What is event marketing?

Today’s market for the consumer poses the dilemma of countless pitches and advertisements a day, so when it comes to making purchasing decisions, you really need to catch the buyer’s attention on first sight. One particularly effective method of connecting with customers is through event marketing. Event marketing is the process of developing a themed exhibit, display, or presentation to promote a product, service, cause, or organization leveraging in-person engagement. Events can occur online or offline, and can be participated in, hosted, or sponsored as a form of engagement.

Using events as a marketing strategy gives potential customers a unique, tangible interaction with the company and a true understand of the company’s focus, perspective, and personality. The buyer of today goes about making purchasing decisions at their own rate, usually after careful consideration, so marketers must be ready to seize every opportunity to start a relationship and earn the trust of prospective buyers. Arguably there are less time-consuming and budget friendly methods of marketing but by incorporating event marketing into your overall marketing strategy, it can pay dividends in connecting with buyers on a impactful level.

Event marketing can reward your business in a multiple ways. Aside from helping to build brand presence before, during, and after the event, you can generate leads, pipeline value, and new opportunities. In addition to leads, event marketing can help promote a specific product or feature and increase overall customer satisfaction and engagement. It is also an opportunity to data capture potential buyer’s information. This can be useful when you have promotions, new products or simply want to shed light on your customers’ spending habits.

Now more than ever, it’s important for businesses to stand out from the crowd, and event marketing is a great place to start. Not only does event marketing give you new channels and tools to use to engage with future and returning customers, the customer data you collect from other sources can allow you to get to know them prior to the event, so they can be treated as individuals rather than a crowd being sold to which works— In market research studies, 73% of event planners believe that personalization and data-driver marketing is a priority for their events. Whether you are hosting a small webinar, a large-scale international trade show, or an executive-level private function, event marketing should be an integral part of your demand generation mix. Contact the Varii team today and let us help you coordinate your future event marketing strategies.