What’s the future of events and brand marketing?
As life is starting to go back to normal we’re all realising it’s a new normal and that this new normal requires for us to change the way we go about running our businesses. When it comes to event marketing especially the landscape might have changed forever – or has it?
Coming to you from the midst of the event industry we’d like to share some of our top tips on how to go about events as a marketing tool post-pandemic. Here are the best practises of event marketing in a hybrid world.
Three best practises of event marketing post-pandemic
Here are some tips on how to best conduct events when using them as a marketing tool post-pandemic. We’d like to think of ourselves as experts on the topic having spent these past two years trying to understand what purpose events will serve in the new normal.
1. Don’t do events for the sake of events
All good marketing takes the why into account before jumping to the what; this of course also applies to events and event marketing. We often hear variations of the term future of marketing being thrown around and even though it might be true that the field has been disrupted the basics stay the same, i.e. know your brand and know your audience.
Just because you can organise an event it doesn’t mean you have to; it might not be the right answer and in a changed landscape it might even be bad for your brand to host an event that you don’t have the resources to make the most of. People seem to have become more picky with what they leave the safety of their home for and if they do pop outside to go to your event you don’t want to disappoint. This brings us to our next point: hybrid events.
2. Hybrid is the future
As with many things these days, hybrid seems to be the answer. In the new normal audiences don’t want to pick one or the other and we’re going to have to come to them where they previously came to us. It might sound like hard work but by not going hybrid you risk loosing audiences and it might even harm your brand.
Luckily there are not only downsides with not going hybrid, there are also upsides with doing so. Hopefully you’ll gain new audiences and cut down on people not showing up. Anyone that’s ever planned an event must know how frustrating it is to spend months planning only to have less than half the guest list turn up due to unforeseen circumstances.
Hybrid event thinking
Don’t design an event for either or, design for hybrid.
You have to realize you have two (or more!) audiences at the same time when going hybrid. Think about the different audiences and what you communicate to each of them. Give them what they want in the environment where they are. Maybe not all parts of your event are suited for your online viewers, then don’t broadcast it to them. It’s all about understanding who you want to reach and how to best reach them.
You want to make hybrid the best of both worlds rather than the worst of both world and in order to do so you might want to consider seeing your hybrid event as two events rather than one. Worth considering when doing so is if you have the resources to make this happen, which brings us to the next, slightly incongruous, point.
Don’t do hybrid if you can’t do hybrid
On the contrary we can’t stress enough that there’s no point in going hybrid if you don’t have the resources. It might be better for your business to organise a small event in-person for a selected few or just an online event if you’re looking for a broader reach. It’s all about knowing your own capacity and what you want to achieve with the event.
3. Invest in strong event content
Now more than ever audiences want good engaging content in order to keep hanging around. In a world where half (or more!) of the audience is attending online we’re not only competing for a slot in their diary, we’re competing for their attention once they’re already attending. But luckily the race has not been lost yet! We think there’s always room for good content and this is a great opportunity for businesses to be creative and disruptive when it comes to both what content we create and how to make it stand out.
We’ve seen an uprise of more in-depth and qualitative content at events and key is to be accurate when describing your event beforehand in order to manage expectations.
Are you looking to make events happen again? Have a look at our venues for networking events to reconnect!
