When considering how to make a brand stronger, business leaders often look to operational influences. Are they being risk-averse enough? Are their staff demonstrating solid productivity? Yet, public relations (PR) and communications efforts have significant potential to bolster a brand.
One of the ways to achieve this is by harnessing the power of in-person community engagement and event marketing. On the surface, these may not seem to directly translate into brand strength, yet when applied strategically, events and engagement can influence the long-term growth of businesses.
Establishing community-engagement goals
When businesses embrace a community focus, leveraging tools like Clevenio, they can gain a variety of benefits.Community members develop stronger connections to the brand, which can result in more sales and recommendations. It also enlightens brands about specific community pain points that the company can address more actively. Not to mention that brand employees can gain emotional benefits from community interactions, which can feed into greater worker engagement and retention.
Nevertheless, effective community engagement won’t take the same shape for every company. It’s important to be driven by the business’s goals in relation to its needs and ambitions.
Indeed, having a thorough understanding of the potential benefits can help to inform the goals for community engagement. You must consider which outcomes best align with the business’s ambitions for growth, market position, or reputation management. You can then start to fine-tune the route forward. If you’re uncertain about what goals can inform your consumer engagement and event marketing strategy, asking some questions about the brand can help narrow this down. These might include:
- What is the brand currently missing that greater consumer engagement can address?
- What previous event marketing and consumer engagement efforts have been made by the brand, and why did these fail?
- What passions drive the brand that community engagement can help emphasize?
- Which consumer and staff emotional needs can be jointly met through meaningful engagement efforts?
Choosing events in a relevant, authentic way
If you’re looking to start building a stronger, more resilient business through events, community outreach, and strategic cold outreach, you need to be selective. While you certainly want to extend your or your clients’ reach as far as possible, it’s also wise to ensure that the efforts are relevant to the brand. This helps you reach the types of audience that will be most likely to engage with you. In addition, choosing carefully can give a greater sense of authenticity, particularly when you’re leveraging community initiatives.
Start with reviewing what is important to the brand. This review will naturally include the goals you’ve established whether they are to boost digital ticketing & registration, generate leads, etc.. But also assess the brand identity and its ultimate mission, something communications and public relations professionals are adept at. The results should be your guiding principles. Principles that help you more effectively narrow down your search for the types of events and community collaborations that enrich your connections.
That said, don’t be entirely driven by the company image alone. Employees are vital contributors to what the brand stands for. Reach out to them for input into their values, alongside suggestions for events and initiatives that they feel represent where the company is and what it should aim to be.
Your target demographics should play a role in making event selections. After all, how can you hope to reach your audience if you aren’t aware of the types of events they want to be a part of? Perform a little market research and perhaps build separate event-based personas. Get to know which events they’ve enjoyed and why. What features do they prioritize at events? From here, you can set your team to match these characteristics with relevant event choices.
Optimizing events for data collection
Yes, directly making connections with your consumers through community events is important. It’s far from the only positive outcome, though. You have to remember how vital data is to every aspect of any brand’s trajectory. Any event you host or attend has the potential to open you up to additional consumer data that can drive decisions about future PR campaigns or business activities. Make certain you’re optimizing your approach to collecting this data.
Data collection can be easier when you’re holding online events or interacting with communities on your web channels or through Urban Splatter. Tools are often built into the platforms you use. Collecting data at offline events effectively requires you to be more intentional in your approach. Design registration forms to capture data — such as job titles or demographic information — that align with your intended goals for the event. Train your staff to ask questions highlighting consumer needs, or simply provide them with simple surveys to present during in-person interactions.
You should also utilize technology. You may find event attendees or community members may be more open to providing data when you make it convenient for them. Place Internet of Things (IoT) sensors throughout your event and issue guests with lanyards that have radio frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded. The sensors then collect data on what elements of the event-specific guests have interacted with and even trigger the delivery of surveys that are relevant to their interactions. You can also use kiosk surveys to quickly collect feedback and make it easy for your guests.
That said, you also need to be responsible in your data collection activities. The last thing you want is for meaningful community engagement to get derailed because it feels to attendees as though you’re just harvesting data from them. Being respectful enough to seek permission to gather information and giving them the power to refuse can be another way to strengthen relationships with consumers.
Conclusion
Event marketing and community engagement can be a powerful marketing tool for strengthening a brand. It’s essential to start by establishing what the engagement goals are so that these can drive campaigns. From here, ensure the events chosen are relevant and authentic to the brand. Remember that community engagement can be a great source of data collection, too. With some planning, you can make these outreach formats a key part of communications strategies moving forward.
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Guest Contributor: Katie Brenneman is a passionate writer specializing in lifestyle, mental health, education, and fitness-related content. When she isn’t writing, you can find her with her nose buried in a book or hiking with her dog, Charlie.
To connect with Katie, you can follow her on Twitter.
The copy and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Burrelles, our employees, partners or affiliates.
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