The effectiveness of event marketing can depend on how well you manage chaos.
The Content Marketing Institute reports that 75 percent of B2B marketers use in-person events as their most effective marketing strategy, so maximizing sales and energy in this fast-paced environment is vital. Event marketing companies need to effectively handle chaos while marketing products or services. Here are a few tactics you can adopt to get the most out of your event marketing strategies.
Understand Your Resource Limitations
There is a large amount of uncertainty that’s out of your control at an event, so it’s important to limit any problems you can control. Get started on the right foot by ensuring all necessary employees show up on time. Short-staffed events will increase stress on employees who do attend, and severely limit opportunities. You have limited space and time, so you need to nail your event staffing needs.
Furthermore, consider the resources you have immediately on hand. Forgetting essential equipment will damage your reputation and decrease the likelihood of achieving desired results. Stay on top of all the small details, because managing those effectively helps smooth out the stressors that occur throughout the day. Advanced preparation is the key to seamless and stress-free event marketing.
Fully Document Your Work
You need full documentation of the work you’re doing at the live event. The necessary steps should be taken to keep track of activity – whether you’re working at your own event or participating in another organization’s event. Field team management reports must have information to demonstrate work the field team accomplished. Features including geo-tags, photo upload capabilities and automatically aggregated reports can provide you with real-time updates. Images can also be used on social media platforms to build excitement for a live event, illustrate marketing materials, and connect with the people you engage with at the event.
Add Accountability to Your Events
To effectively market in chaos, particularly when you’re working with a field team, use a tool or platform that provides accountability capabilities. If you can’t be on site with your field team, you need to perform oversight to keep employees and reps on track and on target with your event marketing strategies.
Geotagging features let you confirm that employees are on-site and in the right location. You don’t have to call each field team member and confirm they’re in the right place – all you need to do is look at the solution. Similarly, a feature that enables employees to check-in and check-out will save your business time. Instead of requiring employees to track down an on-site field manager who may be busy, implement a software solution with features that can provide the same capability. Accountability features make it easy for you to monitor which employees are showing up and doing their job, but they also give you a way to create a seamless process for your staff.
User-Friendly Solutions Are a Must
Time is at a premium in the days and weeks leading up to the event, let alone at the event itself, so you need a product that is simple to teach and integrate. Your training time takes away from other duties your employees need to do before the live event, so you need a user-friendly solution they can pick up quickly.
Research software solutions and mobile data collection tools to ensure easy implementation. Look for a product that works with your existing infrastructure and integrates into your event marketing processes. For example, a solution designed for your employees’ mobile devices reduces the need to purchase new hardware and lets employees work on the devices most familiar to them.
Effective Reporting
You need event feedback for your customers, so they can ensure field teams are marketing a product or service according to strategy. By utilizing an effective mobile data collection tool, you have the data necessary to create a clean and useful report. Make sure to advise data collection throughout the event so that you can create reports reflecting different stages of the event, as well as a final roundup.
Event marketing has many moving parts in a chaotic environment. Effective field team management requires the right tools so you can hold employees accountable, collect valuable data, and provide your customers with complete reports.
