How we got the attention of over 2,000 conference attendees.

A conference is sometimes hit or miss when it comes to gaining brand awareness or any new business at all. There is so much going on that it can be difficult to grab anyone’s attention. You may have an added advantage if you decide to sponsor the event in some way but not all sponsorships are created equal. While some people may spring for booths, or shelling out for a cocktail hour, we here at Zembula like to provide something that the attendees literally cannot live without – the wifi.

Here is what we just did at our most recent conference endeavor, eTail West:
We set up a deal with eTail that allowed us to sponsor the wifi and then redirect users to a webpage post-login. We love doing this sponsorship because literally, everyone that uses the wifi will see us! And what’s even better is that usually, the wifi resets every day so we get more than one chance to grab attention.

Flexing our muscles:

In order for our product to shine, we needed to show everyone how it works! And we also believe that it is best for users to see our interactive content in the wild where they serve a purpose other than just promoting ourselves. So we teamed up with a couple other sponsors at eTail to promote them using our product. This way we get to show the conference what our interactive experiences can do while building relationships with other sponsors and promoting them. It’s a win, win!

The campaigns:

Conferences are overflowing with giveaways. If you are ever going to try and get more email addresses in exchange for something of value, a conference is the time.

We worked with two companies to create giveaway customer acquisition campaigns and created one for ourselves as well.

Here’s how we set them up:

Basically, the look and feel was dependent on the brand we were working with, but all good giveaways have some things in common.

• Strong copywriting:
  Good campaigns have FOMO in their language like “Scratch to see how you could win.” They pique your curiosity “We have a special treat for you.” And of course we tried not to crowd the cover image with too much text, but then let them have all the details on the reveal!

•  Good Design:
  When someone logs into the wifi at the conference, they probably are already determined on a destination. We needed to be eye-catching as ever in order to divert their train of thought enough for them to notice us!
  Here are some tips:
  Bright colors are a great way to catch someone’s eye
  You know we used animated gifs!

With this campaign we were able to help others and ourselves capture email addresses from the event. This hot lead list is now passed to our sales guys for working. While the email addresses are an important and valuable component of this campaign, the best part is the brand awareness we were able to gain!

Over the weekend our landing pages were visited by over 6,000 visitors in 4 days. This made our meetings with brands at the conference go smoothly and it was an easy conversation starter because everyone had already seen the wifi. And the cherry on top of it all is that we had now cookied all those viewers and are now (nicely) following them around the web with retargeting ads.

Events are a necessary evil, if you’re looking to improve your brand awareness or get a lot of new business fast. But if you are going to make that huge investment, you need to make sure you stand out in the sea of other companies. Interactive content can be the boost you need both at and before the conference. Don’t forget promoting your event or driving traffic to your booth can be done with interactive content as well! Check out this example from Marketo that they made for their event this year.

If you need help getting your event campaign off the ground, drop us a line. We’d love to help you!