Strategies to boost brand awareness of your event
In today’s disruptive business climate, leaders have to go above and beyond the competition to capture the attention of their customers.
A strong event brand is the perfect vehicle for delivering your unique value proposition. Giving your event its own ‘personality’ will attract a certain type of audience.
Needless to say, you need to craft your brand carefully and develop a multi-channel strategy to build awareness about your event.
Strategies for increasing brand awareness for your event:
Your website is usually the first thing that comprehensively communicates your brand, you need to pay extra attention to the way your fonts, graphics, logo, colors, etc. all work together to create a consistent impression. Use it to set the tone for the rest of your attendees’ experience with you.
The event website may very well be the first introduction to the event for most attendees.
As such, your event website needs to be ready in the early stages of the event preparation, sometimes months before the actual event takes place.
A key advantage that a full website has over a mere landing page is the many avenues for creating community it affords. Your blog will furnish your audience with things that add value leading up to the event, which they can share to generate more interest in your event. It can act as a hub for all your social media engagement, both by linking to all of your accounts in a central place and also possibly through a feed of social media posts.
A newsletter to your mailing list is a standard first step in raising awareness about your event, but you may also benefit from continued communication leading up to it. In addition to maintaining a website and publishing valuable content regularly, you can keep your audience posted on the preparation of the event itself, including updates about speakers and sessions.
Engaging in a dialogue with your audience and giving them a voice can definitely improve their perception of your brand. Moreover, allowing your brand and event to evolve with your audience and the discussions you’re having with them will help you remain relevant and choose topics and personalities they will appreciate.
Engage very active or insightful members of your audience on social media and facilitate discussion; feature guest and opinion pieces on your blog or social media accounts; create a forum for your audience to interact with each other and your brand. These strategies could help build your event’s public image even further while providing some insight into what your audience expects.
Event planners believe social media to be the most effective tool for marketing events, with Facebook being the most effective platform for event promotion, followed by LinkedIn.
Your social media presence should be strong and aligned with the branding of your event. The trick is to create highly shareable content that your audience will be more than happy to like and redistribute to help you increase your event exposure.
A great way to make it easy for your audience to find you is to create a hashtag that is easy to type and remember.
(The article first appeared in eventmanagerblog.com)
