Digital Marketing to Power Brand Events

15 Mar Digital Marketing to Power Brand Events

Brand events can be powerful experiences that generate buzz, increase sales, and boost brand loyalty. They also offer valuable direct feedback and interaction with customers. Brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Apple use innovative brand events to build relationships with customers, journalists, and influencers. Smaller brands and businesses can also use brand events to help grow sales and create new relationships.

According to PwC, roughly $108 billion is spent on event marketing in the US every year, and for charities and nonprofits, experiential events are key to their organizations. 

How to market your brand event

A brand event can only be successful if people know about it and want to attend.

So how can you attract larger numbers to your next brand event or brand experience? Digital marketing can play an important role.

Online advertising

Let’s start with online advertising. Facebook’s Ad Manager offers impressive tools to help you tailor your marketing very specifically to a chosen audience. It’s possible to define your target audience by various criteria, including location, interests, age, occupation, and so on. It is a very efficient way of advertising the event because you can be so specific about the people you want to reach. 

Facebook can also use the profiles of your existing customers, to find you new potential customers with a similar profile to the people who already buy from you, and could be interested in your product or service. 

Facebook can also be used for B2B audiences. However, if you are looking to attract other businesses to your event rather than consumers, LinkedIn might be a better alternative. It offers highly customizable advertising in a similar vein to Facebook but with a much richer number of business profiles on its platform.  

Outreach campaigns

If you have run brand events in the past, you will likely have the contact details for previous attendees and you can run an email or text campaign to let people know the event they enjoyed previously is on again.

There are also likely to be places online where people interested in the topic congregate. There may be specific apps or social media groups where people naturally discuss things related to your industry or product category. It makes sense to market the brand event there, as you’ll have a far more receptive audience.

Creative social media posts on Instagram, or videos on TikTok or YouTube can be other great ways to announce and publicize your brand event.

Don’t overlook the idea of street-level marketing to complement digital marketing efforts – posters and print advertising can generate interest local to the event. This can be done relatively cheaply but it will cost more than social media placement. Weigh up your options and do your research first.

Another option to consider for smaller businesses is the power of collaboration. If two brands that may complement each other combine to put on an event, it’s possible to diversify and broaden the audience slightly. Just make sure you don’t stray away from your core purpose but consider expanding to include complementary offerings to increase the number of attendees.

Amplify your event with digital platforms

Consider setting up live-stream access on social media websites for those who couldn’t otherwise attend your event to amplify the exposure. You could also create unique VIP packages and add-ons and other exclusive event options to generate PR. 

After the event, digital marketing should also be used to reformat content captured from the event to promote your company on social media. Analytics tools can be used to monitor the uplift in PR coverage and brand mentions online to measure how effective your experiential campaign has been. Lessons can then be learned from the data and applied to future events. 

If you would like help with your brand messaging, advertising, and digital marketing in Charlotte, North Carolina, to Seattle, Washington, and everywhere in between, get in touch with Visual Caffeine to learn how we can help you.