Digitising Your Events Marketing Strategy
With events transformed into virtual offerings, how can technology be employed to help you maximise reach for your customers?
From the manufacturing sector to broadcast, trade shows and conferences are now crucial components of a successful brand marketing strategy.
There are many benefits to participating in trade shows. For starters, they’re excellent conduits for brand awareness, a brilliant platform for launching new products and provide opportunities to directly engage with existing and potential new customers.
In the long term, they can also lead to partnerships and new prospects. A study by the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry found that exhibitions were creating a global output of €275 billion ($325 billion) in direct and indirect business sales.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, many events held in 2020 were cancelled or have had to revise their offerings throughout the year and into 2021. Rather than simply leaving it up to chance, many businesses are opting to go the virtual route and produce a digital version of what they originally envisioned as face-to-face interactions inside a conference hall.
ROHM Semiconductors GmbH, for example, had their first event of the year (Embedded World) cancelled in 2020 so when PCIM 2020 - the world’s leading conference for power electronics - was cancelled too, it meant yet another potential setback,
“It was a big disappointment for us too, and we were really looking forward to meeting our customers and have new opportunities,” says Dominique Shen, Senior Marketing Project Manager at ROHM.
Thankfully, PCIM chose to go the virtual route and provide exhibitors and visitors with the chance to participate in its ‘Digital Days’ event. Many brands taking part in this new version of the event opted to follow PCIM’s suit and enlist in the webinars and round table discussions being hosted by the conference itself.
“We needed to offer alternatives to keep our branding ongoing and our facilities ongoing, so we thought a virtual booth [at PCIM’s Digital Days] would be different to our competitors and offer a more refreshing feel for people than just scrolling around landing pages,” adds Shen.
As a point of difference, ROHM tasked Electropages Media with creating a virtual tour and stand for PCIM to support their sales and marketing strategy.
“I wanted to offer something that is really interactive and has a feel that when people are entering a virtual booth, they are entering a different environment. We wanted something different and refreshing, and different to what our competitors were doing.” adds Shen.
The virtual 360-degree tour and booth that Electropages Media built included webinar access, a free evaluation board campaign, the opportunity to book meetings and speak to ROHM’s sales staff one-on-one and more. All of this helped the manufacturer to adapt to the ‘new normal’ without missing out on this key event in their calendar year.
Ultimately, PCIM’s Digital Days had over 4,500 attendees, and though it was an unusual circumstance that caused the trade show to take place solely on the web, overall ROHM had a good event, and were happy with Electropages Media’s solution, ‘The results were really satisfactory for us, and in general, we had a really good working experience [with EPM], and final results were all of our expectations.”
And what of the future? Are virtual booths here to stay? Shen notes,
“In the current circumstances, there’s no other way to meet people, so having a virtual environment where visitors can see what kind of products are presented and solutions are available. I think this is going to be a trend in the future.”
To find out more about how we can work with you on a bespoke virtual environment and event booth solution, please get in contact.
