EMBiz: Digital & Experiential

Laurel Mintz, CEO & Founder

Digital & Experiential

Hi guys Laurel Mintz here with Elevate My Brand and today’s EMBiz is all about event marketing. We get a lot of questions about whether event marketing is actually efficient and/or how to make it moreso. So what we have found in the last 10+ years of working here at the agency is that brands when digital became a real thing which was about 10 years ago, I’m dating myself now, but they went so far to the left of digital that they forgot that they actually need to talk to their customers IRL. So, as of recent, we’ve seen a lot of brands going back to experiential. So making sure they’re showing up at events, hosting their own branded events, etc. Now the most important piece, though, is making sure that there is a tie between digital and experiential because I think for a long time, there was a disconnect there.

So Number 1 is that there are a lot of content opportunities. If you’re going to be spending money, and we’re going to talk about budget in a bit, on marketing at events, making sure you have a videographer, a photographer, you can even set up a media corner and interview people that are interacting with your brand so that you can then use that on social media or through E-blasts later on. A perfect example of this is Tamara Mellon, one of the brands we have recently worked with. So Tamara Mellon reached out to us about 60 days before the Create Cultivate Conference which is a huge national conference targeting millennial women and they had no idea what to do. They said “Elevate, we need your help”, so we ideated, fabricated, and executed an event concept within 60 days which was no small feat let me tell you, but that’s what we do best. We also made sure there was a hashtag that was really unique to that event and that was #FlashYourMellons. It was a little irreverent, it was a little out there, they were not sure about it - but on the first day of that conference, they got more social engagement through that hashtag than in the entire career history of the brand. And that’s when they hired us on to be their national agency and we’ve rolled out 4 or 5 events since then.

So making sure you’re tying in the experiential with the digital piece is so critical and to the point of budget, that is how you can make sure that you’re not wasting money or that you’re leveraging your money to the best of your ability.

To recap, make sure that if you are going to be doing events, you’re using a little bit of that budget to bring on a photographer and a videographer, make sure your hashtags are on point, make sure your social content is integrated so that you can get the most out of your experiential budget.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for more from Elevate My Brand.