How Do You Turn Great Event Attendance Into Brand Advocacy?
An event is an opportunity to showcase your brand in the best light possible. We recently blogged about how experiential marketing – like an event – is a far more powerful way to get potential brand advocates to back your brand. Because a tactile experience creates a long-lasting, relatable impression, your guests are far more likely to become customers than if they were to read a brochure or watch a TV ad. It’s one thing to be aware of the potential that an event holds for your brand; whether you capitalise on that potential hinges on the strategic use of information you’ve gathered about your guests.
In order to glean insight about your target market, you’ll need to get them to attend your event in the first place.
But just why do people attend some events, and not others? The answer is simpler than you think. An event that resonates is one that provides people with relevant content. Does your event culminate in guests who are informed, rewarded and entertained? If so, you’re on the right track. If not, it’s time you went back to the drawing board and devised a way to pique the interest of the people you want to see buy into your brand.
In addition, the tools you’re using for your RSVP process can make or break your event attendance.
We’ve spoken in detail about the crucial role that online invitations play in getting people to your event (for a recap, read our blog about why your event attendance hinges on your online invitations here).
In short, an event that’s relevant and entertaining, coupled with online invitations that stand out from the myriad of other communication your guests no doubt receive, is your ticket to turning potential customers into brand loyalists.
Your event attendance rates are crucial, as the more people at your event, the more people there are to tweet, post and advocate your brand – online and off.
Don’t neglect the power of the digital age. Your guests will be sharing their experience of your event online – be it positive or negative. This means that your event needs to be one that impresses if you want to capitalise on the powerful force that is word of mouth marketing, amplified by social media.
Once you’ve gotten your potential brand advocates to attend an event, how do you keep them interested in the brand?
As well as getting your guests to form part of your brand awareness strategy, ensuring that your brand remains top of mind is dependent on your use of data gathered about your guests. How to do this? With a post event survey. Establishing the various touch points of an event that resonated, as well as those that were off the mark, provides you with invaluable consumer insight.
By asking relevant questions, and then storing this information for future use in any follow-up marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to create future content – either in the form of an event, an above the line campaign or an inbound marketing strategy – that your target market wants to consume.
The best way to collect, store and collate this data is via a sophisticated event management tool.
If you want to maximise on the data you gather about your guests and event attendance, you’ll need to do this in the right way. Making use of an online event management tool that collects all of this information on your behalf – from data from the RSVP process (dietary requirements, names of partners, car registrations, etc.), to registration information (the time a guest arrived, if they didn’t arrive at all, or brought a different partner), to the information you gather via a post event report is then paramount.
In short, the use of an intuitive, intelligent tool that enables you to turn every single piece of your event attendance data into consumer insight elevates your brand offering in the eyes of your target market – the most vital step in nurturing brand advocacy.
