Event Marketing: The Magic of In-Person and Online Events

When it comes to B2B marketing, what do you think is the most overlooked strategy to grow recognition and business? It isn’t video content and definitely not cold outreach. In today’s hype-train-hopping marketing world, young marketers are forgetting one of the best ways to grow a business–networking.??

Trends like influencer marketing and programmatic ads are great channels. But, a solid networking and PR strategy for event marketing goes a long way in maintaining a strong reputation while building a healthy network of peers and prospects.?

And, it isn’t all traditional marketing either. The lockdown showed us the power of a simple webinar session being an effective way to educate your prospects and generate brand awareness. But as we work towards the final quarter of 2023, the isolation days are behind us.?

The true magic of event marketing is the combination of online and offline events.?

Here’s Why It’s Time to Go Back to In-Person Events

While conducting a webinar is absolutely the easiest way to hold an event, it isn’t the most effective. Since you’re conversing through a screen, it becomes hard to make a connection with your audience and share a good experience, altogether.?

In-person events may not be as convenient as a Zoom call, but they are amazing for better audience experience. The presenters get to interact with a live, engaging crowd that makes the event lively and memorable. The audience members get a chance to make valuable industry connections. Your brand gets associated with a strong list of attendees, building your company as an authoritative entity in the industry.?

All-in-all, your event acts as the source for educating your audience, building a solid network, and giving your brand a good rapport. That said, it is still wise to keep your events diverse.

Keeping Room For Online Events and On-Demand Content

With all the great benefits of in-person events, you still need to keep room for on-demand and live, online events. That way, you can also target your audience that can’t make it to in-person events.?

So, how do you make a good event marketing strategy that incorporates all of that??

Consider These 4 Factors While Making Your Strategy

Assuming you already meet prerequisites like understanding your audience and budget limitations, you need to focus on these 4 factors:

1. Selecting the Right Mix of Formats

When you divide in-person and online events, you get a mix of different formats. You can conduct trade shows, online or offline conferences, webinars, workshops, seminars, and promo events.

Depending on your goals, you need to select which formats work best. Ideally, online events like webinars and live conferences are great for generating leads. On the other hand, you can host workshops or seminars to educate your existing customers and prospects about your product.?

2. Decide on the Content and Set Your Theme and Messaging

Once you know the formats you want to work with, make a list of topics you want to talk about. Think of possible challenges, activities, industry areas, or general concepts that you think would work.?

After you know the content for your events, set a standard theme and messaging format. This will help you set the right tone for your brand. This is a very important consideration as one of the main purposes behind an event is branding and increasing your recall value.?

3. Nail Marketing Activities to Generate Adequate Registrations

Regardless of how popular your brand or product is, you need to promote your events to get registrations. Consider a solid promotional strategy that includes multiple channels and targets all relevant audiences.?

Some great ways to promote your events are email campaigns, advertisements, social media announcements, etc. If you still fall short of your target number, consider external help for generating leads.?

UnboundB2B specializes in lead generation for events like webinars. We promote your events using multiple channels based on your requirements. Some of those are email campaigns that target an existing database of IT and SaaS decision-makers, customized landing pages and programmatic ads, telemarketing, and more.?

Want to know more about this? Click here to get more information and contact us.

4. Event Branding Material

Standees, banners, brochures, company cards, booklets, and any other creative branding material you can think of, are great additions to your event. These materials provide better information about the event while displaying your branding.

Creating event branding material needs a thoughtful design and ideation process, followed by printing and logistics. So, make sure you prepare these beforehand to avoid last-minute hassle.?

You can also create trailers, GIFs, infographics, or promo images to promote your events. These are relatively easier to manage as you’ll be working on them in-house.?

After considering these factors and setting everything up, there is one more thing to make the most out of your events.?

Repurposing Events with On-Demand Access

Repurposing any of your marketing activities is a great idea to make more while doing less. If you repurpose your events, you can direct your attendees to the next step while using the repurposed content for other activities.?

For example, you can use bits and pieces of your event to post on YouTube or social media. You can also create associated content like blogs and articles and mention them during your event so the attendees can check it out later.?

Some other repurposing ideas include making an ebook, embedding videos for social proofing/PR, making the events into a podcast, etc.?

Once you diversify your event marketing with online and offline events along with on-demand content, you can experience a significant boost to your demand and brand awareness.?

About The Orange Draft

The Orange Draft is UnboundB2B’s LinkedIn newsletter where we post marketing content that educates and inspires marketing professionals. This edition was our way of discussing topics that are not often given the attention they deserve.

And speaking of on-demand content and events, UnboundB2B has something exciting lined up for the near future. Be sure to follow us here on LinkedIn and other social media platforms to be the first ones to know about our updates.