#InConversationWith Tosin Oyetade, Marketing Manager at Kuda — Events as a Customer Acquisition Strategy
Hosting or sponsoring an event is a sure way to acquire customers for your company. Users want to experience your brand, not just read about it. They want to interact with your brand in person.
We had a chat with Tosin Oyetade, Marketing Manager at Kuda on her event marketing strategy and how it has helped to acquire (and retain) customers.
- How important is event marketing as a part of your growth and marketing channels at Kuda?
We’ve only recently started looking at events as a part of our growth channels at Kuda. In 2019, we did a bunch of stuff in Unilag and at Social Media Week. 2020 was thick COVID, so nobody was hosting events asides from virtual events. But in 2021, we felt that there was a market there. We were doing well with our digital channels, but it was imperative that we went offline and the way to get our target audience offline was by being at events that they were at. In 2022, we will be doing a lot more event marketing.
2. How do you decide which events to sponsor?
It depends on our goal for the event. We have a specific target audience; we know the people we are trying to reach, so we ask ourselves, ‘does this align with our target audience? ‘would our target audience come to this kind of event?’. We also look at the budget, timeline and the team behind the event. We need to be sure that the organizers are qualified enough to plan an event and possibly have a track record.
3. I agree with you about looking at the team behind an event. What are some of the challenges you face when crafting your events marketing strategy?
Health and safety is always a major challenge. We are still in a pandemic, so that’s a concern. At Live in Concert, I remember they had mentioned that there would be policemen around, and we know how that can get rowdy, so I briefed them before the event not to hurt attendees. We want people to be safe at these events. Another challenge is the project timeline. We don’t want to just sponsor an event; we want to integrate Kuda in some way, for example, by asking people to purchase tickets to the event via the Kuda app, so we need enough time to get that done. So when organizers reach out to us, we encourage them to add it to their project timeline, so our engineering team has enough time to work on it.
4. Let’s talk a bit about experiential marketing and brand activation at events. How do you decide on the experience you want to give your guests? I really like the music booth you had at Live in Concert.
Again, it depends on the kind of event and the people coming. For example, at Wild Sessions with Lady Donli, we knew that it was an alté crowd, so there was no point doing something mainstream, and so we had a really cool neon light fixture for people to take pictures with. At Techpoint, we had screens that ran our product demo and showed some of our most recent ads, Live in Concert was a music event, so we had a music booth which was a hit with the audience. At Fireboy’s concert, we had a merch stand. So it depends on the type of people coming for the event. I don’t want an experience centre where nobody interacts with the brand items.
5. Startups have a lean marketing budget but also want to do event marketing — sponsorships and brand activations. How do you advise that they do that without breaking the bank?
I think the challenge is when the company wants to go all out. Your event marketing strategy doesn’t have to be elaborate, and you don’t always have to give cash sponsorship. There are other things that event organizers need that you can provide. It could be anything; you just need to be creative. At one of our recent events, we didn’t give cash sponsorship. Instead, we offered offline marketing support, so billboards and things like that. You also want to make sure that your experience centre has something that will make guests actually come in to interact with you. At Fireboy’s concert, we had a merch stand set up, and all people had to do was open a Kuda account for a chance to win some. And guests actually came in numbers. People wanted to be a part of it; they wanted to win our merch. So you have to figure out what you can do to connect with guests.
6. Can you share a success story of how events marketing has contributed to customer acquisition at Kuda?
With Wild Sessions and Live in Concert, we had people open Kuda accounts to get discounts on their tickets. I can’t share the figures right now, but that was a major success.
Last year was really a testing phase for us to see if we could reach our target audience offline through events, and we’ve seen that it totally works. This year, our product, marketing, and engineering teams are fully working hard together to tighten our event marketing strategy for the year. Aside from acquisition, it also helps with our customer retention.
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