Events and brand awareness go hand in hand. On the one hand, hosting events can help to increase your brand exposure and drive customer awareness. On the other hand, you need some level of brand awareness to ensure successful events that have both attendance and engagement.
Here are some of the ways you can grow your brand awareness and support your marketing endeavors.
Brand awareness marketing strategies
1. Host an event
Want to get more eyes on your brand and create more interactions? Start by hosting your own event. This can be small to start or you can dive right into being part of a bigger event, like a conference or trade show. Maybe you want to let your space be the forum for an entrepreneur to meet up or local startup competition. Maybe you have product designers who are uniquely qualified to host a workshop or other branded event. Maybe you finally need to take the plunge into securing a trade show booth and applying to be a panel speaker. Oftentimes trade shows, conferences, and conventions seem like a big commitment but are actually a good place to start, particularly when considering brand awareness marketing efforts. People will automatically be at the trade show – even if not a single person shows up to specifically engage with your brand, you can make an impact, make connections, grow impressions, and be seen alongside industry peers. All of these can have a huge impact on your business. No matter what path you go down, it’s a step in the right direction of growing your brand influence and impact.
2. Support or sponsor an event
Another way to use events to show off your brand is to partner with events that are already happening as a way to get more impressions. Brands and events use sponsors all the time to help fund their events. MuckFest and other events like it have event attendees pay registration and fundraise so that all of that money can support the cause that the event is being organized to support and promote, but businesses will donate funds to help offset event costs and get their name on promotional materials. This kind of event sponsorship can get you in front of all the attendees, participants, spectators, and anyone who’ll see pictures of the event later on social media.
3. Use social support
Your social channels are some of the best event marketing you have. Facebook allows you to create invitations and all social media platforms are a great place to post details and engage with followers. You can even utilize your social channels as a way to shape your event. Ask your followers what they want to see, what they’re most excited about, and engage with them about how to create the most successful event.
4. Use influencers
Influencer marketing has become a crucial part of modern digital marketing. Influencers are those individuals on social media who have a certain niche – like fitness, food, real estate, travel, or innumerable other subjects – and who curate content around these topics either as experts or enthusiasts in the sphere. This kind of content will usually draw the attention of like-minded people with similar interests. The more people that follow that influencer, the more power their brand has to reach others. You can often align yourself with marketing influencers and use their audience as a way to boost your brand exposure. If an influencer will be making an appearance at your event or attending your event, their sharing this news on social media to their audience will translate to better brand awareness for your organization and event.
5. Try a press release
You can draft a simple press release that shares the details of your event and hosts it on your blog as well as share it with local media sites. This way people can find your event without even looking for it through something as simple as reading through local publications or searching “business events near me.”
Whether you’re using brand awareness marketing strategies to help drive traffic to your event or you’re using event planning and promotion as a way to help grow business exposure, remember that your events and your outreach should still be authentic to the core of your brand. If you’re a health and wellness start-up, it might not make sense to sponsor a local candy-themed celebration even if the exposure will be high. Then again, sometimes showing up where you’d be least expected can give you an opportunity to tell your story in a way that makes it more engaging and relevant to audiences who would expect to see you there. Having good strategic conversations and relying on solid data is an important part of building and balancing your brand awareness marketing as related to your business events.
