Marketing and event planning might not seem as though they have much in common to begin with, but as we’ll see from this blog post, they actually have more similarities than you might think. At the most basic level, both disciplines are all about interacting with real people and providing them with an experience that they remember. That’s also why event marketing is a thing – and why it’s in fact a multi-billion dollar industry.
People are different, and that’s never going to change. When you’re planning an event for large numbers of people, you start to realise just how different we are as individuals. Take dietary requirements, for example. Different people have different allergies or make different dietary choices, so as an event planner you need to bear that in mind and cater to them accordingly.
As marketers, we can learn from this. After all, personalised marketing is taking off for a reason, and artificial intelligence and other technologies are making customer relationship management (CRM) systems more powerful than ever before. And while the stakes aren’t as high as they are with food – where if you get it wrong, someone could die – the same general principles apply.
The basics of personalisation
When you’re running an event, the goal is to cater to as many people as possible while simultaneously tailoring your services where needed. You need to think about everything from disabled access to where smoking areas are and whether there’s someone front of house to greet people as they arrive.
The same concepts hold true when it comes to marketing to people. For example, different people like different content formats, whether we’re talking about YouTube videos and ebooks or whether we’re talking about tweets and blog posts. As if that wasn’t enough, they also prefer different content types, so while some people like how-tos and tutorials, others like industry news or infographics.
It’s your job as a marketer to get to know who your audience is and what they’re looking for so that you’re best able to cater to them. Knowing your audience is half the battle, and yet it’s a step that people too often forget to take. Without a thorough understanding of who your audience is, you’re just shooting in the dark and hoping for the best.
Conclusion
Events and marketing are two very different fields which nevertheless have a lot of overlap. Indeed, event hosts need to know some basic marketing if they want people to show up on the night, and marketers can use events to reach more people and to turn prospects into customers. As professionals, we need to constantly be looking for ways to improve ourselves, and learning from other disciplines can be a great way to do that. And so with that in mind, we hope this post has given you some food for thought. Good luck.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.