How to Use Events for Marketing your Product or Services?

In 2005, M&M’s introduced its own version of dark chocolates, and they did take a step to the ‘dark side’. With the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in 2005, M&M along with LucasFilm gave us one of the most fascinating examples of a marketing event. The launch of the new dark chocolates took place at Times Square in New York, with one X-Wing Fighter, six Stormtroopers, Anthony Daniels in his costume of C3PO and Darth Vader’s counterpart: M Vader! This marketing event, “Dare to Go to the Dark Side” earned them a media outreach of a 184 million and their dark chocolates have been getting a 31% growth rate each year.

The concept of event marketing is arguably a decisive way of carving your product or service up the rock. The importance of the same cannot be overlooked by any economical establishment working towards selling a product or providing a service. A good strategy of associating with events for marketing will give you a great outreach, higher sales and a stable place in the market; a great one may help you establish a monopoly.

RedBull is the monopolistic leader in the ‘Energy Drink’ world, with the highest market share in their product category. One of the key strategies for achieving their success goes to their heavy use of events for marketing. With association with almost every sports event: from FIFA and NASCAR to local college sports festivals, RedBull has it’s tents up. It’s not far off to say a sporting event to be unusual if it’s not associated with RedBull, which has led to a reverse phenomenon of the one under discussion here. Another successful global sponsorship was held during the Pepsi UEFA activation event. With thousands of attendees, PepsiCo created an immersive and amazing experience to UEFA football fans while building their brand awareness.

The statements of praise for marketing events thus are not mere assertive. The concept is fairly simple: it is a marketing tactic that establishes face to face engagement of a company or service provider with its target consumers at an event.

Steps for a successful marketing event:

• The first step for a successful marketing event is to choose an appropriate event that involves the target audience for the product or service.
• You can hold competitions or mini contests to make your product more recognisable in the market.
• Sponsor some major events and participate in the meets and groups to get a chance for communicating with other business owners.
• Make sure you organise a pre-party and an after-party for your event to socially bond with other people and to get deeper connections.
• Companies have started using QR codes on their banners to maximize their reach on people’s phone as it is the most used device. Offering discounts and offers further helps to engage the public cleverly.
• Events conducted need to be such that they create a lasting impression on the public. Consider the example of Sony’s 2005 campaign where the company filmed 2,50,000bouncy balls on the streets of San Francisco to display the colour capacity of their new model Sony Bravia. This interesting yet simple event made a huge impact on the minds of general public.

The most creative events create interactions that not only create a positive impression of the product during the event, but it makes a lasting impact and creates a huge buzz. Statistics show that 58% of the participants purchase the product after a marketing event. And a whopping 86% of people became regular customers.

Many travel agencies have started organising small trips for a group of people to make them experience the joy of vacationing and later a large number of people do end up booking their vacations through the same travel agencies. Such creative events can be used to market services. The cost of organising the event might seem high, but later on it all evens out and the result is getting profit.

Remember to make your marketing campaigns smart, creative and bold. Events are supposed to be fun and engaging. It would help substantially if any event contains making the participants connect to their social media to expand your social media reach. For example – You could ask the participants to click a picture with your product and to post it on their social media accounts with a few hashtags for some goodies.

Event marketing shouldn’t take place of the traditional marketing system, but should work hand in hand with it to market your product in the best way possible.