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Digital Event Marketing: Pre-Event, Real-Time, and Post-Event
Digital Event Marketing
As a whole, just how extensively do corporations and brands realize the mass amounts of effort, time and resources that is spent on events? Local events, outreach opportunities, trade shows, and other related events is a much larger industry than most realize.
The Convention Industry Council released a report that gave great insight into just how colossal the event industry truly is. Accord to the study, each year around 1.8 million company sponsored events take place. Across this wide range of events, on average over 225 million people attend, with this population coming out to at least one if not more of these in the course of a year. These events include but are not limited to 270,000 conventions and 11,000 trade shows each year.
A lot of companies and organizations attend events with the mindset that it’s a given propensity to maintain consumer awareness or further acquire higher levels of community presence. However, not a lot of measurement is done around the success of these events and the amount of business and/or revenue that they generate. According to Harvard Business Review, three out of five businesses have no successful methodology behind measuring ROI when it comes to events.
What this statistic lets us know is that most companies either set no explicit business goals around events they attend or sponsor, and even if they do, they have no way to measure whether or not those goals were met.
The provoking fact behind this is that, according to a 2017 study by Statista, it cost on average $609 for a business to attend or exhibit at an event, and this number is expected to jump another 4% by the close of 2018. This does not include the costs of travel, employee time, possible sponsorships, set-up, etc.
Even exceeding these numbers, according to a Frost & Sullivan study, the overall amount spent on events such as these totaled up to a monumental $565 billion per year. AdAge published that comprehensively this spending accounted for an average of nearly 20% of business’s annual marketing budget.
With businesses spending so much to hold a presence at events and yet so few businesses measuring the success accompanied with these, it stands to reason that there’s a huge gap in the industry to be filled.
Thankfully here at El Toro, event marketing is one of our strongest fortés in regards to helping businesses procure their full potential.
The beauty of this is that, if you’re like most businesses, always looking for growth, odds are you’re already attending, sponsoring, or even hosting events such as these. This means you’re already doing the most taxing aspects around events, the rest, thanks to our technology at El Toro, will be a breeze in comparison for you.
Head over to one of our recent posts, 4 Strategies For Digital Event Marketing to see some of our recently published tactics behind enhancing your abilities around the events you attend.
We realize that the goals around events can span widely depending on the company. For some, lead generation is the only needed end result, while others may be looking to get access to decision makers or even to have direct sales come from an event. El Toro technology can execute marketing strategies behind each of these goals, pertaining to bother B2B and B2C. We take pride in going even further than the organization’s self-evident upfront objectives.
Our patented advertising technology products are able to have impacts whether it be before, during, and after any of these millions of events across the nation.
Digital Event Marketing: Pre-Event
Seeking to encourage your current customers to come out to your space at an event?
Our original, core technology that started it all is still one of the most used and beneficial products that we own. Through El Toro’s patented IP Targeting, you can get in front of your existing customers before an event, impacting on them to come out to the event and to take part in your space during their time there. We take your CRM list and once we derive the physical addresses within that list, we can bring to light the IP addresses associated with them, pulling only those we have a 95% or above confidence level in. With this, you can pull your customers that are located near an upcoming event you plan to attend and target them with highly personalized ads encouraging attendance.
Wanting to draw particular businesses to come out to your event?
Through our Captive Audience ad tech product, you can identify and target staff within the locations of businesses that you want to attend your event. This technology allows companies to map business locations, then target the devices seen on the networks within that location. A company can leverage this highly specified targeting in order to send an offer exclusively to this business, noting that the deal relies on their attendance to your event. Through this, you can have a major impact on all employees within a location, creating buzz and pushing for attendance from one or more of the staff within. By getting these attendees, you can get in front of staff and possibly decision makers all specifically from a company or companies you’re looking to gain business with.
Hoping to garner similar attendees from other events?
In similar geographic areas there tends to be a number of events that bring out similar attendees. Take for example Chamber of Commerce business expos, most major metropolitan areas have upwards of ten or more chambers just within their city. Across these chamber events, it’s not uncommon to see similar attendees and exhibitors. This is a population to make use of. Our Venue Replay technology is able to look at any event that occurred within the past 6 months and pull Device IDs found at that event. From here, we can trace these devices to their correlating home IP address and target not only the found device, but all devices within that home as well with advertisements. There are a couple of keys to impacting this population of attendees from similar events. First, companies need to have an impact on people to come out to the event in general, using the event marketing to their advantage to further influence these consumers to attend. From here, organizations need to push upon this audience segment with a captivating, localized message that makes stopping by your space at the event an unbeatable opportunity.
Digital Event Marketing: Real-Time
Looking to gain access to decision makers while at an event?
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, Captive Audience is the industry’s answer to real time advertising within a specified space, gaining attendees’ or hosts’ attention while at an event. Through our Captive Audience technology, we can target anyone who gets on the network associated with the event location or surrounding locations, and target these consumers with ads. This gives us the ability to find and target people in real time. Decision makers and their employees are likely to be present at these business oriented events either as an attendee or as an exhibitor. Sponsors of events, who exercise the lengths of their budgets when contributing to large events, are likely to have mid to high level employees at these events as well. Use Captive Audience to place highly personalized ads to those already in attendance at your event to encourage them to come by your space, giving you the opportunity to start a conversation with those who you may not have had the chance to impact on otherwise.
Digital Event Marketing: Post-Event
Needing to have an additional touchpoint on visitors after an event?
Venue Replay is at it again. Not only can it be used as discussed above, targeting attendees at other events, but it can also be used to target those who attended your event as well for post-event marketing. Upon leaving an event, some businesses would think their opportunity to advertise to those in attendance is over and done with. Not in the eyes of El Toro. Through our proprietary Venue Replay and its geo-framing technology, we can map the location of your event and pull all of the devices found within. As discussed above, the real magic happens when we are able to match those devices to their home IP address and then begin targeting them and their entire household with ads. Through this post-event digital marketing strategy, companies can send highly personalized messages to those who attended their event, being able to still have an impact on them even after they leave the venue.
Seeking a digital touchpoint for those who left information with your business at an event?
We come back to the original IP Targeting technology for this. A number of businesses gather information from attendees at events at their space through some type of form fill. A slew of companies do this, some even have enticing giveaways to those who are willing to divulge some of their personal information. While some use this opportunity to gather email addresses for future email marketing, consider accruing home addresses instead. By gathering home addresses, you can then compile these into a spreadsheet and import it through our portal. From here you can make use of our IP Targeting tech to match IP addresses to these home addresses. Forget the lofty hopes of email marketing, instead use this tactic to target attendees in a more significant manner. You can use these matched IP addresses to then continue to reach these visitors with specified ads across their entire households and the devices within.
In Summary
Don’t let your event marketing be in vain, most companies like yourself are already engaging in one or more local events. Now it’s time to take it to the next level. What you can do to revolutionize your approach to events and stand out from the crowd is use El Toro and our advertising technologies. Through this, you have an impact before, during, and after your events, ensuring your highest possible impact.
Our technology is proven effective. With our real and measurable results we give every client after any campaign, we can show you the true success behind the marketing. No longer wonder what your ROI is behind events, through our digital event marketing, and the results that accompany it, you’ll find that results are black and white. Also, our IP Targeting is 100% cookie-free and with this is free of any fraud or flaw in its execution, continuing to be unrivaled by any competitor in the market
Take the time to get in contact with El Toro today and see how you can increase your event performance!
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