Organising an event or attending a fair is a challenge for a company, which requires marketing efforts and investments of time and money. You need to raise awareness of your event to get people to come along and share it with friends or colleagues. But more than that you need to attract qualitative leads through channels such as email marketing, blogging and advertising.
In this article, we explain to you how interactive marketing and data collection can assist you in your duties to make your event successful or boost your attendance at a fair.
1. BEFORE THE EVENT
► Create a pre-event landing page
An event landing page or minisite will help you capture early interest, even if you haven’t finalised all of the details yet. Give your audiences a central page to drive them to, and include a form to capture leads or pre-registrations. You can also add a video, a quiz or another interactive content to make your page more dynamic!
To encourage people to (pre)register and capture even more early interest, you can even give a special prize related to your business or your stand (a discount coupon, a unique code) to the first 100 people enrolled. You can also ask your employees or speakers to share the news on their social networks.
► Promote your event on your blog
If you have a blog, create a post to explain why you’re organising or attending this event and make it more dynamic by integrating interactive content.
For example:
- A quiz where people would have to answer questions about the event
- A battle campaign where they would have to choose between the goodies they want to receive
- A puzzle or a rebus inviting them to find the number of your booth or the location of your event
► Begin your campaign in your newsletter
Of course, you can promote your event by mentioning it in your email signature thanks to a picture, a sentence, a link, etc. Even better: in order to increase your newsletter click through rate, personalise it by adding a picture of your interactive campaign and a CTA redirecting to your blog post, hosting your interactive content, or to your landing page.
Tip: you created a quiz, which you shared with your database through an emailing campaign. Users who will click on your campaign shouldn’t have to fill out fields about their personal information such as their name or email address, since you already have the data! In Qualifio, it is possible to pre-fill these fields.
► Run a ticket giveaway social media campaign
That’s the best way to advertise your event: get attendees to interact and contribute to your event. Ask your audience to fill out a survey or a form, to share pictures through a photo contest, to invite friends and reward them (or some of them) with a free ticket giving access to your event. You can even share unique codes with all those who participate that they can use at your stand, event, etc.
► In short: connect the digital and physical worlds
Interactive marketing will help you to connect the digital and physical worlds and attract online visitors to your stand or event.
2. DURING THE EVENT
It’s also crucial to put marketing efforts during your event. An example (actually two) is worth a thousand words:
► Organise a live contest
For Batibouw (the greatest professional fair of construction and renovation in Belgium) Èggo Kitchen created a special “contest area” at its booth. In this space, tablets were provided, displaying Èggo’s contest, on which visitors could answer three questions about their kitchen style and leave their contact info. Once the form had been submitted, they were automatically registered to the contest to try to win a discount voucher to be used on their next kitchen.
Èggo Kitchen captured more than 700 unique contacts, a great ROI for this type of event. By crossing databases from several previous actions, Eggo realised that part of the same community that participated in its previous campaigns had visited its stand.
Moreover, behind this Batibouw contest, Èggo also had an email strategy to retarget attendees with the appropriate Èggo kitchen style. The opening rate of this retargeting action exceeded 50%, with a click-through rate of over 10%.
► Organise a live survey
Like Èggo, the pharmaceutical company Takeda made tablets available to the public with a live survey asking questions about a type of cancer. The results of the survey were displayed on a big TV screen at the entrance of the stand. This survey allowed Takeda to catch the attention of the visitors, engage them but also to collect data and opt-ins through a form at the beginning of the survey asking participants their contact info. With this survey, Takeda managed to get 30% opt-in rate.
3. AFTER THE EVENT
It’s not over! Take advantage of all the data collected before and during your event.
► Ask for feedbacks
Create a post-event survey and share it with attendees to gather feedbacks that will help you be more efficient and make your next event even more successful. You can also reach out to some specific contacts, among those who take part in your survey, contest or quiz, and ask their input. Testimonials are a great marketing tool. They will help you boost your corporate image and online visibility.
► Keep attendees engaged
Retarget attendees with valuable and quality content on social media or through your newsletter (if they have provided their consent). Be sure to offer content that is focused on attendees interests, key points and messages from the event, which attendees can learn from. That will increase the sharing and the comments on your content, keep the discussion going and the event community alive.
