How To Align Event Marketing With Social Media
Event marketing can be effective, create an intimate connection with your customers and have a high impact on reaching your consumers. Integrating social media into your event marketing plan can help with the success of your campaign. Using social media, your brand can maximize event ROI and use it to expand your online reach. Here are a few things to consider while marketing an event with social media before, during, and after the event.
Before:
Make sure to create an event that is sharable.
You can ensure that your events enable consumers to capture and share the experience by creating a dialogue with your consumers, posing questions and facilitating contests or call-to-action statements.
Involve influencers to drive pre-event awareness.
This is one of the most effective ways to gain awareness of your event through word-of-mouth advertising. Some examples of ways that you can involve influencers to foster awareness is by giving the top influencers in your target audience early access to the products that your brand is trying to gain consumers for. Once you give the influencers access to the product, ask them to document their usage of it on their individual social media platforms. Social media influencers can make an online impact that can also translate into real offline benefits like higher sales and event promotion.
During:
Provide incentives for target audience to like, follow and share.
Using a reward system is the best way to get your consumers to perform a desired action. Using rewards and participation incentives can drive immediate event participation and also generate campaign awareness both onsite and online.
Tie lead generation to social media.
Give your consumers access to digital event forms, through your brand ambassador or a QR code, that they can fill out and access via their social media accounts. Remember to have alternative options for people that don’t want to use their social media accounts to fill out your event forms.
After:
Keep your online interactions consistent, fun and sharable.
Your brand can accomplish this by running regular discounts and loyalty programs through all social media platforms. You can also create engagement by creating contests that incorporate giveaways and also provide good customer feedback. Always encourage your target audience to share the contest so that you can reach more people and have potential increase in your social media followers.
Using social media platforms for your event marketing allows your brand to hyper-target and influence potential clients at every stage of the purchase process. It can transform a one time encounter with a customer into an ongoing engagement opportunity.
