How can events be used as a marketing tool

Events can become one of the most efficient ways of getting more customers for your startup. Here’s what you need to do.

Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

What do you think of when you hear “events”? Probably trade-shows, industry specific events like Websummit? Or, perhaps, business lunch for important leads? That’s right. They are all events. But there are many more that you won’t even think about. However, they have a great potential for becoming your major source of customers. Here are just a few of very efficient examples

Webinars

SparkToro. Rand Fishkin — a founder of SparkToro and ex-CEO of Moz (the main platform for SEO professionals) — is an influencer on Twitter (300K followers). But he doesn’t use his authority to market his product. He uses it to…get more people into SparkToro events. One of the main tools in SparkToro marketing arsenal — online events. Rand hosts “Office Hours” — online webinars almost weekly. Topics he discusses vary from “How to arrange an efficient PR campaign” to “How to increase cold outreach email open rate to almost 100%”. The point is that his tool — SparkToro — helps with all these tasks. During the webinar he demonstrates how to use SparkToro to achieve the goals. Every webinar attracts up to 1K viewers. Every webinar generates over 500 posts on social media where people share gained knowledge and mention the product. Every webinar generates up to 10 articles and blog posts where SparkToro is mentioned.

Also, to register one has to leave their email address — this way, webinars become not only the source for instant purchases. But they also send more people into SparkToro marketing funnel.

A book launch as an event

Michele Hansen, a co-founder of Geocodio (geocoding and data matching service) — is an expert in event-driven marketing. She hosts a great podcast show — Software Social — and uses every episode as a special event to get more followers, listeners and, perhaps, prospective customers. She also loves to go to conferences as a keynote speaker. In 2021 she published a book on customer interviews Deploy Empathy. As a book author she was invited to many other shows and podcasts. This, in turn, widened her audience…