The game has changed for the events industry and for corporate Australia. The landscape is complicated and changing every day and there’s plenty of uncertainty.

The obstacles and unexpected changes you may be experiencing can be time-consuming and difficult to navigate and it’s likely you’re looking at, or have already moved to online events.

Whether you’re conducting training, an online exhibition, a museum or gallery virtual experience, keynotes, a meeting or conference or even zoom or virtual networking, you still need to get eyeballs on these links and if you’re in the ticketed event world, you’ll need to drive revenue from these links.

As people spend more time online doing everything from working to shopping and learning new skills, statistics are showing right now that Facebook and Instagram are the most cost-effective channels for brand ad campaigns, and Search is still converting leads well for ourselves and our clients.

Now’s the time to up your marketing game to get ahead of your competition. As some businesses pull back on their marketing spend, the space that they leave is a space for you to claim a bigger piece of the pie.

Create smart marketing through genuine connections. Gently lead in new opportunities by engaging potential customers. Give them reasons to trust you, like you and want to do business with you.

How do you do this, right now?

1. Review your marketing strategy. 

Now’s not the time to be the pushy salesperson knocking at the digital front door. There’s a lot of uncertainty and people who may be doing it tough, so be mindful of this. Reimagine your messaging, creative, identify new audiences, opportunities and channels and build your game plan first.

2. Do a digital health check. 

Make sure your website is fully mobilised, has customised landing pages for each of your campaigns and is sales-ready. Make sure your SEO is kicking with tags, long-tail content and rich-content blogs so Google can find you easily. Check your social and digital channels and update them with new headers,  regular posts and have a hashtag strategy to make sure you’re reaching and extending your audiences.

3. Build trust and in your brand, your people, your service and your expertise. 

Endear your audiences with an empathetic – rather than sales-driven – approach. You can do this through content-driven marketing rather than straight sales ads, then amplifying these messages on socials, paid digital including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, programmatic marketing and of course your own e-newsletters. Build subscribers by offering something for free. That might be an insights report, free advice, data or research or a template for your audience to use. You can push this out again through your digital and socials, online services, news services and other content platforms. Make sure you push back to your website and capture the downloads through a sign-up form. By doing this, you create a powerful database of interested and loyal fans. And you can market to them over again for minimal cost through an ongoing funnel-marketing campaign.

4. Drive traffic to your website and your links through a hyper-targeted digital marketing campaign. 

Right now, Facebook and Instagram are the number one platforms to reach your potential audience and customers and push interested people to your website. Customised audiences are a must, don’t reach out to the masses, keep the targeting tight and overlay this with your subscriber database to create lookalike audiences and reach more like-minded customers, then serve customised messages and offers, with customised landing pages on your website.

5. Take an integrated approach to your Event Marketing

With the brand wheels moving, you’ll already have built an engaged customer base. Your event marketing campaign should be well-rounded, integrated and incorporate content, funnels, digital, social, alliance marketing, PR and media buying. The timing of announcements and promotions should also be wrapped around five phases of customer decision-making and buying: awareness, consideration, conversion, advocacy and loyalty. At each of these phases, your pricing, announcements, campaign messaging, offers and creative should change to suit the buying and decision-making cycle.

If you have moved your event into a virtual world, are live streaming or if you just want to build some strong brand equity while everyone else is still considering their marketing plan, we can help.

The good news is that we have these five steps bundled into easy to activate pieces of the puzzle, so it’s easy to activate one or all of the steps with us. We’ll lead the way with minimum fuss and impact on your resources. We can build your strategy, develop creative and content and get you into the market ASAP.