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Events as a marketing channel

No marketing activity is better than a marketing event, where you get to meet people in person—usually your prospects and customers. You can discuss business, chat, laugh, and build meaningful relationships with them that ultimately win their mindshare. Your prospects will also know they're not just doing business with a website and a logo, but rather the people behind it. Without stressing the importance of event marketing further, let's get started

Getting Started

How to plan and execute event marketing for your business

Choose the right kind of event

It's important to choose the right event type, as events can be classified in many ways:

Locate the right place

Event marketing is all about creating memorable experiences for people with your brand. To achieve this, go to the places where your audience is. A simple approach is to identify your customers' primary locations.

If your business offers a tech-based solution, you can gather geographical data when customers sign up for your services. Alternatively, if you haven't collected this information, consider sending an email or making a call to gather the necessary data.

For businesses not in the technology sector—especially those selling physical products—pinpoint the cities where your sales are thriving and plan events in those locations. If you're launching a new business or solution and have yet to acquire customers, consider hosting events where your competitors are already successful.

At Zoho, we organize Zoholics every year to connect with our customers and enable them achieve their business goals through our tech solutions. With consent from our customers, we use our own marketing platform to gather insights on their locations and the challenges they encounter.

We then organize events at their locations to educate them on our latest solutions and best practices, ultimately enabling success for them. Using our own marketing platform, we derive insights, plan, execute, and manage the entire event end-to-end.

Location

Plan your budget

Once your business has decided on the type of event and the right place, it's crucial to plan the budget. Marketing Plus enables you to create a marketing project, categorize it as event marketing, set the main objective, and, most importantly, allocate a budget for the event while tracking all related expenses. This ensures that your event spending is data-driven, and you can always stay on track. Here are some ideas to plan budget for your event.

Fixed costs

These are costs associated with sponsoring the event, and include booking the venue and purchasing event-related items, such as projectors, screens, displays, building stalls, employee expenses, etc.

Variable costs

These are expenses that often vary based on the situation, such as costs for food or refreshments, which can vary based on the number of attendees. It's a good practice to keep a buffer amount on hand to cover unexpected expenses that may arise during events.

Incentive costs

Incentive costs represent the amount of money you allocate to incentivize your prospect or customer with a free trial of your solution, reward them with gifts to convert them into customers, or express gratitude.

Miscellaneous costs

Events aren't always entirely predictable, and you can't always rely on your planned budget. Set aside a fund for unexpected expenses.

Budget

Interaction with audience members

Get feedback and measure your success

This final step serves to determine how your event went. Ask for feedback from your attendees through online surveys and analyze their responses. If your event marketing efforts were effective, you can potentially harvest the results after some time.

At the same time, identify your event's shortcomings and take them as lessons for when you plan your next event. Unfortunately, you can't measure the success of event marketing directly.

However, you can gauge it indirectly by tracking metrics like your customer retention rate, changes to the number of searches for your brand via search engines, changes to product/feature adoption rates, the amount of press coverage you receive, and the amount of new inquiries into your business.

Event feedback

How event marketing as a channel can help you market your business

While channels such as emails, social media, phone calls, and webpages can help you interact with your customers, events can provide a higher level of engagement and help achieve your marketing goals. The reason is straightforward: Your customers are talking to you, the human being. You can build a relationship with them in real time and customize your solutions according to their needs. When there's a human touch, you build trust. With trust established, your customers are more likely to continue the partnership with you.

Product launches

When your business is launching new products or solutions, events can enable you to reach a wider audience and convey the importance of your solutions more clearly and thoroughly. In contrast to online content, people generally have greater attention spans when meeting and listening to you in person—enabling you to promote your message even more effectively.

Sales opportunities

By listening to your audience during your event, you can understand their needs, recommend your solutions, and create direct selling opportunities. For existing customers, you can suggest additional solutions for their businesses as a cross-selling opportunity or upsell by offering additional value.

Networking opportunities

Events are the best way to meet your customers and build rapport. You can connect with customers from different industries, expand your network, and establish relationships.

Market research

No one is as well-positioned to suggest enhancements to your product or to propose a completely new product than an actual user. Events serve as the best ways to have deep conversations with customers, hear about their pain points, learn how they use your solution, and conduct thorough research to identify gaps in the market. Ultimately, these insights enable you to enhance your solutions and make them best-in-class.

Customer marketing

Customers are more likely to make purchases when they witness others buying your solution. The psychology of social proof consistently proves to be effective. Utilize events as an opportunity to identify satisfied customers, gather positive feedback, and collect testimonials about your product and brand. This creates a reservoir of testimonials that you can showcase to further establish trust and influence potential customers.

Community building

When you know your customers better, it's easier for you to group them and build a community of like-minded people who are loyal to your brand and can turn into evangelists. This means you can instantly broadcast all updates to them and leverage word-of-mouth marketing.

Media coverage

Press media often cover events, interview the attendees, and broadcast footage on their satellite channels. This results in more publicity and marketing for your business, enhances your visibility, and helps you stand apart from competitors.

How a unified marketing platform can help you manage your event marketing

A unified marketing platform is a tool that enables marketing teams to collaborate with team members, create content, and manage campaigns across multiple channels—all within a single integrated system. Platforms like Zoho Marketing Plus provide comprehensive solutions for marketing teams, allowing them to handle events efficiently across the three key stages of any event: before, during, and after.

Before the eventDuring the eventAfter the event

Brainstorming

Collaborate with your team members to plan the type of customers/attendees you want to invite. Define the event type, identify the location, set your budget, and plan your creatives and promotions accordingly.

Contact segmentation

Based on your brainstorming discussion, segment your contact list and generate a list of people to invite. Segmentation can encompass factors such as geography, tenure as customers, products/services they use, their lifetime value, and so on.

Website and collateral

Create a microsite to promote your event and share marketing materials such as ebooks or event agenda brochures with attendees upon form completion. Integrate payment gateways to facilitate online ticket sales and set up an automated transactional email system to be triggered upon purchase.

Event promotions

Unified marketing platforms like Zoho Marketing Plus often support omnichannel promotion features, enabling you to promote your event directly on social media, send targeted ads to segmented audiences on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, and thereby improve your event registration efforts.

Attendee management

If you've sold event passes online, you can share a QR code with attendees and confirm its validity to identify them. This QR code can also assist them in navigating to the correct venue.

Backdrop management

With unified marketing platforms like Marketing Plus, you can effectively manage the event backdrop, oversee sessions, coordinate with speakers, and ensure that your agenda stays on track throughout the event. Features aren't limited to just these, however; by highlighting these two key aspects, we simply mean to cover the most essential components of your live event.

Get feedback from customers

You can use survey forms in Marketing Plus to automatically send emails to customers, collect feedback, and categorize them based on the responses. This enables you to assess the success of the event, identify shortcomings, and implement improvements for future events.

Outcome analysis

You can set goals in Analytics on Marketing Plus to track increases in the number of business inquiries you receive, your sales numbers, or even the amount of web traffic your site generates. These tangible metrics can help determine the success of the event. With a unified marketing platform, you can manage end-to-end activities for your event marketing and ensure you deliver the best possible experience to your audience.

Marketing Plus for your next event marketing

Getting started with your next event marketing is simple with Zoho Marketing Plus, which provides all the powerful tools you need to deliver a connected experience in one place. All you have to do is ensure you spend enough time with your potentials and customers.

  • STEP 1
  • STEP 2
  • STEP 3
  • STEP 4
  • STEP 5
  • STEP 6
  • STEP 7
Activity planning

Bring your team members together, collaborate in real time, plan marketing activities, and assign tasks on Kanban boards.

Start your next event marketing with Marketing Plus.

Getting Started

15-day free trial. No credit card required.