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How to Plan a Successful Brand Event?
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How to Plan a Successful Brand Event?

BySean El Hani

Increasing brand awareness and presence is a critical component you wouldn’t want to exclude from your business’s marketing plan. Your digital marketing efforts may produce the bulk of customer conversions and brand expansion activities, but you can achieve even more when you take your efforts offline. Traditional approaches remain popular and effective, and one of them you will have to consider at some point is organizing a brand event.

Think about product launches, concerts, pop-up shops, conferences, and expos. These types of events are guaranteed to help you increase your business’s reach, establish new contacts, and position your brand as an important thought leader in your industry. To accomplish all that, however, won’t come easily.

Considering the cost, logistics, and effort needed for any event, you will want to make sure that every expense and resource will generate a high return in the long run. For this reason, the guide below should give you the lowdown on how to organize a brand event that will lead to new windows of opportunity.

Why Organize an Event Anyway?

Let’s first talk about the value that brand events bring to the businesses that organize them. As much as online marketing has become a prevalent way of reaching out to a target audience, consumers remain attentive towards brands that go out into the open and engage with them at a more personal level. In an article published on Advertising Week, about 83% of marketers say events drive business growth. That’s on account of the following factors:

  • Community-Building: Consumers are more likely to spend on brands that relate to their preferences and needs, making them feel that they belong to an authentic group that shares their beliefs, passions, and advocacies. When you organize an event, you provide a platform for such individuals to connect and find common ground in the values you project and the solutions you offer. More than driving brand loyalty, you’re creating a space for conversations among your target audience and positioning your brand as a catalyst for these conversations.
  • Establishing Industry Leadership and Credibility: Organizing an event communicates your business’s desire to reach out to its community in the most genuine way. Generating sales and increasing audience engagement only result from your industry’s view of your business as a credible source of insights and solutions. Conferences, seminars, and the like create avenues for showing your brand’s willingness to collaborate and come up with valuable innovations. Boosting credibility is the foundation of your business’s capacity for success, and an event might as well be the best channel to accomplish that.
  • Expanding networks; More than just a way to connect with consumers, events also offer valuable networking-building opportunities as they open up your brand to collaborations within and outside your industry. They serve as platforms in which collaborations may occur, leading towards partnerships that allow for access to new markets, tools, and insights. More than anything, cooperation with other brands will benefit your marketing efforts, drive trust, and even unlock opportunities for expanding your brand across borders.
  • Means of gathering data: On the side, brand events also function as research tools, especially as you monitor feedback from attendees that may include consumers and potential business partners. Use such events as product unveilings and trade shows to gauge audience sentiments and come up with ideas that will nurture your future marketing and business development efforts.

Going beyond the costs of event organization, there is much to gain from building one that could result in optimal gains. Then again, that will only depend on how much effort and thought you put into planning one.

Tips for Planning a Stellar Event

Once you have decided to organize a brand event, you will need to make sure you’re on the right track. It can be overwhelming having to deal with the many details and variables involved, but the tips below should help ease the process.

1. Know your goals

The first thing you will have to keep in mind when planning a brand event is to set a direction and destination. You wouldn’t want to focus only on brand awareness, since that’s already a given. You will need to define what the long-term goals are that you want to accomplish once the event is over. Here are just some you might want to check out:

Establishing Customer Loyalty

You want your event to be a means to make your target audience feel they are at home with your brand, allowing them to make repeat purchases and even recommend your products or services to people within their circles.

Increasing Sales

Part of your efforts in organizing a brand event is to boost your business’s revenue. You can use it as a way to upsell products or services and, in the case of a product launch, drive engagement and future customer conversions, especially among those who have a strong interest in purchasing your product or service.

Boosting Follower Count

Some events can focus more on improving their social media numbers, especially if they are organized to possess viral potential. If this is going to be your main thrust, come up with a specific target for new followers, shares, and reactions.

Boosting Audience Sentiments

If your event is organized with a focus on improving public relations, then it matters to gauge the feedback of your attendees and find out if their perception of your brand has improved. Having this goal should prompt you towards calibrating your brand image and filling the gaps that your brand may lack relative to your competitors.

There are other metrics you may have to consider when organizing your event. It matters to come up with goals that align with your brand’s long-term mission and vision.

2. Build a Team and Set a Budget

Once you’ve laid out the goal you want to achieve through the event, you will need to brainstorm for ideas. You can’t do it on your own, as you will need the perspectives and creativity of others to help you build a clear-cut plan. With that being said, start building a committee in charge of all aspects of organizing the event, and build subcommittees that will focus on specific areas such as venue selection and preparation, marketing, and logistics, particularly the preparation of equipment and security. Further divide these subcommittees into smaller teams assigned to handle different microtasks.

As you assign roles to the different committees and decide on who gets to head each one, you will need to come up with a realistic budget. Keep in mind that you’re not only paying for the venue and the technical and creative aspects of the event. You will also need to set aside resources for marketing, additional staffing, and catering. As you do so, make sure to set a buffer that should cover real-time costs in case your total expenses exceed the initial estimate.

3. Double Down on Your Brand Presence

Whether you’re organizing a discussion or a trade show, inviting key players in your industry, you will have to maximize every opportunity to boost your brand visibility. You can start by building a separate social media page on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, where you can post updates to build anticipation leading to the event. In addition to that, consider setting up a website exclusively for the event. This may also serve as a platform for interested attendees to register and access additional resources about the event.

Decorating your event with your brand identity can also help improve brand recognition and retention. Consider preparing custom music, AVPs, and decorations such as custom feather flag displays that use your brand colors. During the event, have a documentation team take high-quality photos and videos, many of which you can repurpose for future marketing campaigns. Also, don’t forget about freebies. People are more inclined to engage with your brand in the long run if you offer them gifts in the form of shirts, pens, and other usable items.

4. Elevate the Experience

You may have hyped your attendees so much, but high expectations will only lead to disappointing results if you fall short on delivering beyond the bare minimum. With this in mind, if you promise an exciting and stellar time for your attendees, you might as well give it to them. Even if it’s just a talk with a key personality in your industry, some ways can help make your event more dynamic. If the event focuses on consumers, consider setting up booths with partner brands. Interactive talks that include Q&A sessions and workshops, on the other hand, are best suited for a more corporate crowd.

In case you want your event to embrace new technology, double down on augmented reality and virtual reality platforms. Offer live product demonstrations and decorate your event in a way that will push people towards documenting every highlight they come across. When done right, the appearance and sensation of attending can encourage participants to post about their experiences, thereby further driving awareness and engagement towards your brand.

5. Put Contingency Plans into Place

Planning your brand event shouldn’t focus on aesthetics and spectacle alone. A big part of it should also include plans for scenarios that may lie outside of your control. Technical problems are the most common disruptions to prepare for, so it’s important to always have backup devices such as audio-video equipment, as well as backup power in case of outages. If you’re holding the event outdoors, make sure you have a Plan B in mind in case of severe weather.

There may also be instances when the speakers you invite won’t show up for some reason, so it pays to set an action plan that allows you to utilize the time reserved for such speakers and keep the event going. You retain attendees better when you plan for disruptions and ensure the continuity of the program.

Endnote

From the looks of it, organizing a brand event entails a lot of hard work. On the bright side, so long as you plan it right, all of your effort will result in unlimited opportunities for your brand to grow.

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