In this guide
Learn how to plan your event marketing strategy, choose your virtual meeting tool, and track results, with this complete guide to event marketing.
Event marketing can have a big impact for your business. Connecting closely with your customers at events can generate an immediate or long-term return on investment (ROI), help to grow your brand, and build customer loyalty.
Throughout this article, we’ll share everything you need to know to plan, execute, and measure the success of your event marketing strategy.
Event marketing is the practice of hosting in-person, hybrid, or virtual events to promote a product or service. The purpose of these events is usually to entertain, educate, or connect with potential customers.
Events make great marketing tools because they maximize your one-to-many marketing efforts. They also help:
Event marketing is much more than an excuse to throw a cool party or master class. Here are 5 figures that prove it’s a profitable way to promote your business:
According to a study conducted by Verified Market Research (2022), the events industry is expected to reach USD 2,194.40 billion in worth by 2028. That means people are and will continue to invest in events for marketing purposes.
Markletic reports that 45% of B2B event organizers expect at least a 3x ROI one year after the event. This means that for B2B marketing, events are highly profitable in the long run.
Having the perfect microphone and webcam for webinars and webcasts is critical for its success. In fact, Markletic shared early this year that 70% of their surveyed marketers agree that having a quality microphone is crucial for these events. A good camera is also important according to 60% of the surveyed people.
Earlier this year, Visme shared that 74% of the surveyed attendees leave the event with a positive impression of the brand. This leads to them doing further research about the brand and potentially becoming customers.
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Any virtual event marketing guide could tell you that there are different types of events that you can use as event marketing tactics, including:
These live events happen face-to-face - not virtually. These events allow your prospects to interact with you and your products firsthand. Examples include:
Online marketing events happen virtually and are only accessible through a meeting link. These events reach a wider (even global) audience. You will likely need an event marketing tool or software to host this kind of event. However, since it requires less effort for people to attend, the signups to attendance ratio are usually lower than in-person events. Use cases include:
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Another great event marketing example is a hybrid event. These events can be attended virtually and in-person, meaning they’re more easily accessible to a wider audience. It usually works by recording and streaming a real-life event to online attendees. Some of the best event marketing examples for a dual audience include:
You should lay out your strategy and define tactics as part of your event marketing plan. Here are our event marketing best practices for virtual conferences, in-person, or hybrid meet-ups:
The first step that you need to follow in your event marketing strategy is setting SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) goals. That way, you can make future data-driven decisions and measure the success of your event in a specific way.
Examples of B2B event marketing goals and objectives include:
One of the key aspects of successful event marketing is planning ahead. A good way to do this is by preparing a timeline with a list of everything that needs to happen before the event.
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A great way to save time in the future and make your job much more efficient is to create an event marketing strategy template. This allows you to have easy access to the basic steps you need to follow for planning an event. You can write one for live, hybrid, or virtual events.
Each event has its particularities and to plan properly, you need to define its format. The type of event and format are tightly linked. The type is the way in which you will reach potential customers, and the format is the structure you’ll follow to reach them. Typical formats include: deminars, conferences, parties, master classes, and sponsored races.
Despite the type of marketing event that you’re hosting, you need to create digital assets to promote and host your event. The different assets that you can’t skip include: social media posts, paid ads, presentation design, banners and backings,and brand kits.
Capture attendees' information and facilitate easy event registration by building and customizing an event landing page. This page should include a:
Your landing page should also be optimized for mobile and tablets.
If you’re hosting a marketing event, you’ll benefit from a platform that supports you at different stages of the meeting. Livestorm allows you to customize event landing pages, host the meeting, and have access to analytics and attendees' information using the same software.
It’s very common for people to sign up for events and forget about them. Having a strong email marketing campaign that sends automated reminders with a planned cadence helps increase the attendance rate. For example, Livestorm allows you to automate email reminders due to our MailChimp integration. You can create plain text or HTML emails and define the dates for them to go out. You can also use your leads email list for marketing an event through email.
The only way to get people to attend your event is by promoting it, and one of the most powerful channels to do it is through social media. You should design a social media campaign that invites followers and non-followers to sign up for your event.
A good idea for promoting your online event is by giving away free access to competition winners. This will help you generate FOMO among your followers and have others sign-up just to avoid missing it in case they don’t win.
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Plan to give your attendees something branded for them to keep. If you're doing an in-person event, you can give them branded clothing, notebooks, or earphones. If you’re hosting a virtual conference, you can giveaway:
If you’re hosting an online or hybrid event, you can follow some of these virtual conference engagement ideas like including interactive elements in the presentation. If you’re using Livestorm to plan, promote, and host your event, you can make use of these interactive elements to enhance the user experience: live polls, Q&A, live chat, emoji reactions and CTAs. You can replace these elements when hosting in-person events by asking people to speak up, raise their hands, or scan a QR code.
Whatever the type of event, if you’re planning a marketing event, it should have a call to action (CTA). The CTA should be aligned with your event goals and help you achieve said objectives.
For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness at a launch party, you can share a hashtag on the screen for people to use when they post pics on social media. You can also create Instagrammable photo opportunities to invite people to promote your event online.
Marketing for an event includes thinking about how to make your event shareable before, during, and after it’s done. If you’re hosting an in-person, online, or hybrid event like a niche conference, you should record it. This recording can be used as evergreen content that you can repurpose and share for a fee or use to get leads. For example, if you do an online personal branding conference, you can then use the recording to create different video modules for people to access once they share their email with you.
Feedback is crucial for growth, and only your attendees can let you know if they found the event useful, entertaining, or a huge waste of time. There are three things you can do to gather feedback during the event (if it’s a presentation):
The way you measure the success of your event depends solely on the goals you’ve set for yourself. However, these are some of the metrics that you can review after a Livestorm meeting or any kind of event: number of registrations, attendees, and no-shows, number of replays (if you shared the recording), number of questions, polls, and messages and the average attendance duration
The success of an engaging event comes down, in part, to the tools that you choose. That means everything from your internet provider, to the camera and microphone, to the virtual event software.
Your event marketing tools you choose become a kind of co-host for your virtual event. If you’re looking for one of the best virtual conference platforms, designed for engaging virtual audiences, try Livestorm. It’ll help you
Yes, event marketing can make your business profitable. To get the most ROI, you must come up with a strategy that will help you measure your event marketing initiatives and tailor them to a clear goal.
The first thing that you need to do is define the type of event that you want to host. You can have virtual, live, or hybrid events. Then, you’ll need to
If you’re hosting an online or hybrid event, you’ll also need to add “choosing the right virtual event marketing software” to the list. In that case, Livestorm is one of the most complete options for hosting large (3,000 attendees), interactive, and analytical platforms you’ll find.
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An event marketer is responsible for planning, organizing, and executing marketing events. Depending on the marketing strategy, the event marketer might also manage other marketing aspects like networking and public relations.
One of the most common examples of event marketing is a product launch. Apple is quite popular for hosting hybrid marketing events to announce the launch of their newest products.
Event marketing is highly effective, when done correctly it can help businesses to
You should start event marketing as soon as it aligns with your strategy. Because contrary to popular belief, event marketing doesn’t need to be expensive. You can start with an online webinar or conference, and then slowly grow into a hybrid or in-person event with thousands of attendees.
These are the five essential features of event marketing:
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