The Future of Events as Marketing Tools

As an event planner, you know all about marketing your events – but what if you flipped the script, and used events as a marketing tool for your business?

If you think about it, events can be fantastic marketing tools that deliver an outstanding return on investment (ROI). You’ll just need to know how to use them as such. Let’s take a look at two of the most prominent, real-world examples.

Webinars

For several years now, businesses (especially in the educational space) have used webinars as a platform for connecting with potential customers on a personal level. The formula for these intimate events is usually pretty straightforward:

Step 1: Send a webinar invitation to your mailing list

Step 2: Host a webinar that speaks about a certain topic or issue, then offer your product, service or solution at the end of the webinar

Step 3: Make the webinar available on-demand, so invitees who missed the live event can watch the webinar in their own time (and hopefully become customers)

As a bonus for live attendees, hold a Q&A session and answer any questions they may have. This will increase audience engagement and build goodwill/trust among attendees.

Live events

These can be your most powerful marketing tools around. At live events, you have a captive audience who have made time to attend your event in person – making them, in sales terminology, hot leads. This provides an excellent opportunity for you to build up your brand and close sales.

To improve the effectiveness of live events as a marketing tool, increase your level of engagement with attendees. You can do this via an event app or voting system. Asking participants for their opinions and getting their feedback also provides you with qualitative data that you can use as trustworthy marketing research results.

What’s next?

There’s certainly a bright future ahead for events – and not just in a traditional sense, but for innovative brands who are open to using events as marketing tools. With more event types headed our way in the years ahead – from virtual events to hybrid events, and more – there’s a lot for event managers to think about today, if you want to stay ahead of the game in the coming years.

If you’d like to discuss how you can transform your events from cost centres into profit-driven, marketing centres (by making them engaging and analytics-driven), speak to your local Angage consultant today.