to what extent they see it as the leading brand on the market. As a matter of fact, many companies are known solely by their products brand’s names, such as Band-Aid, Vanish, or Pepsi. This concept not only shows the quality of their products and services, but also how active they are in the community.

One way of using event marketing to build brand authority is by promoting your upcoming events with newsletters and on social media. You can also do that by attending events, and interacting directly with your customers. 

Better Customer Engagement

Event Marketing can help you engage with your audience and customers. For example, you can use  quizzes, questionnaires, or forms to interact and engage with your audience pre, during and pos events. By involving your participants on every phase, they will feel more interested on your event, and more connected to your organization.

You can also give them something to remember you, like a gift or souvenir when they stop at your booth. This way, your audience will think of you every time they need the service or specific skill you provide.

Generate Business Opportunities

Another benefit of event marketing is that it can also help you generate leads and business opportunities. 

For example, by utilizing an event marketing platform you can allow people to register online for your events, and then collect their contact information. You can also use custom questions in your online booking form to gather even more personalized information. You can ask people about their preferences, needs, or reasons to attend your event.

Later, you can review and analyze the answers to understand which attendees are more likely to become customers. Consequently, event marketing can increase the quality of your leads, leading to better potential deals.

Get Blogging Material

Preparing an event marketing plan and hosting promotional events can boost your creativity! While planning, promoting, hosting, and attending events, you can learn about new topics to discuss in your blog. This will also help you promote your upcoming events, since you will be able to link it to relevant content on your blog for people who are interested in your service.

Improve SEO

More than creating blog posts, you can also use event marketing to improve website traffic with event related content. That’s because the more content you have on your website, and the more people that interact with your content, the more relevant keywords you will be ranked for.

It all depends on how well you handle and present your event information online. A great idea is to integrate an event management software for corporate events in your website. 

3. Event Marketing Ideas and Examples to Promote Your Business

There are various types of events that you can use to advertise your brand and products. Most of them can bring you benefits even before they happen, especially if you have a good event planning process. Here are some event marketing ideas and examples to inspire you:

Conferences

Conferences are large meetings to discuss a specific topic. Business conferences are normally held for people that are in the same industry and have similar interests. In this case, industry experts and newcomers gather together to discuss market trends, hear speeches and debate important subjects.

There are four common types of conferences: workshops, symposiums, seminars and round-tables. They can be entertaining to participants, as well as share important knowledge and teach skills in different fields.

Expositions

Another example of event marketing is expositions, also called trade fairs. Expositions are events where companies showcase their products and their new offerings.

Expositions normally gather many companies in several booths inside large expo halls. There, companies can demonstrate their products, and host workshops, round tables, and even one-on-one meetings with other participants. In conclusion, everything you can do to show industry knowledge and product authenticity will help you create connections with other companies at an exposition.

Launch Parties / Celebrations

Hosting a launch party or celebration is a great event marketing idea to celebrate corporate achievements, product releases, or even meet with key businesses partners. You can invite important clients and stakeholders to your company’s launch parties and celebrations.

This example of event marketing provides a chance to create meaningful connections in a laid-back environment. No need to give big speeches or write extensive research papers - although some previous preparation can help you make the best out of your event.

Webinars

Webinars are small online presentations hosted by companies or their partners. In a webinar, the company chooses a topic to discuss and selects the right speakers. 

One of the nicest aspects of webinars is that you can use more visual elements than in person seminars since the whole event happens online. Another advantage is that you can easily save the recording and add it to your website or streaming platform. This way, you will always have it documented for future demonstrations and reference.

5k Walk or Run

Walks and runs are becoming more popular nowadays. You can use this event marketing idea to organically spread a message about your corporate values and invite people to interact with your brand.

Since this type of event works very well for non-profit organizations, you can partner up to create a thematic run and showcase your product along the road. You can also use these type of event marketing to raise funds for a charity in the name of your company.

4. Timely Event Management Software for Event Marketing

Timely’s Event Management Software for Event Marketing can help you improve your external corporate events planning and promotion, while saving you time and resources.

By using Timely's event marketing platform, you can have an events calendar on your own website that matches your branding and design. Thanks to our varied calendar views and event page layouts, our system will look perfect on your site! Moreover, you can create, edit, schedule and publish event posts, as well as organize events into categories.

Since our event management software is optimized for SEO, you can rest assured that your audience will find your event content online. You can also use Timely’s event marketing tools to share your events automatically as newsletters or on LinkedIn and Facebook.

In addition, you can integrate your online calendar with Timely’s event booking software, and start offering online registrations and ticket sales directly from your website, without intermediaries. 

Turn your events into life-time experiences! Book a meeting to learn more about Timely's event software solutions.