Social Media and Event Planification: Securing Customers Through Audience Engagement

Many organizations seek to broaden their reach with customer base through events that showcase their newest products or services, either in exhibitions, conferences and launches. Social media has established the bases for customer engagement by allowing people worldwide to attend online launches, much as the case of every new car launch for the upcoming Formula 1 season each year.

We can take the example from McLaren, whose carefully crafted marketing campaign was targeted mostly to recovering their fan base while passing through a corporative image change process after the departure of their CEO and one of the industry legends, Ron Dennis. Alongside with a change of livery, name and many other etcetera’s we can formulate, McLaren spent a well-invested time into engaging their audience to accept and expect all these changes to happen: either by giving hints, talking about heritage as a strategy, or with their McLaren Golden Ticket.

The strategy was good: keep tuned in our social media for a chance of winning a ticket to our car launch event at the McLaren Technology Centre, limited tickets offered. And that’s exactly the way in which company event planning should be focussed: giving users something back for their loyal support to your brand.

Using social media for expanding your reach

There are many tools, better said apps, that event planners should consider for their work. In first instance, apps that allow to live broadcast events like LiveStream. Several other commons social media apps can help as well, like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram thanks to the latest updates developed for providing users a neater experience in live-streaming events.

Photo courtesy of Thibault Trillet

Another approach you can always consider is hosting contests through social media for winning tickets, merchandising or taking part of exclusive events like meeting a famous star. Create your event’s hashtag and post it along with the brand’s own hashtag. Maximum exposure is the key factor for this strategy; therefore, using the typical “tag your friend and repost this publication for entering our contest”.

Consider feedback for growth

Marketers tend to rely on the information provided by analytics for deciding the next steps to follow in relationship with a project. Going along with this line of thought, you can approach for a live-feedback by hosting polls about the event, on what people expect to see or even afterwards, to rate the impact that the event you hosted has produced.

This directly relates to operator-user interaction, as not just people from the event planning organisation – thus the importance on why hiring professional services to help us in preparing the event –  but also crew from the brand itself need to put their 100-percent focus to comments shown in social media. A badly-intended comment can do much damage when trying to get maximum exposure for an event, and that can come as easily as from an angry customer that had a bad experience with the brand.

Photo courtesy of Kaboompics

Put cyberbullying aside, as nobody these days takes notice of trolls, so blocking them is a quick option, neglecting badly intended comments is another thing as you are showing that the brand doesn’t care for what customers experience in relationship with what they buy or get. Always a warm: “good idea!” / “please let us help you with this issue” / “we are sorry you experienced such inconvenience, please allow us to check this issue in detail” can do wonders for a business reputation as proves the point that “customer always have the reason” – even if you don’t agree with such statement.

Keeping it real: How to focus your efforts

You won’t need to spread your campaign in ALL social media platforms for reaching your audience, quite the opposite.

Just like multitasking happens to be a myth – ironic if we consider that this venue is all about managing several resources at the same time for creating the best event budget can allow – deriving your attention towards several platforms if you don’t have the experience or time to do so will only result in failure. Not only you are neglecting your potential customer pool, but also showing that your social media management skills are the likes of a beginner: forgetting to do recurrent posts, ignoring comments, etc.

Instead, pick two of your social media networks that mostly define your brand (i.e.: for Photographers, Instagram and Facebook), and put ALL your efforts in making the campaign a big gig. You will thank later not losing that much time in trying to engage followers that don’t simply care for what you are doing, but to treat as your loyal fanbase as they deserve.

The Aftermath: Evaluating your Event

Now let’s put ourselves at the other side of the event planification scheme: you completed your event, what comes next? Review stage is crucial for visualizing the impact of your efforts and capital invested for making the event a reality: you can always refer to the number of attendants, live-time reactions in social media, overall feeling throughout the event, etc.

Photo courtesy of Negative Space

If you feel you cannot trust your crew to do an impartial evaluation of the event’s impact, hire the services of a professional like an audit made to measure the effectiveness of the event hosted. Sometimes event planners offer these services, but most times corporations prefer to have a third-party opinion on this behalf.

In case results weren’t as neat as you originally expected, it’s time to do a serious sit-down and discuss what went wrong at managerial area of your company, seeking professional advice as well. When facing the opposite scenario, don’t start celebrating yet: a successful event is obviously a great milestone to reach, but that doesn’t secure a lifelong success rate: Innovation and constant evaluation is always the path to follow.