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How Can an Event Build Your Brand? 7 Creative Tips

To build a brand today, you need to be known for more than just your product or service. Your brand should be able to truly enhance your customers’ lives. Successful brands are built through the delivery of relevant, consistent, and distinctive messaging, imagery, and experiences to target audiences.

Why Are Events Important for Brand Building?

Hosting events has become a powerful tool in the arsenal of brand marketers. When these events are effectively marketed, they can provide unique experiences for your customers. The event itself allows brands to interact in an environment where deeper and more meaningful connections can be forged between brands, customers, prospects, suppliers, and partners. From your corporate event space to your event staff, everything plays an important role.

To build your brand around an event, you need to focus on three important elements: the creative aspect of the event, the messaging aspect, and the creation of one-of-a-kind experience for the visitors and attendees. These three should interact well and attract the key audience and sponsors.

Your corporate event checklist should take the following into consideration.

1. Have Your Most Enthusiastic Staff and Customers on Hand

Passion is always the way into your customer’s heart. One of the best ways to create a strong emotional connection to your brand is to hold an event that is packed with your most ardent supporters.

These are both your internal supporters (employees) as well as external supporters (customers and partners). These people can create a more personalized feel at the event so that your guests can observe and experience your brand values.

Your staff should have top-notch communication skills and be fully knowledgeable about how your company works. Cherry-pick your team members and your super fans who you think will have the most positive impact during one-on-one conversations at the event. They will be crucial in setting the tone for the event.

2. Define Your Unique Brand Identity and Keep It Consistent

Your brand identity is the single biggest factor that communicates your brand message to the customer. It defines your brand and tells your customers what you’re selling and how.

Some of the key elements of your brand identity include your logo, colors, fonts, imagery, tone of messaging, values, and persona. Clearly defining these elements is necessary as they will make the basis of all your promotional material used at the event to build brand recognition. Be sure to come up with the most compelling material that speaks of your brand, your values, and your culture.

Once these elements are defined, make sure to keep things consistent throughout the event. Inconsistency can be a buzzkill, and it will send out a confused message to your guests and visitors about your company’s values.

3. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

A cost-effective way to bring life to your event is to create visually-engaging content for your social media channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Keep in mind that text based content is not as effective as visual content as far as engagement is concerned. Videos, in particular, are the best way to grab the attention of your target audiences on social media.

Start posting pictures and videos on your social media pages months before the event. You can share things that go ‘behind the scenes’ during the planning phase, engage customers through meaningful polls, tell the audiences what your fans are saying about your brand and the event, and more.

4. Design Event Posters, Flyers, and Badges

Print media isn’t completely dead, despite the growth of the digital media. When designing your event posters, flyers, badges, and other promotional materials, pay close attention to the colors you use, the typography, and the composition of the message.

Keep your color palette consistent with your brand and avoid the use of too many colors. Your font style and the way the words and lines are positioned should be able to draw all eyes to the posters. The message should be short and crisp.

5. Create a Unique Name and Tagline for Your Event

Generic names such as ‘Leaders’ Conference’, ‘Fashion Expo’ are history now. You have to come up with a unique name and tagline for your event that gives a subtle message about your brand. A great example is Ted Talks – Ideas Worth Spreading.

Once you have a good name in place, you can also create a hashtag to ramp up your event exposure. Invite your fans and attendees to use the hashtag when sharing updates from your event.

6. Run Competitions and Giveaways

Competitions and giveaways are another excellent way to create a buzz around your event and promote your brand. Plan some interesting competitions to run at the event and encourage participation with attractive giveaways.

To gain maximum exposure, promote it on your social media pages. The more appealing and exclusive the competition is the more it will get liked, shared, and retweeted.  This, in turn, will enhance brand awareness.

7. Reward Loyalty

While you put in so many efforts to make sure the right people are attracted to your event and the attendance is great, you should also think about ways on how to reward your loyal supporters so they keep returning. Offer early bird discounts or discounts if several tickets are purchased together. You should also offer attendees discounts and incentives for your future events.

To Sum Up

Whether you rent a small event space, an outdoor party venue or large exhibition hall, if you want to maximize the impact of your event, you need to come up with unique and engaging ideas. We hope that this post has helped you gain some insights on how a well crafted and well marketed event can help you create a long lasting impression on your customers and strengthen your brand recognition.

Author Bio:

Amanda McPhail runs the booking team for deck655 – a sophisticated downtown San Diego event venue. Amanda has longstanding expertise in the wedding and event industry, and she enjoys blogging about the latest trends and industry topics.