Live Events: Your Opportunity to Flex Your Creative Viral Muscles

This is a fun one. The term “live events” encapsulates such a wide range of opportunities that you can get so creative with there’s no way you SHOULDN’T brainstorm around them. In other words, no matter what your industry, you’re going to have ample opportunities to activate this next non-viral marketing channel.

Live Events: The Hidden Treasure for Creative Virality

  Live events can include:

• An industry trade show that you set up a booth at or sponsor
• A public speaking gig you or one of your team members gets asked to do
• An athletic, musical, or community-related event your company sponsors or publicly participates in
• A “meetup” you organize for users of your product in a specific area
• An event or festival that your company organizes
• A free event that you also stream as a webinar teaching prospects a valuable skill that also provides insight into why your product is valuable

As you can see, there are a number of possibilities. But not nearly as many as what you can DO at these events. That’s where you can really flex your creative muscles and try something unique, valuable, or interesting to evoke a high-arousal emotion in others. In addition, since you have the ability to interact with potential customers in a live environment, this marketing channel doubles as a method of incredibly powerful market research and product testing. Just make sure you have everyone who is in charge of designing your product there if possible. That way they’re able to ask customers questions directly and really see them interacting with the product in-person.

Live Events and Virality

  One of the incredibly obvious benefits of live events is to spread the word about your product in an environment where you can directly interact with potential customers. But it’s also a perfect place to inject some virality. Here are a few creative ways of doing this:

1. Set up a photo booth with funny props and your brand’s step-and-repeat in the background. Grab prospects’ emails and Twitter handles after their photos are taken so you can email those photos to each of them individually. That way, you can not only build your contact list, but you can tweet each photo out and tag the people in it. (Which is one of the best ways to generate retweets.)
2. Create some sort of funny theme for your speaking engagement, and come out in costume. Encourage attendees to take photos and live tweet them, or post them on Facebook or Instagram. Just make sure they tag your brand on each. (Place a sign with your social handles in the view of the audience).
3. Create some sort of event experience that is collaborative or competitive in nature, and encourage those experiencing your event to bring friends to participate. Gather an email address from each person, and offer them some free swag to take photos and tag your brand. Who doesn’t love free swag?

These are just a few ideas that come to mind – but the possibilities are endless. Remember, focus on offering value to those experiencing your event. Show them a good time, go above and beyond to make them happy, and provide numerous opportunities and reminders to share their experiences with others that make sense (i.e. don’t make the most ridiculously-amateur mistake possible by just randomly asking people to follow you on Twitter).

What’s Next

  Live events are cool and all, but is there a way to kick them up a notch? Well, I’m glad you asked, because yes, our next marketing channel takes user engagement to a whole new level.