A Guide to Maximizing Your Event Marketing

Introduction

Your brand’s events should deliver an impressive return for each marketing dollar that you invest in them. While that may seem like a difficult goal to achieve, it’s easier than you think when you take an integrated approach to creating your events program. In fact, taking this approach is critical because your event programs should also be an integral part of your brand’s overall marketing plan.

In this whitepaper, we explore tools and strategies that can help you leverage your events to increase sales, brand recognition, and loyalty. You can boost your success in using each of these by adding promotional products to your events. They not only enhance your return on investment (ROI) from your events but also tie into your overall marketing program, thereby increasing its effectiveness.

Promotional products extend marketing reach for companies of all sizes and in all phases of their growth and development. Research has consistently shown that at least 83% of consumers in the United States enjoy receiving promotional merchandise with advertising messaging and 89% of consumers who receive a promotional item within the last two years remembered the name of the company on the item.

Tools and Strategies that Deliver Successful Events

Behind every successful event is a comprehensive plan that includes activities designed to support it. Once you have selected a date, work backward from it to plug in deadlines for each activity or deliverable necessary to promote your event and capture the right attendees.

Below are several activities used time and time again to boost attendance and buzz for events. And when you add the lure of branded product giveaways to each of these, you can sit back and watch the excitement build.

• Partner with a Non-Profit Organization – One way to make a difference in your community, associate your business with positive contributions to the community, and increase attendance at your event is to partner with a non-profit organization.
• Create and Deploy Email and Text Message Campaigns – Launch your event with an exciting announcement delivered via email or text message to your customers and prospective customers. Keep the excitement going by sending reminders and announcing new aspects of your event with every email or text message.
• Place Digital Advertising – Support your event attendance with creative ads on the websites where your customers and prospective customers get their information and entertainment – such as local news sites, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Use Your Social Media Platforms – Encourage event attendance and engagement daily on all of your social media channels using colorful graphics and photos and giveaway offers.
• Use Your Website – Use your website to advertise your upcoming events. Add a banner image promoting the event on your homepage. Blogs are particularly effective in drawing people to your site, so blog often about each event and offer tickets and other giveaways.
• Make All Internet-Based Activities Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Friendly – For every online effort, make sure that your communication has the keywords that people use to search for your products, services, and local events.
• Consider Industry Influencer Marketing – Having an influencer in your industry promote your event on their social media channels and to their contacts may be an effective way to gain buzz for your brand and events.
• Offer Free Tickets Via Social Media and Digital Advertising – People love free stuff, including tickets to an event. If they have them, there’s a much better chance they will attend.
• Leverage Existing Events – Always promote your next event at the current event you are hosting with signage and free ticket giveaways as rewards for providing contact details.
• Post Signage Announcing Your Event at Your Physical Location – Consider posting a banner with easy-to-read basic information about your event at your business location.
• Add Your Event Details to Local Community Events Calendars – These are often posted on websites and in publications of organizations such as chambers of commerce, local newspapers, local NPR radio stations and other media.
• Invite Local Media to Your Events – Media are always looking to cover what’s happening in their areas and like to provide active visuals; this is especially true for television. Coverage of your events helps build excitement for and attendance at future events so prepare a media package with all the details about your event and why they should cover it – throwing in a branded promotional item never hurt.

Budget Building for Events with Promotional Products

Most marketing professionals create a year-long budget for events by reviewing the prior year’s budget and actual spend. Because 2020 and 2021 have been unusual for most marketers and events have been scaled back significantly, you may want to consider 2019 figures as you decide what how many business’s events and the promotional products used within them should be within your entire budget. Where promotional products are concerned, consider how effective they are for promoting your brand.

A single promotional item averages 344 impressions per month, according to research from PROmotion Marketing, LLC. Promotional products also have one of the lowest cost per impression ratios – about .6 cents per impression, according to the Ad Specialty Institute (ASI), the promotional product industry’s largest membership organization. Compare this to the cost per impression of television and magazine ads, which is about 1.8 cents per impression.

One reason why promotional products have the edge over other types of advertising in terms of impressions is that 81% of consumers keep promotional products for about 1 to 5 years. The longer a product is kept, the more impressions it will make – both from those who keep the product and others around them who see it.

To calculate an approximate return on impressions, marketers use Cost Per Thousand (CPM) as a benchmark. Divide the total cost of the item by the number of estimated impressions, and then divide by 1,000.

Consider the Research on Promotional Products as Effective Marketing Tools

The Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) and PROmotion Marketing, LLC research of consumers throughout the United States found that:

• 90% of those who receive a promotional product can recall the name of the brand.
• 89% of consumers can recall the brand on a promotional product they received in the last 2 years.
• 80% of consumers can recall the messaging of a brand after receiving a promotional product.
• 80% of consumers have an immediate reaction when they receive a promotional item from companies they’ve never heard of.
• 82% of consumers have a more favorable impression of a brand after receiving a promotional product.
• 70% of brands consider promotional products mostly or always effective in achieving marketing goals.
• 53% of the time, a promotional product creates a more favorable impression of the advertiser.

How Planned-For Promotional Items Can Complement Your Existing Marketing Initiatives

When you consider the research noted above that illustrates how much people appreciate receiving promotional products, it’s easy to understand how they might enhance virtually any event and overall marketing efforts for your business. Below are just a few of the many ways promotional products work hard for your marketing initiatives.

Promotional Products Make Your Events Memorable – Because people keep the items for significant periods and see your logo each time they use them, they’ll be reminded of your event and your business.

Your Business Receives Enhanced and Extended Brand Awareness and Recognition – As you provide branded promotional products to audiences that matter to you, your business receives more and continuing attention.

Promotional Products are Cost Effective Event Enhancers – Just consider the low cost per impression to help understand the value promotional products will add to your event.

Show Your Audience that You Understand What is Useful to Them – By selecting the right promotional products to giveaway at your event, you drive your marketing message home and continually reinforce it.

Promotional Products are a Much-Appreciated Introduction to Your Company – What’s not to like about a company that gives you something useful free of cost? By adding your business logo to the item, the recipient will remember your business.

Promotional Event Products that Give Your Business Lasting Impact

Everyone knows that branded promotional products are a big part of every successful event. Whatever products you choose, your logo – or even a special logo you design for events – should be the star of the show.

Decide early on if you will need a special logo for the event, or if you will use your company logo. If you decide to create a special logo, remember to still incorporate some element of your business’s identity and consider always placing your business or organization’s logo (with contact details) next to the event logo you have designed. Take careful consideration of colors, depending on your event – brighter than normal may be better.

Also, make sure that your branded promotional products are consistent with your business’s mission and image and that they are the best quality your budget allows. This is critical, as you only want your customers and potential customers to associate your products and services with quality.

For events that are not at your headquarters, your promotional products must be portable and easy to distribute to attendees. If your event is online, make sure that its associated promotional products can be easily accessed and received by attendees via mail if necessary.

All these points considered, your event’s promotional product giveaways should be items that people want, so that they see your brand as one that understands them. Research conducted by the ASI found that there are five products that most often influence consumers’ brand engagement. Consider incorporating some of these at your next event.

1. Performance Wear – These durable apparel items create a lasting impression and lots of buzz as they get noticed frequently.
2. Outerwear – An impressive 86% of consumers think more positively about a company after receiving branded outerwear, such as jackets.
3. Drinkware – 50% of US consumers use logo cups they have been given two to three times per week.
4. Pens, Pencils, and Other Writing Instruments – Budget-friendly and long-lasting, 50% of US consumers own promotional writing instruments.
5. Flash Drives – About 91% of consumers keep these.

Measuring Your Success Using Branded Promotional Products for Any Marketing Initiative

The marketing industry standard for determining an initiative’s success is using the benchmark revenue to cost ratio of 5:1 or better. This means that for every marketing dollar spent, you receive $5 in revenue.

The key to understanding the success of your promotional products-enhanced efforts is calculating ROI. Several tests can be used to determine the ROI or Return on Investment in branded promotional products. To apply tests that show ROI in terms of sales directly related to customers having received promotional products, you must first plan how to track the products you intend to give away so they can be traced throughout the testing process. It’s important to note that each item used for your event or campaign must have a trackability component if you are using the items to deliver sales.

Trackability – Decide how best to do this: URL, QR Code, or Discount Code. Then choose a promotional product that works with your choice of tracking method, purchase it, give it away, and track the number of people who contacted your business as a result of receiving the item. Next, measure how many people who received the item bought your products or services and calculate the ROI from that number.

Basic Metrics Test – The most simplistic way to calculate ROI is based on two metrics: the cost of the campaign and the outcome it generated (typically, this is the revenue it has generated). Subtract the amount spent on the campaign from the profit it generated. Next, divide this total by the total amount spent, multiplied by 100. 

Return on Impressions – This method is important to use when the marketing goal is focused on brand awareness and engagement. In advertising, an impression is an estimate of the number of people a specific advertisement is reaching. Each time a person sees the advertisement or brand on a promotional product is considered one impression.

Promotional products have one of the lowest cost per impression ratio – about .6 cents per impression, according to the ASI, the promotional product industry’s largest membership organization. To calculate and approximate the return on impressions, marketers use Cost Per Thousand (CPM) as a benchmark. Divide the total cost of the item by the number of estimated impressions, and then divide by 1,000.

Partnering with the Right Promotional Products Professionals is Key to Successful Events for Your Business

To host successful events for your business, you will need to work with a creative and reliable promotional products partner that can demonstrate their expertise and experience in delivering meaningful materials for effective events and marketing campaigns.

At Fully Promoted, we have more than one million promotional products for you to choose from as you plan any type of event or campaign involving promotional products. Our local experts take the time to speak with you to learn about your events, customers, and their needs so that we can narrow product recommendations down to about four or five items that will provide the most impact. When you partner with Fully Promoted, you will receive personal attention from our local promotional product experts, who will work with you from beginning to end to ensure your event’s success. Our local experts specialize in putting your logo on almost any item you can imagine and will provide access to product samples that you can touch and feel to ensure the promotional items you select are the best possible representation of your brand.

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