Event Sponsorship: bet on education not marketing
While traditional advertising keeps losing its positions on the marketing arena, event sponsorship is becoming one of the leading forms of marketing worldwide. Sponsoring a conference or a trade show can bring a company a set of competitive advantages: face-to-face interaction with their target audience or a chance to emotionally connect with attendees by providing unique experiences or building a dedicated community of like-minded people around a brand.
According to the Experiential Marketing Content Report, 72% of consumers positively view brands that provide quality event experiences and 74% of respondents admit that engaging with brands that provide memorable experiences makes them much more likely to buy their product.
If your company or brand is looking to increase exposure and create a long-term relationship with your customers, sponsoring an event as part of your marketing strategy might be a good idea. Sponsorship can help your brand to achieve the following:
- emotional commitment to the brand
- visibility and brand recognition
- new contacts and leads
- increased sales
- better perception by your target audience
- additional media coverage
Nowadays, event organisers offer a multitude sponsorship packages. Although these vary greatly, they frequently include social media mentions, placing your brand logo on the event materials, including an ad in a newsletter, etc. Make sure you know exactly what your package will include before deciding to invest.
And while banners and branded bags may still be part of an outdated marketing strategy people do not attend events for freebies or to listen to a sales pitch. That’s why being a sponsor today is a good opportunity to apply a more thoughtful approach to marketing.
As we mentioned in a previous article, people attend conferences and trade shows because they are eager to stay up to date with the latest developments in their industry and connect with other like-minded professionals. Keep this in mind when sponsoring an event and prepare a well thought content strategy beforehand.
Shifting from advertising to experiential and content marketing
Events provide experiences and your brand must add something meaningful to this. Placing a poster or featuring your logo on the event website is not enough if you want to connect with your target audience. Your goal is to become a valuable resource for the attendees through sharing valuable content, which will inspire your audience.
You will have a good chance to stand out from the competition and connect with your customers if you:
- create and nourish a community of people that share the same interests
- provide a tool that will boost networking and facilitate communication between all those attending
- educate and add value to your audience by providing practical and emotionally engaging content
Event apps make it easier for sponsors to build communities of dedicated professionals, gather people loyal to the brand and create a powerful communication channel that will provide useful and practical content throughout the year.
The greatest advantages of investing in an event app for sponsors are direct access to the target niche market and the ability to measure the return on investment.
So which of the event app features can help you implement the above?
Creating additional exposure for your brand with interactive banners and an advanced sponsor profile is a good place to start. Content sharing features can help you build a loyal community of customers, as they will change the way you are perceived from ‘sponsor-advertiser’ into ‘sponsor-educator’.
Push notifications
Customisable push notifications allow you to instantly reach your audience with important announcements or promotional messages. As long as an app is installed on the attendees’ devices, push notifications will pop up on their screens. However, it is important to think carefully about what kind of content you send out in order to avoid being perceived as a spammer. Furthermore, scheduling the notifications in advance will save you the hassle on the day and ensure everything is sent out at the correct times.
Here are some examples of the messages that you as a sponsor might want to send:
- Invitation to visit your booth
- Discount coupon for event participants
- Link to a video or a presentation after the event is over
- Educational materials
- Links to industry related articles
- Information about new product launches
- Social media links
Social wall
If you want to increase your brand exposure during the event — the Social Wall is a perfect solution. Your logo, banners or important messages may be displayed on large interactive screens. Live Social Media feed will boost the attendees’ engagement by encouraging them to post and share.
- Create a unique hashtag that will be associated with your brand and engage the audience to use it whilst tweeting. The posts published by the audience will automatically appear on the ‘Social Wall’
- Share updates and latest news
- Connect your social network accounts
- Run surveys and display the results
Social media
Social media channels can be a powerful tool for driving event attendance and increasing your brand visibility. Using social networks during the event will allow you to reach the remote audiences and at the same time to increase interaction around your brand on-site. Event apps that support integration with social media accounts make it even easier for the attendees to post and share.
As mentioned in the same report nearly all consumers create and share digital or social content at events. Therefore, by providing quality content you can significantly amplify the reach of your message and consequently your brand. Keep in mind that visual content is much more likely to be shared — engage the audience to take photos and share live videos, post visually rich messages on your social media channels and use the discussion board.
Discussion boards
Discussion boards are a great tool to engage your target audience around the event. By providing the attendees with industry related content all year round you may be sure that your audience will be interested in keeping an app on their device even after the event is over.
- Set topics to be discussed before, during and after the event
- Share relevant images, videos and industry related content
- Constantly communicate and interact with your audience
File sharing and videos
Share educational materials and videos that those attending the event will find useful. As an example, you might want to share an outline of the sponsored speaker’s speech before the conference and provide the audience with the presentation or a related video. Sharing valuable content on a regular basis will help you to increase sponsor-attendee connection, enhance the way you are perceived and consequently get new leads and drive sales.
Measure your success
Investing wisely into sponsorship means being able to measure the return on the investment. Learn how successful you were following a detailed data analysis. Find out how many people were interested and checked your brand out, measure how talked about was your product, determine which piece of content got more response from the audience, etc. By using event technology you can directly track, measure and evaluate your brand exposure and influence.
By investing into the community you will receive great feedback on your products and build a strong following. Providing the audience with practical and engaging content on-site and after the event will help you to change the way you are perceived as a sponsor. Remember that the effectiveness of traditional advertising channels continues to decrease. Therefore, rather than continuing to spend a big part of your budget on banners and promotional materials, prepare a well thought-through content strategy based on what your goals are. Using social media channels and event technology will help you to spread your message, build long term relationships with your customers and consequently increase brand recognition, generate new leads and create real business value.
