Take your Event Marketing to the next level
What if you could utilize a social networking tool like Twitter to drive hundreds, maybe thousands, of leads to your company’s booth at your next event?
MIT students used social networking tools like Twitter to find 10 red balloons, 8 foot in diameter that the R&D arm of the U.S. Dept. of Defense scattered across the United States, in an effort to see how social networking could be utilized to accomplish time-critical tasks.
Um…based on the results, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it worked. 10 balloons found in less than 9 hours. For details how they accomplished it, here’s a link to the article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20091207/tc_zd/246651
Now, if MIT students used Twitter to put an offer out there for “followers” to help them find 10 balloons, you can most definitely use it to drive prospects and leads to your events. Here’s how this applies to you as a marketer.
Twitter merged with the XMPie software that Colormark utilizes for our variable cross-media and print campaigns does it for you. You setup a Twitter page for your event, get a few of your current customers and prospects to follow your page, put “tweets” out there, and soon the message is spreading through their followers, their followers followers, and on down the line.
Then, people start following your event if they’re interested. We also create a RURL (response web page that’s personalized to the follower) that is sent to anyone that follows your Twitter page, they go after an offer or giveaway you’ve put with the RURL to visit your booth, and you’ve just collected valuable data on a current or potential customer without using a mail list or sending one single email. Heck, you may have even just boosted event attendance with a brand new contact that was nowhere to be found prior to this campaign. That’s what I call a marketing campaign with multiple benefits, my friend. Collect data, build a database of additional leads, boost event attendance. Check, check, and check.
Just a little something to think about as we blaze new marketing trails together.
-- Eric Mangold
