How To Use Live Events To Build Your Brand
Having never really played around in the live event spaces (from an exhibitor’s perspective), I have found myself exhibiting at two industry events in as many weeks.
These were varied in size and audience which means we went into each of them with a slightly different outcome or focus, but I have learned some really handy lessons that might be useful for you if you’re considering events or industry exhibitions as a way to scale your awareness.
This, by the way, is something that I think can be seriously valuable for brands and businesses as long as a few boxes are ticked; firstly, the attending audience needs to be the right fit for your company and secondly, you need a value proposition that appeals to that audience.
I think it is useful to highlight the two events for context. The first was The Business Show, a free-to-attend 30,000-delegate business event at London’s ExCel Centre with a very generalised audience. The show attracted mainly SMEs and, from the data we collected at the event, it would be the smaller end of the business spectrum with the majority of people who came to our stand falling into the sub-20 staff bracket. The second event was EMC aka the Entrepreneurs Marketing Conference which is a relatively high-ticket (but absolutely brilliant!) 1000-delegate conference packed with expert keynotes from some leading experts from around the world.
The reason why I highlight the differences is that I think you need to treat different events in different ways — for example, The Business Show is mainly a sprawling 4-acre exhibition of displays from relevant brands with short keynotes on small stages from business leaders, whereas EMC is mainly focused on the longer-form, educational keynotes on one main stage, with the exhibition area being something that people would stroll around quickly during the coffee break. It is important to know how attendees are likely to behave so that you can make your offering fit in with consumer behaviour. For example; at The Business Show we found that attendees would happily stop for a chat for 20–30 mins as they are not working to a fixed timetable, whereas EMC attendees only wanted to have a very quick chat as they are on a short break in between brilliant expert talks.
Neither of these formats is right or wrong, you just need to be aware so you can make sure that you can make that delegate’s trip to your stand as powerful as possible i.e. don’t try and make your team have a long rapport-building chat with someone who is trying to rush back to see the next speaker!
Of course, exhibiting at events can come with a large price tag, but if you present the right market with the right offer that you can close in the right way, then the ROI on your outlay can be huge. So, here are the top lessons that I have picked up in the last few weeks, to make sure you maximise your live event opportunities.
- Is this the right audience?
- You have to be unique
- Contact prospects in advance
- Make it easy for attendees to connect with you
- Follow up, fast
IS IT THE RIGHT AUDIENCE: Does the event have the right audience to be of maximum value to your business? Be really, really honest about this. Ask the event organisers for info on their attendee demographics to ensure there is a good fit.
BE UNIQUE: If you’re going to have a stand, make sure there are some reasons why you can draw people in. Push marketing at events is really hard. With so many people relying on just handing out a flyer to passing attendees it can be difficult to get the right attention, so you want to draw people to you like a magnet. In order to do this you want to have something on your stand which attracts people to come and see what it is that you’re doing. Dwell time is powerful in this environment. Now, in our example at both shows, we actually took a mini recording studio setup with us (mixing desk, mics etc) so we could do a live ‘broadcast’. Recording live podcasts really attracted a crowd and gave us what I call the ‘busy restaurant effect’, which essentially meant that people stopped to see what was going on, which drew a bigger crowd. Like a busy restaurant, the fact that the stand was packed with people increased the footfall and drove more traffic. Now, of course, not everyone can run their own ‘broadcast’ from their stand but you could hire a firm like us to run recordings or live streams which could then be syndicated to the likes of Facebook, Clubhouse, LinkedIn, Twitter Spaces etc.
CONTACT PROSPECTS IN ADVANCE: A great way to preemptively connect with prospects and build rapport — in advance — is to give and not just take. For example, in the case of The Business Show, we actually touched base with every single exhibitor in advance and offered them a 15-minute podcast interview with our team. We then turned that micro-podcast into a piece of content that they could then use across their social media and content marketing channels. Here is a little Soundcloud playlist so you can hear what we did. So when you are out-reaching to give (and not take) the offering needs to have a genuine high-perceived value. Something like a 10-minute financial assessment that is a thinly disguised sales meeting ain’t going to cut it!
MAKE IT EASY TO CONNECT: If you can use all the above tactics to get in front of the right people then you need to make sure it is easy for you to connect with them. For example, leaflets can work, maybe nicely designed brochures could be a good fit too, always worth making the audience leaves with something in their hand. Another great thing to do is to encourage a digital connection too. That way you can try to capture contact details via popups on landing pages and you could even retarget those that land on certain URLs if you have the relevant pixels running. A handy tip for ensuring that people head to a specific URL is to give people an easy-to-scan QR code.
FOLLOW-UP, FAST: The final tip is to follow up, fast. There’s never going to be a time that a prospect is hotter to your product or service than when they are standing right in front of you. So you want to make sure you get in contact with them after the event as quickly as you can. And I would say probably try and get on to either a live meeting or a face-to-face call with them as quickly as you can to increase conversion rates.
I really hope that these short tips are helpful if you’re considering live events and experiential IRL engagements as part of your marketing, promotion and sales tactics — I discuss these hints in more depth on a recent episode of my Building The Brand podcast, which you can download on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts and all other major platforms.
Happy Exhibiting.
