As the owner of a cutting-edge startup, you often spend endless hours crafting the perfect marketing campaign that will propel your startup to blossom into a promising brand. This primarily involves planning heavy social media marketing strategies, smart SEO tactics, and out of the box advertisements. As effective as these marketing formats are, nothing beats the old school effectiveness and charm of event marketing.

While digital marketing strategies and advertisements are essential to spread the word and let the world know who you are, event marketing helps to get your brand truly recognized in your fraternity. For instance, if you’re a startup, then you would know why Web Summit is the mecca of startup events and a networking haven that brings together all the members of the technology community under one coveted space.

Web Summit is always flocking with serial investors, CEOs and top management cream of some of the most renowned companies, passionate evangelists, and geeky tech enthusiasts. It goes without saying that every startup participating this year will be looking to attract crowds to their booth. Therefore, you must plan what you wish to achieve by exhibiting your business and how you will stand out from the competition.

Participating at a mega-conference such as Web Summit is probably the most sure-fire way to reach more customers, forge strategic partnerships, and attract some serious investments. This year, the technology conference will be held in Lisbon from 5^th to 8^th November.

In this post, we will cover 5 essential event marketing tips that you can use to help your startup make the most of what Web Summit offers.

1. Be Visible

The primary goal of exhibiting at an event is to stand out from the crowd and have attendees visit your booth. This requires creativity and ingenuity that can create a stir at the event. Go all out with loud and bright colors or fancy costumes or run a special contest or a magic show. Your event marketing campaign must invoke a sense of creativity and smartness that helps you to be memorable at the event. Visibility is the key to building brand awareness and attracting people to experience your brand. The Marketing Madheads team decided to wear funky and rather ‘mad’ suits to Web Summit last year.

2. Appeal to all the Senses

The smartest way to get people to engage with your brand is to appeal to their basic senses of touch, smell, taste, sound, and visuals. Depending on what your startup specializes in, you should tweak your event marketing campaign to appeal to the attendees.

For instance, if you’re an eCommerce startup, you can create stunning fashion visuals to appeal to your audience with your clothing line up or if your business is in high-tech software, you can use an AR demonstration to create a visual and audio stir among attendees. Appealing to the senses can help your startup to strike a chord with the audience and the pay off for that is immeasurable.

3. Be Likable and Memorable

An event marketing campaign is incomplete without the team that will represent your startup at the event. Your team should be cheery and energetic at the event but should also come across as likable. Web Summit sees some of the most brilliant minds strolling about to find something that catches their eye. And so, it is imperative that your team maintains a sense of professionalism even in informal discussions and presentations.

Striking personalities and engaging conversations make for a memorable engagement and so, you must ensure to come across as sharp and knowledgeable. Another key element here is to be organic and seamless in your marketing tactics at the event. A campaign that comes across as simple and effortless will resonate better with your audience.

4. Harness the Power of Tech

As mentioned above, using technology is a smart way to engage with people and woo their visual and hearing senses. Web Summit is a tech conference and so the best way to give your event marketing campaign a boost is to include smart tech implementations and get people to participate with your brand.

Use augmented reality to supplement your presentations or virtual reality to give product demonstrations or install multi-touch tables at your booth to help you with presentations. The inclusion of tech in your event marketing campaign will not only help in your endeavors to engage audiences but also to come across as a cutting-edge, tech-savvy brand.

5. Use Social Media

Ideally, you should go all out and use social media to announce your presence at Web Summit a few weeks before the conference to create a social buzz. Once at the event, use social media to actively engage with the attendees. Craft a catchy hashtag for your tweets and have people tweet live using that hashtag. Live updates and tweets will help people who are following you to locate you and engage with you. Not only that, on-event social media activity will help your followers and customers from all over the world tune into your Web Summit experience in real time. Like an audience engagement bonanza!

Startup League and Web Summit 2018

Event marketing is a highly effective marketing channel; however, it isn’t particularly affordable for startups that are bootstrapped or just starting off. Participating at an event such as Web Summit can burn a massive hole in your marketing budget. To help startups make the most of this amazing platform, the Startup League is giving 10 up and coming startups a chance to exhibit at the 2018 edition of Web Summit at full sponsorship on their ALPHA booth!

Not just that, all remaining other startups that are part of our #Leagueof100 to Web Summit stand to receive 25% sponsorship on ALPHA, BETA or GROWTH booths. Startups will also receive exclusive support in terms of access to mentor hours, investors and workshops through the ALPHA package, free branded swag such as T-shirts and marketing merchandise to flaunt at the event, and a PR push on leading tech platforms like Tech.EU and TNW, to name a few.