Live event marketing is a powerful way to create engaging customer experiences and build brand loyalty. Our guide will explore the different types of live events, strategies for marketing them, and tips for success, so that you feel confident hosting your next event.
Fun fact: The landscape of live event marketing is expanding at a brisk pace. In 2022, 64% of professional event organizers experienced increased budgets, signaling a future devoid of slow-downs in our industry.
But to take advantage of this rapid growth, you need to know how to plan your live event marketing strategy.
Here’s where Eventbrite comes in. With decades of experience helping businesses of every size plan their live events, we’re ready to help you take your events to the next level.
Table of Contents
Live Event Marketing Strategies
How to Take Your Live Event Marketing to The Next Level
What is live event marketing?
Live event marketing is a promotional strategy that involves creating and hosting events to connect with customers and promote products or services.
Such events may include:
- Trade shows
- Conferences
- Product launches
- Seminars
- Workshops
Live event marketing is an effective way to create a compelling and memorable brand experience. It allows businesses to engage with customers more directly, which builds trust, loyalty, and advocacy. According to a study by the Event Marketing Institute, 74% of consumers say that engaging with brands in-person builds stronger and more meaningful relationships with them.
Live events also offer a unique opportunity to showcase products and services, generate leads, and gather customer feedback. You can use them to launch new products, demonstrate features and benefits, educate customers, and build thought leadership.
Live events can also be a valuable platform to network with industry peers, partners, and influencers, which can help increase brand awareness and credibility, plus it’s a cost-effective way to reach a large audience.
Leveraging social media and other digital channels to promote your event and connect with attendees pre-, during-, and post-event amplifies your event’s impact and extends its reach beyond the venue’s physical limitations.
Live event marketing strategies
Although you might be ready to try your hand at live event marketing, you still need to evaluate the strategy you’ll want to follow. Here are a few key live event marketing strategies, and some of our Eventbrite creators that made great use of them.
Create interactive components
Whether your event is virtual or in-person, you can take it to the next level by offering audience interaction. Give people the opportunity to ask questions, answer polls, and talk with each other to make your event more interactive and memorable.
You can make your event more interactive by:
- Offering Q&A sessions with speakers and industry experts
- Having an online chat platform for people to communicate
- Creating polls or surveys to get feedback on your products and services
- Rewarding people for paying close attention to presentations through activities or games
- Hosting breakout sessions to talk about different topics that interest other people
For example, the Future of AI in the Pharmaceutical Industry Conference could have been dry and inaccessible. By including a Q&A session with industry experts, the organizers solved two problems: they made the information more accessible to non-experts and added an interactive component to grab their attendees’ attention.
Remember, even if you feel confident that your event is engaging, an interactive component is yet another way to ensure attendees stay engaged. You can even advertise the interactive elements through Eventbrite Ads, getting people even more excited about signing up.
Use social media
Social media can be powerful both as a marketing tool and as a way of improving your attendees’ experiences. It keeps your audience engaged and informed during and after the event. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram — all of these platforms can help you reach more people.
That’s why the For All Conference started #FORALLConf on Twitter and Yammer. Encouraging people to use the hashtag allowed them to spread the word about the event, give real-time feedback to organizers, and talk about it with other attendees.
That meant that organizers could meet attendees’ needs more quickly and easily. At the same time, attendees raised the event’s profile by participàting with the hashtag.
Eventbrite enables you to give attendees information like a hashtag on your event page and invitations. At the same time, we can automate your social media presence and expand your reach.
Offer incentives
A proven strategy to garner interest in your event is offering exclusive benefits, which could be anything from discounts on products and services, prizes, freebies, or exclusive access to particular speakers or presentations. By providing attendees with something special, you create a feeling of exclusivity that will make them more likely to return for future events.
Some types of incentives are more readily apparent:
- Food
- Swag
- Early access to products and features
- Product discounts
But you can create further incentives by providing opportunities for attendees to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience as well. For example, the 2023 Games Development Conference Afterparty incentivized attendance with a great panel of industry-leading experts.
By bringing in heavy hitters from Amazon, Dolby, and Unity, the Games Development Conference made its afterparty attractive without offering any less valuable swag or prizes. Importantly, it wasn’t any one of these speakers that made the event a must-attend. Instead, the combination of industry knowledge elevated it to the next level.
Segment your audience
You might communicate differently with gamers and video editors in an advertising campaign. Similarly, you should have different parts of your event that target different audience segments.
The Africa Automotive Show sought to attract attendees from a wide range of backgrounds. They needed to target investors, manufacturers, buyers, and government officials.
To achieve this, the Africa Automotive Show segmented its exhibitors. These ranged from commercial vehicles to parts distributors, each able to showcase everything they had to offer. The show also offered a “matchmaking” platform for business-to-business and business-to-government buyers and sellers to make contact.
That meant everyone got what they wanted from the automotive show, no matter their industry or job title. To emulate the Africa Automotive Show, consider how you can make sure all your audience segments feel represented.
Types of live marketing events
Live marketing events vary, limited only by your creativity. However, they often fit into a few key categories.
By understanding each category and how others use them, you can decide what type of event would best suit your marketing objectives.
Trade shows and conferences
Trade shows are an awesome way to meet new customers, promote products and services, and network with industry peers. They’re especially useful because they tend to be:
- Collaborative
- Involve a variety of vendors
- Specific to an industry or niche
These qualities make them great for networking and introducing products to the right audiences.
Similarly, conferences bring together a wide range of people from across a given industry, but they tend to be more structured, with assigned speakers and fewer vendors.
Pulumi provides an excellent example of this with its PulumiUp Infrastructure-as-Code Virtual Conference. This conference brought together various industry experts for a valuable exchange of ideas. Attendees gained insights into how Pulumi’s product could enhance their work efficiency.
The conference enhanced Pulumi’s credibility and brand recognition across the industry. This helped improve attendees’ work efficiency and elevated Pulumi’s stature among its crucial audience.
Conferences and trade shows offer a valuable opportunity to present your product to your target audience. Additionally, these events provide industry experts with essential insights into the practical application of your product. You can collect usage information and other data from your attendees by using technology for conference management like Eventbrite’s, and glean valuable insights through post-event data analysis.
Product launches
Product launches are events celebrating your newest product’s release. These can range from a modest gathering of friends and local professionals to an international, multi-day event. Regardless of the guest list size, it’s a chance to showcase your product and generate excitement.
When Martinez Guitars planned their product launch with Fretmonkey Records, they saw many of those same benefits. They drew a crowd eager to hear the new line of instruments — and the offer of free food and drinks probably helped too.
By scheduling the launch the same week as a local industry conference, they were able to attract a more diverse crowd of industry professionals than they typically would. They brought in professional musicians to show off their latest guitar in front of national and international buyers.
This type of product launch is valuable because it allows people to have hands-on experience with the product.
It’s also an opportunity to network with industry peers and get valuable feedback from potential customers. 95% of products fail to launch, but a good launch party is the best way to get yours started on the right foot.
You can increase your chances of having all the right people at your product launch by using Eventbrite’s marketing tools. By helping you target specific audiences and automate your marketing across multiple channels, we can help ensure your product launch will be as well-attended as possible.
Workshops
Where trade shows, conferences, and product launches let you show your product to your target audience, workshops let you put it in their hands.
Instead of a simple demonstration, a workshop allows you to create a more interactive experience for your audience. You can use it to answer questions, provide education about products or services, and gauge potential customers’ interests and needs.
Succulence does a great job of making workshops an integral part of their business model. They invite people into their plant store to learn how to build and care for their terrariums. Then, they can purchase the terrarium supplies and plants, all while gaining new skills.
Succulence’s workshops are fun events that people will go to for the experience, and the product they get at the end is a bonus. They make plant ownership an active and exciting hobby that engages their audience and encourages them to explore — not just watch the grass grow.
Through workshops, you can make your product tangible and add fun and excitement to its presentation, making it an effective event marketing strategy. To drive even more attendance, you can create an event page through Eventbrite and access a crowd looking for exciting activities.
Virtual events
Virtual events can be any of the above: trade shows, conferences, product launches, or workshops — or any other great virtual event idea you have! The main difference is that you can interact with even more people (anyone with an internet connection) by using a virtual platform.
The rise of remote work and digital collaboration tools has made it easier than ever to create virtual events. You can host an event with thousands of people all over the world on virtual conferencing platforms. This type of marketing allows you to reach more potential customers without paying for physical space or travel expenses.
While physical demonstrations or workshops may not be possible virtually, a virtual event can be an advantage for software products, allowing you to showcase it and give demos and hands-on experience.
Those are some of the advantages McGraw Hill took advantage of in creating its Virtual Innovation Conference. McGraw Hill invited speakers, experts, companies, and attendees from around the world to join one another to exchange ideas on K-12 education.
At the same time, McGraw Hill used the opportunity to show off their virtual education tools. It’s a smart way to have a virtual event double as a product demonstration, and worth considering if your product has synergy with the event’s format.
How to take your live event marketing to the next level
Every live event requires a creator, and in many cases, there are also organizers, marketers, and skilled staff involved who contribute to its success. All of these people could benefit from some additional support and assistance.
With Eventbrite, you can implement industry-leading live event marketing strategies regardless of the type or format of your event. For example, you can offer customized incentives to specific audience segments with Eventbrite’s event ticketing platform.
If you choose a virtual event, you can use purpose-built tools like Eventbrite’s virtual events platform. This lets you create seamless audience interactions with presenters, drive registrations with a simple checkout experience, and help more people discover the event by promoting it both on Eventbrite and through other channels.
