Leveraging Social Media for Impactful Event Sponsorships

Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. – Orison Sweet Marden

It can be difficult to immediately determine the ROI when your brand sponsors an event. The sponsorship package may include your brand’s logo on banners, a prime booth location, or an opportunity to host a panel or sub-event — but how do you know if those sponsorships are really working in your brand’s favor? Your staff manning the booth can do their best to collect business cards, emails, and distribute redeemable coupons and vouchers, but how are they impacting the buying process for event attendees? Chances are, your marketing and sales teams aren’t all able to attend the event, but the power to magnify the impact of your brand’s sponsorship can be done anywhere.

Here are some tips to help you leverage social media and listening to get the most out of your event sponsorship.

Monitor the Event

Nuvi’s industry-leading, customizable monitors capture social data in real-time for the most intuitive listening, analytics and reporting solution on the market. The monitor can include specific hashtags, keywords, geographic location and anything else surrounding the event. Start monitoring early, reach out to event attendees, and personally invite them to stop by your booth during the event.

Offer incentives for stopping by your booth such as engaging experiences, prizes, as well as hosting giveaways. If the booth has an interactive experience, create a branded hashtag for attendees to use. The monitor can track those mentions, the overall sentiment of the experience, the booth, or your brand as a whole — providing honest, organic feedback that can guide your marketing following the event.

All of these mentions can be looked at as potential customers and leads to contact. After the event, be sure to follow up with attendees by interacting with their posts from your brand’s pages. Monitoring the overall conversation allows brands to establish a baseline to track growth year over year and determine the best use of your sponsorship dollars.

Encourage Social Sharing

Brands and individuals are always on the hunt for compelling content. What are you waiting for, your brand should give attendees something to post about. Work to create an attractive experience within your booth, or sponsored session, that people actually want to share on social. The more intriguing and entertaining experience you create for the attendees, your brand gains more exposure and ROI. In addition, encourage attendees to follow social pages, post with hashtags, or share posts with the chance to win prizes or perks. It is wise to post frequently during the event so that follow you know your brand is attending and sponsoring the event.

Post Event Contact

Now that the event is over, reach out to leads while the event is still fresh. Consider the sales funnel and buying cycle while reaching out. Determine where in the cycle these potential customers will land, then tailor any content to accomplish your goal. For example, increasing in-store traffic, setting appointments, scheduling demos, buying online, or a number of other goals.

Using Nuvi provides brands the ability to monitor event conversations and engage with the attendees in the platform. Brands typically reach out with special offers, promo codes, goodwill gestures, links to lead capturing landing pages, and other compelling content. All contact should leave a positive impression connecting the attendee back to the event, and the great experience your brand provided.

Retargeting Ads

Upload the collected email addresses from the event into your ads manager and run retargeting ads. Retargeting ads create additional impressions as users are scrolling through social media or browsing the internet.

Pro-tip: You can also add a retargeting pixel onto specific landing pages you are sharing in your post-event marketing efforts. This pixel will add any user that visits those specific pages to your retargeting list and they will begin to see your ads as well.

Track the Impact

The entire purpose of sponsoring events is to increase brand awareness, generate more business and leads. Identify key metrics like spikes in conversations surrounding your brand, increased followers and engagement on social, website traffic and anything else needed to track and report on the event. Once the key metrics are identified, begin to actively monitor them before, during and after the event has concluded.

It is vital to track the majority of the content shared in your communication efforts. If sharing links, ensure that they are trackable UTM links. Monitor usage of event promo codes and vouchers so results aren’t mixed with other promotions.

As your potential customers experience your brand at the event, your team should leverage social media for quality touch points to continue the conversation after the event.  If done correctly, event sponsorships can be a lucrative method for increasing brand awareness, growing your social presence, generating more leads, closing more deals, and increasing your ROI.

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