The key to overcoming the limitations of event marketing is to build brand connections before, during, and after the event by including attendees (and even those who don’t attend) in your communications so that the brand becomes humanized via true human/brand connections. This is accomplished through planned story-building activities as well as storytelling activities.

Let’s break this down into pre-event, during event, and post-event promotions and integrate that into a discussion of the reach, scope, and duration of your marketing efforts. Remember that “reach” concerns how many people are exposed to your content; “scope” in this case is the nature of your content -- whether it’s focused solely on your event or if it expands beyond the event; and duration is how long your various campaigns will endure.

Pre-Event
Pre-event promotion should be structured to build brand in addition to advertising the event. There will be hundreds or thousands of people who will see your promos but for whatever reason will not be able to attend. Why waste those precious moments of exposure by just making them feel bad that they can’t be there? Instead, discuss the human aspects of the brand and how events like this are made to bring people together as a community and to help people grow and achieve and celebrate. By doing this, all those people who end up not attending will still have extremely positive views of your brand regardless of their views of your event.

During the Event
In addition to delivering a great experience to your attendees, focus your marketing efforts on creating story-building opportunities during the event and on collecting the necessary content (mainly audiovisual supported by still images) so that those stories can be told not just during the event, but for the next few weeks or even months. Go overboard with the filming of video content that has a purpose and that fits into your planning for your post-event campaigns. (And don’t forget, ensure that attendance at the event is contingent on a full video/image/sound release for all attendees.)

Post-Event
If, during the event, you accumulated your huge collection of still images and audiovisual footage that was focused on the human/brand connection stories you want to tell for the next few months, now is when the real work begins. Focus on building stories that bring people together, that explain how they came to know and appreciate and desire your brand, that show the diversity of people and of thinking and of “the why” behind every committed brand advocate. Start releasing those stories as soon as possible with a plan to feature attendees (and even some non-attendees) and find ways to humanize your brand through the event experience that was attended by individuals who can contribute to your brand community.

Following these steps will turn your event into a human/brand experience not just for the attendees, but for all members of your target audiences. You’ll reach more people. You’ll expand the scope of your messaging far beyond the event itself. And you’ll extend the duration of your post-event campaigns from mere days or weeks into months or even an entire year until the next big event occurs.

Through planned story-building and storytelling activities, marketers can extend the reach, scope, and duration of their events, which can greatly increase the impact of the events and make them more cost effective.

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