Event Marketing
Point Of Difference |
For most businesses, launches are important determinants of the future success of a venture. However, if you’re new in the market it’s often difficult to build that level of interest in crowds.
As a night-club owner for example, you are selling people to each other, a group of individuals that you repackaged into a group, set against in a particular setting wearing sexy clothes. You want to attract the right audiences if expecting to create a buzz, because your audience is your product. 
The problem is that if people haven’t heard of you before, they will be a skeptic about attending. If they don’t attend, your launch won’t be a success. If your launch isn’t a success, it may never catch the popularity wave.
The key is to create a story of the event being filled with the perfect crowd in the perfect venue for a perfect night out. If you know what you are doing, all of this can be achieved by using online social tools that are an ideal platform for leaking your story to create buzz. Let’s take an example of how you can use Facebook in this scenario.
The key to this case-study is to target the early adopters. These people are the first to catch the fever and are usually the most active online. If you get them on your lists, you’ll invariably create an environment of excitement around your nightclub launch. Of course, they won’t be easy to convince unless they see the value in it for them. Make it all about “them”.
Step 1: So, the first step is to create a virtual group on Facebook of a cool user group who has great parties every now and then. You don’t have to mention the venues or details of the parties these people attend; in fact you can build a culture within the group where doing so is considered a taboo. Focus on group member’s party experiences & stories after a weekend, build excitement, promote their pictures — and the fun they all have each weekend! You want new viewers of the group to think two things: 1- these people are cool. 2- The parties they go to rock.
Step 2: You want to keep updating this group page with new activities, party ideas, themes, photos and all of the things that would attract your targeted audience as much as possible. Remember it’s taboo to mention a party venue, date or time. Promote the story pertaining to the event: 1- Get people to start following the group in anticipation. 2- Get them to share it with their friends. 3- Get them to add stories and photos of their own nights out, in the lead up to your event. Remember the emphasis is always on non-disclosure of your venue or the date of your launch, though you would want to indicate a month. You may also want to promote personalities within the group as being the kind of people you want at your event. (Always create that feeling of scarcity wherever possible).
Step 3: Suggest an “anything goes” policy (within the law), release parcels of information over weeks not days. Remember you are getting the crowd excited, by telling them the story where they can become the stars (if lucky). The story must reflect the perfect night out for these people. The key is to engage them into a conversation by having them participate in it. Get them to answer survey questions online (use Surveymonkey.com) about the entertainment or dress regulations, even crowd selection, make the groups feel like they are organizing the biggest night out since the Beatles. The thought leaders, people who can move other people will rise to the top of this group through natural selection.
Step 4: You can set up Flickr, Youtube, Friendfeed accounts on the side. You can then feed the photo gallery, the Youtube channel and your Twitter account into the Friendfeed room and Facebook profile. Each day, you can favorite fantastic photos and videos of amazing club nights so that people in the group can see them. You can also bring in content from blogs in the form of ‘notes’ and tag people to the notes. If you don’t have a blog, you can setup Google Reader to pull in great articles and stories from all over the web of good club promotions and launches and bring them in as ‘notes’. Tagging people to notes entices them to read the note and add comments. You can also associate yourself and your campaign to the best club launches on the internet by twittering about it a few times a day. You can contact and interview some of the promoters of the events and record the podcasts of these interviews to share with the group. Without having to create any content on your own, you can use the above methods to build traction and buzz on your group.
Step 5: As each thought leader puts their hand up you can leak a little more information to these people only, give them more detail regarding plans than you do for the rest of the group. Remember don’t let them or the group know when the event will be held or where it will be, but you can leak details like the capacity, ticketing & how the selection process will play out. Give these people some ownership, give them something that sets them apart from the pack, it’s what they live for and you are going to need their support. Get your target audience excited about the concept of your launch party and begin syndicating this story through micro blogging, use link baiting, photo tagging and other strategies to drive traffic to the group while the buzz builds momentum. Keep building the suspense until you have the group publicly asking how they can get tickets.
Step 6: When you have the numbers you want buzzing around the launch, outline your plans. Give the group a location but not the venue (address) and give them the date. Send out electronic invitations along with the party ticket capacity ensuring the number is well below the number of active members you have attracted to your Face book group (say 600 people). Be prepared to partition walls if you have to, ensure the venue size matches whatever crowd capacity you end up with. You are telling the story that everyone has bought into for this big night out, at the end of the night what you said will and must go down at all costs. You need to put your reputation on it and come out the other side.
Inform the hungry crowd that only people who RSVP as interested are eligible to attend. Make it clear that people are not to RSVP as confirmed, you don’t want to build walls around your story that you can’t tear down if you need to. You want the group knowing that everyone wants to come without them knowing who will be there. Anyone who RSVP’s as confirmed is instantly deemed not-eligible for entry.
Step 7: If you have done everything well to this point you will have at least twice as many people that have indicated an interest in attending the launch than the number of people you have declared to be your capacity. Communicate the situation of scarcity to the group with concern for those who look like missing out. Do not allow yourself to become the door bitch whatever happens. Ask the group to decide on a door policy, have them fill out a quick survey about how to deal with the problem.
Now this is a multiple choice survey, so whoever writes it will want to make sure the group gets an option to vote for the lead personalities in the group to hand-pick a certain number of guests each from the list of people marked as interested. Most people in the group will know one of these leaders, directly or indirectly, which gives everyone a better chance of getting a ticket than your promotions team implementing a door-policy- it’s the choice I would pick.
Let everyone know that the leadership group will decide who receives tickets and these lucky people will receive text messages on the night of the launch. Messages will go out between 9.00pm and 10.00pm and it will include the venue, directions & instructions for the midnight launch.
Included within the text message will be a pin number that can be used to open a locked doorway in a back alley (preferably) that leads them into a chamber where security will greet them.
Timing is everything in this game. Pick your launch night when the groups interest peaks - if you delay, the hype may begin to wane and the result may even be a flop. It’s a fine line between getting this right and getting it wrong. Time your launch well, hit the right emotional triggers at the right time and you will see the results.
Your event launch will not only be full, patrons will have paid top dollar to get in. The marketing will have cost less than the security pin pad at the front door and all the people who couldn’t get in will spend the following week telling everyone about your club. More importantly you have already established a second tier of early adopters who all feel like they own the club, ensuring long term success. You can do it without cost and you don’t even need to visit the club. You can use this technique and drive the final surge to buy tickets on your Events Listed page on behalf of any club owner throughout the world and take your cut of the door.
Of course all of this is virtual instigated hype - some may consider it manipulative even. But again, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything against their will. If you want high impact launches without investing in promotions or losing out on ticket values or sales revenue because of freebies or discounts - this is the way to go. I’ve been involved in many massively huge club launches based on this tactic alone.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Exclusivity |
Tell the people that it’s all about them and do this on an individual basis. I am not saying that you treat all the visitors to your website exclusively; instead go for the early adopters. You can give them special offers like sneak peak to videos or photos. Make sure these are the people who get any info first so they feel special. If you do this the right way and make them feel like part of your team, this select group will do wonders marketing your event for free!
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Scarcity |
I am sure you have heard about how marketers often play with certain emotional triggers to entice people to act quickly. You can use the same principles of scarcity when selling tickets and merchandising to your audiences. Creating scarcity implies restricting the supply of the things that you are selling to create a perception of shortage. This becomes even more effective if it is bundled up with a promotional offer, such as a discount or bonuses.
Some people are indecisive or slow about making their decisions and often end up being too late. Scarcity puts them in a spot where they become more inclined to jumping for it rather than “thinking about it later”.
If they are on your lists, they already are interested in your services. Give them a great offer for a limited time and they might say “heck, why not?”
I have even used scarcity for high demand markets by increasing the prices up by 25%. This happened in an “open theater concert” that we were planning a few years back on the East Coast. It was going to be the first concert of that summer and people were already looking forward to it. Regardless of the prices, we would have sold a total number of 980 tickets for 980 seats. We decided to play with the scarcity approach to increase the prices up 25% from our usual rates for a limited time short supply. This trigger helped us sell all of our tickets in a record time and earn 25% more than we usually do from such events.
It’s human nature that people in general like getting attention and feeling important. Also a part of human psyche is the fact that people fear scarcity. For successful marketing you have to build on these emotional aspects. Another important factor that I should mention here is that if you promise anything through your campaign, then be sure to fulfil that promise. People may let you play with their emotions but nobody likes being taken for a ride.
Once you have the people interested, you can subtly convey that there are not enough tickets to go around. This way they’ll queue up to get the “golden ticket” so to speak. This creates a sense of urgency and makes people take quick decisions. Another powerful aspect of scarcity is that it can help you increase the price. If you have built the hype in such a manner that people believe that the event is not to be missed at any cost then they’ll even pay more to get the tickets. Remember timing is everything, don’t be too early or too late or it will all boil down to nothing. Final word of warning: keep your word. Do not promise people something you can’t pull off.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Pricing Strategy |
I often come across businesses that set their ticket prices very low to attract bigger crowds. The problem is that their brand, sales, marketing and even the event itself suffers as a consequence. The event tickets price depends on the perceived value to the audience. If the audience is not excited about attending they will not want to pay too much for it - chances are they won’t buy the tickets even when they are offered at lower rates. What happens is that the cost of arranging the event becomes more than the revenue earned through the event. What’s the point of going through the hassle if you’re not going to earn big profits?
If you can somehow increase the actual and the perceived value of the event for the audience, you will be able to charge a higher rate for the tickets, which if done right, will in turn sell more tickets as well. It will also allow you to draw more attention to prospective new customers as opposed to ones who have purchased from you before. Increased value in ticket pricing will also demonstrate traction and excitement around your event to prospective sponsors which will result in your ability to get them to pay a lot to get their brand in front of your audience. So, in essence, the entire success of the event could come down to the perceived value.
Think about the perceived value like this: A glass of water will have a higher perceived value to a thirsty athlete than a person who is not thirsty. So even though the glass of water is the same physically - it has different levels of perceived value to a different audience. Similarly, your targeted audiences need to want to be a part of your event. They need to feel like they belong there. They need to feel a sense of ownership and association with your event. They need to be excited about it all the way up to the event day. The value of your event to them should be incredibly high, so that they become willing and mentally ready to pay high prices to be a part of it.
The way to build perceived value is by hitting the right emotional triggers in the right audience at the right time. By engaging your audience in a conversation about the event, you are going to have more chance to hit these triggers than you would if you hand them a brochure or flier. It’s about building a story that has the target visualizing them being in the middle of a community of like-minded people who are all enjoying an experience that none of them would want to miss.
Once you have achieved this trigger throughout your conversation you have options. A good example of this process lies in the fact that you are not in a position to introduce a sense of scarcity around your event’s ticket sales until you have your audience wanting to attend. Who cares about limited tickets if you don’t want to go? Price anchoring is a technique that can be applied as a mental trigger to bait the prospects into impulse buying. What happens when people are in a certain mode is that they start searching for a solution that they have already made the decision to purchase. They have researched it & know what they want - and so have embarked on a mission to secure it. They are on a buying frenzy and nothing is going to stop them other than the purchase itself. Well suffice to say, it’s when people are in this mindset that you want to get in front of them with a final call to action trigger.
Throughout your event prelaunch campaign you work on building the perceived value of your event bearing in mind that perceived value and actual value are in the same family. Throughout this phase you need to engage your audience into a conversation that represents value for them to join, you do this be serving up social proof of value with the help of your existing customer or past event community & enhance this technique through the use of some other social marketing strategies. Once you sell them on the strength of value you can introduce discrete triggers like suggestions of scarcity such as an audience member posting comments on a blog about rumours of limited tickets being released to the public. It takes very little to introduce a sense of scarcity once the perceived value is already built.
Sometimes all it takes is a subtle scarcity trigger to send an audience into a buying frenzy where all you need to do is get a ticketing page up on the internet. When a touch of scarcity is combined with a high perceived value you’ll get the early adopters, the effect is almost magical if those early adopters are people-movers and not followers. Once this effect kicks in you can feel it because you go into lock down mode, hiding from everyone who is constantly asking about tickets, requesting favours, access & head starts etc. I like to call it the Event Line and I even named my blogs after it. It’s the line where your events transform from being a vision in your mind to a vision in the minds of your audience. Let’s face it you’re not going to be planning an event that you think won’t be perfect.
Throughout your campaign you can set a value and even a price estimate that will embed numbers in their heads without actually telling them the price. This can be done by comparing your event with other events of a similarly perceived value. These numbers need to be lurking somewhere in the back of their minds, all the while in a generally accepted manner that those numbers will be the price although you have never said so. When you have built that sense of excitement, exclusivity, scarcity, traction and pressure of a world of people rushing to become a part of it (all trigger points that should be planned into your campaign) - open your tickets for sale at a rate which is slightly lower than the number you had planted into the back of their minds (but higher than what you would have generally charged prior to inflating the events perceived value up from its actual value) - If the audience are exposed to a release of tickets going on sale at the right time they will be inclined to purchase them immediately, without further ado. Why wouldn’t they, the event is hot, everyone wants to attend, tickets are scarce & they are actually cheaper than what they had already lead themselves to believe they were going to be.
The impulse buying mode that you have worked them into, will lead to greater ticket sales and larger audiences - that can sell out in hours, days, even weeks before your event. It’s got to be better than placing an ad and waiting for one ticket sale at a time.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Inside Scoop |
Using these strategies for the first time ever may seem a little daunting. This is why I always keep myself available to consult, guide and help anyone entering this business as much as I can. One thing that I keep noticing is that people often mistakenly associate these triggers with volume. Let’s suppose you host a special event for 10 people and manage to attract 20 people with buying intent, you can apply these strategies as is. At less fortunate times, the last thing you want is to shoot for is 20 people, plan an event and venue for 20 people and only attract 10 buyers. The entire event will be a notice to the 10 attendees that if they pre purchase a great experience that is promoted to include 20 interesting, entertaining guests they may well be short changed with just 10 others in attendance. It will be very difficult to entice these same 10 people to trust you again. Here’s the good news. Revolving door technique, clever planning and applying the same emotional triggers to an event for 5 people or 5000 will yield the same effect; i.e. the growth of you as an event marketer in reputation, and the growth of your business promoting any event. Whether you have 5 people walk away from your first event or 5000, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have built a positive platform to promote the next event, one step at a time
I’d like to enlist a few additional tactics and pointers for effective mental triggers
1- Celebrity endorsements. These instill a feeling that everyone is talking about the event. That’s a key element as an initial trigger because people generally like to be involved with popular things around them.
2- To use your influence you must;
- Make an inspirational appeal that displays emotion
- Consult prospects about your appeal
- Form Coalition partnerships
- Build teams of support throughout these coalitions
- Encourage a sense of greater community across these coalitions using personal magnetism and charisma as the draw card
3- Thoughts leaders: You need to leverage off thought and industry leaders so that your message is being relayed through their voice. This acts as endorsement and those people have a greater outreach. People want what they cannot have. Well-known yet inaccessible people carry more weight in their words…
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Relaunches & Mini-Launches |
To keep up with today’s pace - businesses are like revolving doors for launches. You’ll notice how they’ll go through an extensive hype building pre-launch campaign, and then finally launch; only leading to another re-launch or special mini-launches. If event marketing and launching is dominated by ‘a survival for the fittest mindset’ - then this technique is truly going to benefit you a lot. I call it the ‘revolving door technique’ because; just like revolving doors go round and round, marketers can keep launching and re-launching events.
A typical event goes through a standard hype cycle, where the launch is usually at the peak of the hype curve. Slowly, after the event, the hype wanes and fades away with time and only becomes a fragment of people’s memories. What we recommend to our clients is to always keep ahead of the game. Always be on your audience’s or client’s minds…
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Forward Thinking |
Have you ever planned events in sets instead of a one-time activity? Once you start promoting event series, the scale of the turnout and the subsequent success of each rises to the top. Here’s one way of doing it:
Plan a small event to get numbers that are cheap. Start with the customer lists that you already have. Make sure that the event ends up being a success for that selected small number of people, and that they leave with a good taste in mouth. As a sequel to the event you can up-sell a slightly larger event to a bigger set of people, using the first event’s testimonials and feedback to build hype. Make sure you meet their expectations…
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Revolving Door Technique |
Our team specializes in event launch marketing using Gorilla techniques and leveraging social media. We also regularly consult in this area, since it is something which every business or startup can benefit from. The interesting thing that people fail to connect is that everything can be an event. My launching this book to you is an event in my businesses marketing campaign. Your act of reading this book is an event. Pre-launching my website is another event. Our planned “2008 final-call member’s drive” late December is another event in our marketing campaign calendar which is planned to sync with all the other events that come before it.
When we can anchor particular events in our business to our marketing campaigns we are building a community of individuals being brought together by a common goal or object of interest.
By tying a campaign to physical events we can build conversations around the events that participants can enjoy value from. If we make the conversation interactive, those who engage in the conversation will invite others to join in. If we tie each campaign into the next so that a sequence of events leads into one another, then we have diminished our cost of acquiring each new customer through the user distribution of our content. This happens only if our sales funnel has the capacity to filter out leads, prospects and customers from each node in the campaign.
Although this book is primarily written for the purpose of marketing events, these principles can be applied to any business that wants to implement event anchored marketing campaigns to build a customer base. To hammer my point in, think about how you were involved in the launch of this book ever since you heard about it. It is part of a number of bigger launches that we have constantly going on.
In fact our launch is full of so many revolving door swings, that I’ll just use them as an example to illustrate my point. In our pre-launch campaigns, our first blog post published was an event: A revolving door swing. Our book launch for Social Traffic was an event; another swing. Our strategy is to get this book in the hands of as many people as we can without putting price barriers in front of them while maintaining its perceived value. If the book is read and liked by 2000 people, we’ll have 2000 evangelists that we can promote our application to. That makes it another event, all tied up with our launch. Our application is free and has no barriers to entry; our earnings will come from the ticketing functionality of the application. When people buy tickets, we get a small percentage for providing the platform and service. When people are using the application, we re-launch the application to the public. Another full-blown swing…
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Marketing Like Revolving Doors |
Event marketing using social media tools is about creating the right campaigns that have the maximum impact. Social media and networking channels offer a lot of flexibility in crafting out our messages just the way we want to. You can measure the impact and reactions of your messages and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
To keep up with today’s pace - businesses are like revolving doors for launches. You’ll notice how they’ll go through an extensive hype building pre-launch campaign, and then finally launch; only leading to another relaunch or special mini-launches. The interesting thing is that this process actually works!! I have been studying event marketing tricks for a good time, and have found this cyclical launch technique fabulous for business.
In essence, all you are doing is extending the event backward and forward. Backwards into a pre-launch stage where your core focus is on building hype towards the event. Forwards into a post-launch stage, where your core focus is on gathering feedback, leaving a good taste in mouth, following up, keeping in touch and sharing event experiences.
You probably do all of these things whilst interacting with the people you are closest to already, all you have to do now is try to do them online where a growing audience can participate. Using online tools for extending the event backward and forward increases the overall success and impact of the launch, since it makes it easier to reach out to the audiences.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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Why Do Some Marketers Still Shy Away From Social Networks? |
It’s funny how things can take such a flip turn in just a few years. I have seen how marketing concepts have transitioned along with the evolving internet. The greatest difference in the emergence of social media as a marketing medium is that 5-10 years ago marketers would be the ones with the lists. Marketing would be a one-way communication of messages from companies to consumers. They would work off a database of customers to find ways of penetrating them. TVCs, Radio Ads, Publications, Direct mail, Cold calling etc were all a core part of all marketing activities. The impact of the Ads was difficult to gauge.
Google search engines have turned the hunted into the hunters. Consumers now work off a list of merchants or providers and through a substantial supply of information to choose from. They decide who to listen to, trust and buy from. They are more empowered and in many ways less gullible. More access to information makes them wiser and better decision-makers.
This information gets to them via search engines and community based platforms. Search engines run algorithms to parse through information and show it to the consumers. On the other hand, community based platforms are enabled by elements of social interaction. Humans (not machines) filter content based on preferences and popularity. It is we who sort the information to protect our networks from poor choices.
It’s the hunted who now have the power - the merchants must win over the prey if they want the prey to endorse whatever they are offering & invite their social network to embrace it. To some naive marketers these facts represent a nightmare, which it is not. If you use social media effectively and not for spamming, a marketer’s cost of sales can drop considerably. Not only that, we now also have the power to leverage mob-effects, community shifts, emotional linkages - all using simple social networking strategies.
If you are event marketers or promoters, you can now directly interact with your audiences and get a direct feel for their thoughts and opinions. You can get early feedback; involve them in planning the different dynamics of the event. You can create groups and communities around your event to help build hype and excitement, let evangelists and fans promote your event for you. You can allow your prospective audiences to blog about your event. You can enable live twittering at the event. You can allow them to share photos of the after it’s over to build lasting memories and nostalgia. You can do absolutely everything and anything to promote your event.
I find it amusing whenever I come across big healthy organizations being stingy when it comes to investing money in social media marketing through online social interaction. I guess, they fail to see it as an investment rather than a cost for their event branding strategies.
I came across one such company recently that has outsourced a project to a team for developing, conceptualizing and writing a corporate blog for their upcoming annual expo event. Their blog was conceptualized in a manner to invite thought leaders and industry experts to participate in it as a rich community. I visited their site and was happy to see lots of activities, regular postings, participatory comments, etc. These people informally told me their concerns about the fact that they have no real way to measure the impact on event branding quantitatively for this project. I was both shocked and amused to hear them say this. Shocked because, somehow it seemed like they didn’t care about the community that was being formed around the blog - or the enthusiasts that were being born. Amused because, I knew that they don’t know any better. Social media marketing is far different from traditional media, my friends.
If you find yourself in a similar situation where you want to measure the impact of all of the tools that you are using, then here is some honest advice.
Measuring the benefit to your brand via social interactions, communities and social networking is difficult to put down on numbers. However, it can be calculated based on a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measures such as: increase in your list numbers, increase in your ticket demands, increase in audience traffic, participation levels in your blog posts, increase in sharing and bookmarking of your sites, development of evangelists, increase in page rankings, increase in exposure to industry bloggers, increase in authority of the blog rankings, decrease in your involvement to keep your blogs afloat. These are all rich online social interactions. Some of these directly affect your bottom line figures, whereas others are going to be more subtle and may go unnoticed.
Please don’t start counting the number of times your event brand name has been written or talked about as a measure for the success of such social media marketing projects. Be realistic in how you factor in different elements of event branding when deciding whether or not your money is being well spent.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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