Introduction
Hello everyone, this is Priya from Hippo Video an online video personalization and distribution platform dedicated to sales. This blog traces my journey in event marketing from zero to everything.
Event marketing is one of the most impactful marketing channels for various industries. It is very important to seize every opportunity you get with your potential buyers and events offer a very good chance to meet and start that initial conversation.
Recent research says that events make up 24% of the average B2B marketing budget.
Set up goals – Event Marketing
There are three fundamental steps – Zero in on the event relevant to your industry, fix and finalize the event, create workflow and framework of goals.
The first thing would be, of course, decide what event you want to attend based on your company’s industry type. The second you finalize the event, create a workflow and set up goals.
Now the goal could either be branding or demand gen. Either way, both of them lead to driving sales to your company.
Usually, an event marketing strategy is broken down to pre-event activity, event day activity and post-event campaigns. If I were to write about all the 3 stages then this blog will go on and on and on. So in this blog let me just talk about how you can get started with creating pre-event marketing campaigns. Pre-event marketing campaigns set the foundation for any event that you are attending.
Pre-event Campaigns
Video emails
Marketers believe that email is one of the best channels for promoting events.
40% of event marketers agree that email marketing is the most effective channel for promoting an event (source).
But how do marketers leverage email to communicate to your prospective attendees? Talking about emails, gone are the days of text emails, today’s world is all about video emails.
- Videos help in humanizing your email communication and putting a face to your name.
- Video emails help increase in open rate and click-through rate
- Videos result in better engagement and response rate
It is super simple to craft a video email. Start with choosing your target audience. Your target audience should be potential attendees. Could be co-sponsors for the event, influencers, your existing users etc. And then comes the struggle of finding a great subject line (don’t forget to include the word video in it :P)
Using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19% (HubSpot)
Record a quick 1-minute video inviting your audience to your booth and include a few takeaways that add value to your video. As simple as that! You can also send out personalized video email campaigns with the name personalized in the video. Personalizing a video is always the best way to grab attention. And it doesn’t stop there, tools like Hippo Video not only help in video creation but also help you to track your video behaviour with live notifications. This way, you can easily find out which video works best for you and as soon as you see that your video has been played, you can send across a follow-up email.
Personalized Sales Pages
We discussed video emails, how about video landing pages? Landing pages are a must as a part of any event marketing campaign, designed specifically to drive the audience to your booth. They can also be used for the sole purpose of collecting leads for your event so that you can nurture them down your marketing funnel before the event.
The amount of time and energy spent on building a landing page can be immense. The easiest way to build an event landing page for a campaign is to use Hippo Video’s Personalized sales pages. A video landing page personalized for every user is a great idea, isn’t it?
Create a landing page, personalize elements like the name, company name and logo. Add a video of your team saying hi and a bit about your presence at the event and send it across to your audience.
With Hippo Video, you can also add custom CTA’s in the video landing page itself to make it easy for your audience to book meetings. You can also add other videos to the video carousel. Showcasing videos like customer testimonials or your previous event videos add value to the landing page.
Social Media
With all the available platforms to leverage, social media is one of the easiest ways to promote an event. You can spread the word to a wide range of audience through these platforms.
Posting creatives could be the usual way of promoting your booth. However, video posts can get you to engage and convert your audience.
A simple 1-2 minute video post can get you maximum engagement as videos are more attractive than pictures.
According to a source, “Videos have 21.2% more interaction than image posts.”
Another way to get potential leads to visit your booth is to send them a direct video message. Nothing like a simple video that puts a face to your name. Again, this is no secret, but the best way to be active on social media is to keep track of the event hashtags/mentions and engage with those particular posts. This way, there is a chance that your potential leads could notice your presence at the event.
Conclusion
To sum it up, there are a million ways to create engagement and drive leads to your website before an event. However, videos are emerging as one of the most efficient ways to generate leads before the event. And it doesn’t stop there you can use videos during and for post-event campaigns as well. Stay tuned for a blog on that topic 🙂
Now that you know all the tips and tricks to tap pre-event marketing, start creating amazing videos with Hippo Video!