Dakota Murphy outlines why it’s valuable to record every detail of your standout event.
Participating in trade shows, exhibitions or conferences can reap incredible rewards. From fostering partnerships to generating new referrals and revenue streams, exhibiting at an event can be tremendously beneficial. The real challenge lies in ensuring that your event participation translates into tangible, long-lasting results for your business.
Capturing the success of your standout event is crucial for building momentum and capitalising on potential business opportunities. Content marketing is an ever-evolving strategy, especially in this day and age, so executing the right approach from the outset is key. In this short article, we’ll explore strategies for promoting your event appearance, capturing your achievements evocatively, and leveraging them to fuel future growth potential.
Celebrate your wins
There is a case to be made that the immediate aftermath of an event is the most crucial time for nurturing leads and promoting activities online. The actions you take once the buzz of an event has waned are pivotal, but it’s wise to consider the right strategy before you promote your achievements to your audience. Granted, it reinforces your brand visibility and identity, but it pays dividends to make sure you select the right methods and media for doing so.
Social media
Social media platforms make powerful channels for sharing your event triumphs with a broad audience, particularly if you have a following on multiple channels. Consider the following types of social media content:
- Share visually striking photos and videos from the event that capture the quintessential vibe of the event. Consider taking a broad range of shots using a reputable DSLR like the Hasselblad XPan camera or a similar event-friendly model to capture moments in time, and dispense these with clever captions to inspire social media traction.
- Highlight and create easy-to-digest infographics that present statistics, findings and facts. Consider highlighting lesser-known figures that emphasise how successful your input or presence was.
- Encourage your audience to share their experiences with your brand at the event, by discovering brands through hashtags and group pages. Consider timing messages and posts while you’re there to encourage more real-time conversations.
Email marketing
One of the most common and successful post-event marketing channels is email, with HubSpot recently reporting that segmented emails drive 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs. Email presents a tremendous opportunity to keep the buzz of the event alive once the dust settles.
Throughout your time at the event, gather – with consent, of course – personal details of those who could qualify as potentially good customers, suppliers, or partners. Bolster your mailing list and CRM to create a more recent, unified list. From this, craft compelling email campaigns that resonate and add value. You can use highlights of your event appearance to trigger responses while fresh in your new contacts’ minds. Use visuals, testimonials and data to make emails more engaging at first glance.
Website and blog
Your company’s website and blog are valuable platforms for sharing your event triumphs.
Delve deeper into your event appearance in blog posts and provide more tangible conclusions about your achievements. Ahead of your appearance, promote and build anticipation for your presence in blog updates, and tie these in seamlessly with social media and email campaigns to possibly inspire more event attendee registrations. Tying this in with effective networking is a great driver of event attendance, as a 2023 EventsForce whitepaper highlighted.
Consider publishing event reports with statistics, key highlights and lessons learned to emphasise how valuable and enriching the event appearance was for your brand.
Capturing achievements for future growth
Promoting your event’s success helps keep customers and prospects engaged with your brand before it fades into the unending digital ether. However, it’s also important to capture and document your achievements for internal purposes.
The data, insights and conversations you gain from your event serve as a valuable resource to guide future event planning and strategies. Prospective employees can be persuaded to share in future success if they hear about your event wins, and stakeholders may be inclined to take the business in a more event-focused direction if the findings tell a convincing story.
Consider the following to build on the success of your event:
- Encourage all representatives and attendees at the event to gather, and collate data from the event, and collect honest feedback and observations, including successes and challenges.
- Create a centralised repository and knowledge base for event-related resources, such as marketing or staff training materials.
- Recognise and reward team members who contributed significantly to the event’s success or fostered noteworthy conversations.
- Reassess the security of all collated event attendee and vendor data.
- Offer exclusive promotions, demos, or early access to services as a gesture of appreciation.
- Explore opportunities for healthy collaboration among possible vendors or suppliers that you encountered at the event.
Participating in a standout event is a tremendous achievement, but the true success lies in your ability to build upon that momentum. The events industry itself is poised for great things in 2024, but it’s down to you to ensure your brand is best set up for success during an event.
Effectively capturing and conveying your event success will not only reinforce your brand’s visibility and credibility but also unlock valuable opportunities for future growth. Positioning these wins in external and internal content, using the methods outlined in this guide, will prove instrumental in helping you achieve more during and after your event appearance.
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