Event marketing remains the most direct and highly effective strategy for US businesses to secure leads. Previous studies have identified that 79% of businesses were generating sales during events, while 31% considered events as the most effective marketing channel.
Events are still a brilliant way to attract new audiences and deliver a delightful experience to existing ones. Marketers today organize their event marketing through strategic event marketing checklists to ensure a systematic process flow, just like any other form of a content marketing campaign.
Importance Of Event Marketing Checklist For Smoother Execution
As we mentioned above, events are still a popular means for businesses to engage with new & existing customers directly while increasing revenue. An event marketing checklist can be extremely important for operations, marketing, and other departments for smoother execution of the campaign.
Here are some remarkable benefits of creating a trade show event checklist:
Event marketing creates better engagement & connections with audiences. Being prepared with marketing collateral for both new leads and existing customers is a great way to enhance brand recognition. A checklist allows content teams to develop creative & appealing content for all audiences.
Events marketing checklists are crucial when businesses are introducing new products & services. Businesses can release their offerings at low cost to a larger audience and get immediate feedback.
Event marketing campaigns are a very effective means of collecting customer feedback and complaints directly. Checklists prepare trade show marketers to engage with customers and solve their grievances in person, creating a loyal customer base who will repeat purchases. Businesses can organize dedicated areas for feedback since this can be used later as important customer information.
Events marketing checklists are most important because they lay down the experience and the entire plan of the event itself. From event gaming ideas, food & beverages, virtual participation, sales, feedback, visual shows, ambiance, and other aspects, everything must conform with the checklist for enhanced event marketing ROI.
To-Do List for Pre-Event Marketing
The pre-event checklist may be the most important for organizers since this is where the stage is set for a successful show. By creating multiple customer touchpoints, and organizing the teams to fulfill their relevant roles pre-event marketing checklists prepare teams for the task ahead.
Event Brief & Branding Strategy
Developing an event brief will define the various elements of the event itself including your branding strategy, marketing, content, and other aspects. This is the step where you define creating dedicated websites, landing pages, promotional material, and event gaming ideas.
Businesses must also develop a theme for the event answering important questions like color palette, design, timelines, teams, and branded content.
Define Event Basics
Organizers must now collaborate to decide the location, time, type, goals, and budget of the event. This is where marketing teams consider different venues, times, and budgets to decide which one is most efficient & effective for the business.
Create Dedicated Website & Digital Content
Digital teams must collaborate to establish a dedicated website or landing page for the event. Audiences use a number of social channels and email to interact with their favorite brands today. Therefore event organizers can use this opportunity to magnify their event marketing through social platforms.
A dedicated website or landing page can register attendees for in-person attendance and virtual ones who wish to join live online.
Develop Engaging Email Campaigns
Developing engaging email campaigns is a very effective way to reach existing customers. Email campaigns not only remain one of the most popular ways customers connect with brands, but also offers the highest ROI for marketing teams.
Creating appealing and actionable email campaigns provides a larger attendance and delivers important event information directly to customers.
Developing Themes, Designs & Colors
The pre-event marketing checklist is where organizers decide the theme, colors, and design of the event. Most of these elements are either inspired by the brand’s original theme palette of colors, fonts, and content. However, businesses can also organize event themes around new products and holidays.
To-Do List for During the Event
Deploy the Event Marketing Checklist
On the event day, it’s time to relax with all the planning and checklists completed. It’s finally time to put people and processes in action to ensure everything goes smoothly while staying proactive in resolving administration issues.
Organize All Marketing Collateral & Promotions
It’s a brilliant idea for the event day checklist to keep an inventory of all the content marketing activities and branding collateral. Keeping in check digital and hardcopy marketing materials is essential to ensure all audiences are engaged at the end of the day.
Give Them An Overwhelming Welcome
Remember this is all about your audiences, so give them a warm overwhelming welcome. Depending on the marketing plan, organizers use large screens and audio systems to welcome customers to their events. For digital audiences, marketers can prepare attractive content supported by gamification to encourage their attendance.
Build Networks with Sponsors
It’s a brilliant idea to keep in check with sponsors and partners attending the event. The trade show is all about connecting with all business stakeholders, it’s a top priority on the trade show day checklist to provide dedicated attention to your sponsors and partners.
Event Gamification
When it comes to virtual event marketing, event gamification is an essential tool for engaging and incentivizing attendees. By incorporating fun and interactive activities around your brand and products, you can keep virtual attendees engaged and excited about your event. This can include access to gifts, rewards, and discounts, which can be used to drive attendance and increase engagement. It’s important to monitor the consistency of event gamification throughout your event, ensuring that activities remain engaging and relevant to your target audience.
To-Do List for Post Event
The post-budget checklist usually involves evaluating the pre-event marketing checklist. This is where organizers measure budgets and review the accomplishment of goals.
Actual Vs Budgeted
Once the event has ended it’s time to measure the budget financials against actual expenses during the event. This is an essential step for ROI calculation and usually involves all event costs against all revenue from different touchpoints.
Send Out Acknowledgements & Appreciation Posts
As a part of the pre-event checklist, you should send out thank you emails and post appreciation social posts for all the stakeholders who attended. While the focus remains on your target audiences, make sure you remember to thank partners, vendors, investors, and sponsors.
Create Event Recap
An important aspect of the post-event marketing checklist is to create a highly engaging event summary, highlights, video promos, and social feeds. This allows existing customers and other participants to share their experiences of the trade show event.
It’s a great way to increase brand reach to attract new audiences to learn about the brand while entering the sales funnel.
Conduct a Post Event Survey
A post-event survey can be conducted over email, mail, and social platforms, including LinkedIn, for promoting content. Asking customers which aspects they enjoyed and what they didn’t like is essential to learn for the next big event.
This is also a great time to measure the engagement and brand recognition by comparing it to target goals from the event.
Conclusion
Event marketing checklists are a great way to organize the planning, organizing, monitoring, and execution of trade shows. Marketing events are usually placed in three phases including pre-event, event day, and post-event activities.
Marketing teams must prepare strategic checklists for each phase to ensure maximum attendance, brand engagement, and participant satisfaction. We hope you enjoyed this edition of our blog, for more interesting reads bookmark us now and join our social feeds for regular updates.
