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Event marketing isn’t just a tool for brand awareness. Brand marketers love it for 6 simple reasons.

Events:
1. Help the rest of the marketing team

2. Can prove their results 

3. Can make their own revenue

4. Can conduct consumer research

5. Can test new products

6. Open a line of consumer communication

Dig Deeper

Event marketing is the strategy on everyone’s lips, but why is it taking center stage?

A creative and immersive experience is obviously great for brand awareness, loyalty, and revenue, as it helps you get in front of and stay top of mind with your target audiences. But that’s not all there is to it. 

Here are 6 reasons why brands love event marketing and why it makes their bosses happy.

What is Event Marketing?

Event marketing is a brand strategy in which you host your own events, sponsor third-party events, or offer branded experiences that engage consumers and bring them in-person (and sometimes VR) immersive moments. By creating a physical interpretation of your brand that evokes emotional responses, consumers respond by keeping your brand top-of-mind, buying your products, and maybe even becoming a brand advocate. 

1. It helps the rest of the marketing team. 

Event marketing helps not only your event goals like attendance and ticket sales but also in other areas of your department’s efforts. Events give you a valuable opportunity to capture consumer data, opening the door for insights that impact more than just your work. 

Here are a few areas that see the benefit of event marketing:

Advertising

Advertising benefits from event marketing, especially when part of your strategy involves using a survey to capture data. A simple ‘How did you hear about us?’ during registration can confirm whether physical ads, like billboards, are working or where to advertise next based on geographical data trends. 

Consumer Profiling

There’s a world of difference between digital third-party and real-time zero-party data. When your consumers offer you the information you need to fill in the blanks about their habits, purchasing behaviors, and preferences, you help your Consumer Insights team build a more robust, nuanced, and accurate understanding. That, in turn, helps them better enable other teams within the business power more successful strategies. 

2. Its results are provable. 

For a long time, digital marketing has been the main function that benefits from reliable (and provable) success metrics like impressions, conversions, and more. Experiential and event marketing has been known as a more hazy field. However, that’s no longer the case. 

Here are a few ways that event marketing can showcase proven results for a brand:

Brand Perception

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) offers brands a great way to gauge consumers’ sentiment and, when measured before/during, or after an event, the impact on brand perception. 

You ask consumers to rate their likelihood of recommending your brand on a scale of 0 to 10. Scores of 9 and 10 signify brand promoters, while lower scores indicate detractors. Consistency in high scores signifies a positive brand sentiment, while a trend towards detractor scores demands attention and corrective measures.

If you include a question measuring NPS in the event registration or RSVP process, you can measure the change before and after the event with follow-up surveys to fully understand how the event changed brand perception.

Brand Loyalty

Post-event feedback, social media engagement, and continued enthusiasm from attendees are indicators of a successful event. Still, true brand loyalty can be measured by who makes repeat purchases from your brand. 

When you identify returners and brand promoters through NPS and other trends through loyalty programs and VIP events, you can see who's spending the most time and money with you. An experiential marketing platform can surface specific trends about brand loyalty on one dashboard, breaking down the data by factors like average age, gender, location, and more.

Purchase Intent

Purchase intent measures whether consumers plan to purchase your product and, in this case, whether your event impacted that intent. Asking your attendees, “How likely are you to purchase [brand] products in the next six months?” will give you this insight, with answers ranging from “Not Likely” to “Extremely Likely.” 

Pre-event registrations, digital interactions, and post-event surveys help map this transition, offering you a more nuanced understanding of the consumer journey. Post-event surveys and onsite sales data contribute to unraveling the mystery of purchase intent, helping you align your strategies with audience behavior.

3. It can make its own revenue.

Events that sell tickets, such as festivals, concerts, and unique experiences, grow in popularity to the point that they become a self-sustaining revenue center. Although events and experiences are often viewed as cost centers, you reap the rewards when you’ve nailed your strategy. 

Repeated consumer loyalty and improvement guided by feedback and prior learnings create experiences that are so popular that they bring in higher ticket sales and sell out of your products and merch onsite. Fans can’t wait to snatch up tickets to exclusive VIP events. At the end of the day, experiential is contributing to revenue growth in a meaningful way. 

4. It can conduct consumer research.

When entering new categories or buyer markets, researching ahead of time helps you better impact brand awareness and market share. Hosting or sponsoring events in new markets also helps you conduct consumer research about a different segment’s buying habits and your most prevalent buyers since you can capture valuable insight onsite or in post-event follow-ups. 

Gathering information on the ground before a larger push into new markets can also help you determine what will be most effective when it comes to marketing, distribution, and more. 

5. It can test new products.

When you launch a new product, it can be difficult to understand if it’ll be successful without testing it among demographic groups. An easy way to get feedback and understand how successful the new product might be is through sampling in key areas where it would be sold. For example, food brands create sampling booths at grocery stores and festivals. Breweries and distilleries use their brand homes or liquor stores. 

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A feedback survey collects responses to see what can be improved, what’s good about it, and how popular it might be for different target audiences. 

6. It opens a line of consumer communication.

When your consumers attend your events, you can give them the opportunity to opt into marketing communications, either during the ticketing process or a survey after the fact. When you offer something valuable in exchange for opt-ins, the likelihood of consumers agreeing rises; sometimes that value exchange can even be the quality of the event itself.

When consumers opt into your marketing communications and provide you with their personal information, they’re open to hearing from you. The value of that explicit permission lies in its potential; you can now foster an ongoing relationship with your consumer and build even further trust in your brand.

Many CPG and retail brands use marketing opt-ins to promote their products directly to consumers and have found that these sign-ups have been proven to lead to purchases. 

It goes like this: a consumer signs up for your email or SMS list. Then, marketing sends newsletters, promotions, and more to encourage purchases. You can now assign an average transaction value to those who opt-in at your events. Armed with that information, you can put a dollar sign on marketing opt-in numbers and showcase their ROI to stakeholders.

In Conclusion

Event marketing is successful and vital to a brand’s strategy for good reason: it affects so much more than just brand awareness. Building events into your strategy helps you engage consumers in a creative, personalized, and immersive way, connecting with them through valuable memories. 

So, next time event marketing comes up, remember that you can amplify the impact when you connect it to multiple areas. Create a stronger, more robust investment through proven results, revenue, consumer research, product testing, marketing opt-ins, and more.