5 Benefits of Event Marketing for Driving Customer Engagement

Event marketing bridges the gap between digital campaigns and real-world interactions. It not only allows you to promote your brand but also helps you nurture deeper connections with your target audience. Today, we’ll examine the five key benefits you stand to gain by leveraging event marketing!

What is event marketing?

Event marketing is the process of creating a physical display or online presentation to promote products, services, and brands. These webinars, workshops, or conferences help you engage both existing customers as well as new prospects.

5 benefits of event marketing

1. Increase brand awareness

Even when doing your best, it can be difficult to grab people’s attention nowadays. Events marketing helps you stand out by offering something interactive, something your customers can’t ignore, giving you a vital chance to ensure they hear your message.

Have you got an attractive product to demo? Do you offer a service that people need to hear about? Does your business have core values that will resonate with your customers? If so, you should take the opportunity to tell your story.

Another benefit of events marketing is it allows you to partner with other firms, extending your reach. Partnerships and sponsorships can help elevate your brand’s visibility in the industry so you can tap into new demographics beyond the reach of traditional media.

2. Generate high-quality leads

Whilst generating leads using email marketing or social media platforms can be an affordable way to generate a large quantity of leads, they might not provide the best quality. Email blasts rarely yield results while converting social followers into paying customers can be a Herculean task.

Event marketing, on the other hand, gives you so much more time with potential customers, so you end up generating higher-quality leads. Potential customers don’t just glance over your material, they engage with it fully — which results in better conversion rates and more sales!

Leads who attend an event or watch your webinar are almost certainly interested in what you offer. The increased interest inherent to marketing events provides unique opportunities for direct interaction. You can run product demonstrations, have Q&A sessions, and engage prospects 1-on-1. 

As a bonus, the data gathered from events — such as online registration details and feedback forms — can drive further engagement. This gives you a chance to reach out to customers after the event using tools like call center lead management, email marketing platforms, and social media. 

3. Build stronger customer relationships

Events marketing also allows you to connect to your existing customers more meaningfully, helping you build relationships and creating loyal, lifelong customers who return to you time and time again. This is particularly important for industries with high competition and churn rates.

Events marketing helps build a sense of community beyond one-to-one interactions by giving everyone who attends a sense of shared experience and brand camaraderie. This encourages discussions between your customers through forums or social media even in your absence.

On top of this, it’s also a great way for you to interact with lots of different customers from a variety of demographics. This helps you to better get to grips with how your customers really think and feel about your product, as well as their needs and interests, so you’re able to connect with them more in the future.

4. Enhance the customer experience

It’s one thing to read about a product; it’s another to experience it. Events marketing allows you to drive customer engagement by providing an immersive interactive environment for customers to experience what you are offering.

Workshops, product demos, and webinars allow your customers to see what your product does and try things out before committing to a sale. This is known as the endowment effect: people value things more highly once they psychologically “own” something — even by just temporarily handling it during a workshop.

Moreover, events can be fun and memorable. By offering entertaining events and engaging webinars, they’ll subconsciously associate that positive feeling every time they think of your brand — creating an affinity for your business.

By creating positive associations and emotional connections, events can transform ordinary customers into passionate brand advocates, — further enhancing the customer experience. This creates a virtuous cycle of ever-improving engagement, and driving sales through word of mouth.

5. Gather customer feedback

Getting honest feedback can be surprisingly tricky without direct interaction. Just look at ratings online. They can be very subjective, with some people giving five stars to something that was just “okay” to others choosing one star even for the slightest problem.

With objective feedback, it's possible to gauge how people feel about you and what you need to change to improve. However, direct interactions at events help you understand how they think which is instrumental when refining products/services or designing future marketing campaigns to match customer needs.

Incorporating interactive elements like polls, questions, and quizzes will encourage attendee participation while giving attendees the opportunity to share their feedback. This is especially important for online events like webinars that rely on interactivity to cut through the noise.

See our full list of interactions here!

Post-event, you can continue to drive engagement by involving them in the creation of the next event so they feel heard and understood. Use social media polls driven by the event’s hashtag, to send out surveys after the event, asking how you can improve the next one.

This not only gives attendees a voice but helps you figure out what to improve on future webinars — all the while increasing the odds of repeat attendance which will increase the effectiveness of your customer engagement efforts.

To learn more, read our full article on Best Webinar Survey Questions to Ask Before, During, and After!

Conclusion

Getting to know your customers properly can be challenging in a digital world filled with spam emails and paid ads. Event marketing allows you to interact directly with your customers in an engaging setting that's informative on both ends.

Whether through in-person conferences or virtual events such as webinars, this highly personalized contact helps you build relationships with existing customers and generate fresh leads for your business. These unique benefits are simply beyond the capabilities of more traditional marketing strategies.