Event marketing examples tell you how other events and businesses succeeded with their techniques. While it’s a little hard to adapt their strategies completely given their various resources, you can still learn!
Furthermore, we’ve deducted the core strategies and the psychology behind these events for you.
You’ll find yourself interested in how event marketing isn’t just about ticket sales. It’s about engaging long-term customers, networking, and branding that’ll help long after the event is over.
Typical event marketing requires a lot of lead generation, marketing research, and community. However, these event marketing examples will illustrate some hacks. Now, let’s go through the precious insights from these successful events.
1. Comic-Con’s Secret Sauce
Comic-Con is now famous across the world. But, it all began with San Diego’s Comic-Con genius event marketing strategy. It is one of the best marketing examples because its marketing elements aren’t their own at all.
Comic-Con feeds on the success of famous comics like Spider-Man, Iron Man, and more from the Marvel universe. They target their fandoms and create a whole event around them. They owe their high event attendance to the success of comics.
They stay on-brand with cosplayers, meet and greets, merchandise, and areas resembling scenes from the comics. The audience gets the opportunity to witness elements of their favorite comics and heroes in real life.
Influencer marketing also helps get more traction for the event. While targeting such huge fandoms, celebrities and influencers in the field are abundant.
2. FIFA and Coca-Cola collaboration
This example will illustrate the best of marketing and event spheres. FIFA is one of the most loved sporting events across the world. However, it’s also very costly to attend in person.
Keeping this pain point in mind, Coca-Cola saw an opportunity to drive more ticket and product sales. They placed a VR setup in a crowded train station in Zurich. Here, people could play with their favorite FIFA footballers virtually using VR.
Here, you can note two major strategies. Accessibility gave people an opportunity to feel a part of FIFA and be more driven to buy tickets. Other than that, Coca-Cola was also strategic in picking a crowded spot for this setup. It couldn’t escape the public eye.
So, the two brands were able to mutually benefit each other by embracing a loved sport and technology.
3. The very expensive Burning Man Festival
This is a popular festival in Nevada that’s all about self-expression and creativity in the community. The tickets and parking alone cost USD 800. Food and accommodation can take the price up even more. Other than the unique concept, the event marketers of this festival focus a lot on community building.
They don’t just do their marketing a few days before the event. Rather, their event marketing is all year round where they hook interested attendees with their newsletter. Their interesting newsletter contains updates about the upcoming events.
One aspect of their event marketing that stands out is that they use smaller events to market their big event. They keep hosting small events to keep their audience engaged and coming back for more.
Since their community is so strong, word-of-mouth marketing also works great for their event. Their attendees turn into customers as the event marketers never let them get bored.
4. The most outrageous movie launch event
For years to come, people will read this amongst the best event marketing examples. Event marketers of ‘Barbie’ the movie had the most flashy campaigns.
In the age where people and brands are embracing minimalism, they made a comeback for maximalism.
Let’s start with the most subtle elements in their not-so-subtle event marketing campaign. They did their homework by learning color psychology. They used their vibrant pink hues in every campaign leading up to the movie launch.
They made collaborations with brands across industries. Xbox included characters inspired by Barbie and Ken in their games. Food brands like Cold Stone Creamery and Pink Berry released pink ice cream and yogurt. Cosmetic brands like NYX launched products like pink glosses, cheek palettes, and even a pink flip phone.
Other brands were quick to jump on the moment marketing trend and launched posts and products without direct collaborations.
Besides this global pink phenomenon, all eyes were on Barbie when the marketing team used AR for their campaign. A building-sized Barbie stepped out of a box next to the Burj Khalifa, a tourist attraction.
The event marketers then made the movie launch event more relatable with this technique. They launched a selfie generator that allowed people to create Barbie movie posters with their face in them. People forget that it’s a campaign when they’re a part of it. It was extravagant and relatable at the same time!
5. B2B event marketing examples
Cvent Connect is one of the most successful B2B events. Their event marketing strategy is simple: provide value to tempt people to take your service.
Their conference held in Las Vegas offers more than a hundred sessions on hospitality, technology, and marketing.
By providing such an amazing learning experience, they also attract the right target audience. This allows the attendees to network.
Offering learning and networking opportunities has made their B2B event, and ultimately their products a big success.
6. An HR event?
This event finds itself a unique spot amongst the event marketing examples. You’ll see how three birds were shot with just one stone in this human-resources event.
Spotify Diversify was a recruitment event. Yes, they weren’t looking for more customers but rather people to employ.
This event took shape in the form of a student talent hunt. Spotify invited coders, designers, and those looking to network. They gave them a platform to showcase their best work and even ask questions about this industry.
Their marketing campaign also ensured that the people invited were from diverse backgrounds.
What was Spotify able to achieve from this event?
- Attracted talented new employees
- Rebranded their product as inclusive and diverse
- Student influencers marketed Spotify by sharing their experience at the event (more sales for Spotify amongst students!)
We hope this example gives you the idea to be creative about your target audience.
7. An event to market the product using the product
We apologize for the tongue twister but..
Event marketing and product marketing are a match made in heaven!
This is one of those event marketing examples that illustrates the new age of event marketing
We are talking about the HTC Vive XR Suite product launch. To give you some context, HTC is a VR and cell phone company.
They had launched a VR program to improve office productivity in remote work settings. Interestingly, they used their own VR technology to launch the new product.
Attendees joined the product launch as avatars. This should give you a clue as to how quickly Metaverse is growing in the event space. Read about Metaverse weddings here.
8. How Apple does it
While we’re on the subject of product launch events, we can’t skip Apple’s strategy.
We’re sure sometimes you must ask yourself why Apple product launches are so hyped. Why do people pay so much for iPhones when Android has more features for a lesser price?
It’s all in their event marketing strategy.
In the months leading up to their product launch event, Apple drops little to no details about the next product.
A picture here, a little fact there, and nothing else! This strategy of suspense drives so much traffic to their actual event launch.
In the actual event, you see some of the most influential people in the industry witnessing this showcase. The events provide more knowledge rather than a sales pitch.
Apple never really mentions its price first. They don’t even talk about features as features. It focuses the whole event on how the new product is meant to make lives easier.
As soon as the product launch is done, the whole internet is flooded with high-impact full-length posters of iPhones everywhere. This visual storytelling technique after the event makes the product launch even more impactful.
9. More event marketing examples
You’ve learned plenty about what other brands and companies are doing. Now, here are some tips you can implement today to make your event marketing stand out:
- Give away some event tickets through a contest
- Find relevant influencers in your industry and collaborate with them to draw more attendees
- Host smaller events in the community and give them a good experience. Leverage their good experience to drive more attendees to your major event
- Create a sense of urgency with limited-time discounts on your event tickets
- Make your event exclusive with limited seats
- Engage potential attendees through virtual events that can be as big as conferences or even social media live sessions
- Retarget your previous attendees and promise them an even better experience in your upcoming event
- Produce high-quality photo and video content through previous events. This is extremely crucial for marketing your event in the future
- Provide your attendees with plenty of opportunities to click pictures. User-generated content is even more impactful than some of the ads you might launch
- Branch out your marketing efforts by getting your sponsors or brand collaborators also market your event
Now, we’re sure your mind is bustling with inspiration in ideas.
However, event marketing requires a systematic and strategic process. We have a guide for that too! Learn event marketing with EventTube using this free guide.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article. We’ll see you in your next creator block while planning events!
Best of luck.
