Events, both live and physical, are very effective tools to promote your business, build a relationship with customers (or potential customers), interact with them, reiterate your positioning, appear as an expert in your field, sell your service, and much more.
But which events are best suited for your company, your market, and the service you sell?
Obviously, we can’t provide an answer upfront without first carefully analyzing your business, your specific needs and the marketing goals you aim to achieve in the medium and long term.
If you want to reach a wider audience and limit your organization costs, digital events may be the right choice...
If, on the other hand, your industry requires you to attend trade shows and events, physical events are best suited to your needs.
(You could also combine both types of events to maximize the reach and impact of your marketing strategy). Either way, these mediums should always be included in a wider strategy in order to help you achieve your business goals.
ROMI Company was one of the first Italian companies to structure exclusive, limited-access digital events. We have been using this model (since 2020) both for ourselves and for our marketing clients.
All the events we organize are intended to sell the service, but they are also a great nurturing medium to grab the attention of potential clients and position the company effectively in their eyes.
Sure, we could do it through one-to-one meetings as well, but that would require significantly more time! Instead, with a two-hour event we nurture several clients at once.
This is how we operate when organizing our clients' digital events:
We can call them marketing tools that have become increasingly popular due to their flexibility and ability to reach a global audience. Let's briefly look at them one by one.
Webinars are online events where you share relevant and very important information for your target audience (e.g. how to solve a problem, how to achieve a goal, you can talk about case studies, etc.). Participants can also ask questions, but by text only.
Even in interactive meetings, you share relevant information with your audience—but in this case, participants can see each other via webcam and engage in verbal dialogue to address questions and receive personalized advice on their specific situation.
Workshops are training events you can organize to help potential clients solve specific problems (or learn new skills).
These are some of the advantages of digital events:
Organizing digital events is generally less expensive than physical events because you don't have to worry about travel costs, space rental or catering services.
Digital events can be enjoyed from anywhere in the world, so you can reach a much larger audience compared to physical events.
Live events take at least 6 months to organize. In addition, there are many more resources and people involved in the execution process as opposed to a digital event.
Digital events can be repurposed as online content, allowing you to maximize the reach and impact of the event (this is also possible with physical events, though it tends to be more complex).
You can analyze audience engagement and participation. During virtual events you can monitor clicks on links, interactions with your users, and many other KPIs.
Ultimately, digital events, incorporated within a broader marketing strategy, enable you to do lead generation and convert prospects into actual customers.
Leverage digital events professionally
When we build a digital event for our clients, the planning phase is critical. In fact, to ensure the engagement of every user, the event must be incorporated as part of a wider strategy.
After carefully studying your company, your market, your target audience, and your potential customers, we go on to define the appropriate strategy for the event and which goals are to be achieved.
Our digital events are disguised as informational, educational and confrontational events for the target audience, but the ultimate goal is to bring potential customers closer to purchasing the service and thus boost sales.
According to the type of digital event we need to structure, we build the high-value content that will be shared with the participants (slides, possible guides, case studies, etc...).
But it's not just about that: post-event content (follow-up) is equally crucial, aiming to encourage the purchase of the service.
For example, we design a series of emails to guide the potential customer closer to making a purchase, along with sales procedures for the sales team.
Texts are written by our copywriters, while designers take care of the design with visuals, logos and colors aligned with your company's image and brand identity.
What is the best platform to deliver your digital event? Depending on your needs and the type of event, we will define the most suitable technological solutions.
We will also take care of platform management, technical support and other details.
You might be planning the best digital event in the world, but without a proper promotional phase, you will have no participants!
ROMI, with its marketing team that includes advertising specialists, copywriters, and designers, takes care of promoting your event on the right channels (e.g., on google and social networks).
With adv campaigns and specific communication, we intercept the target audience (your audience) and, by assigning a score to each lead, we know who is most likely to attend and might buy your service.
Before, during and after your digital event, performance analysis is crucial.
By monitoring specific KPIs (performance indicators), we can study the data to get advance knowledge on the number of participants, the degree of engagement during the event, and the customer conversion rate.
After the event, it is vital to set up a series of follow-up communications and activities to bring the potential customer closer to purchasing the service and thus speed up and stimulate the sale.
Analysis of data and results is crucial in order to improve and plan events that are increasingly more engaging for the target audience.
As you may have read, digital events are a very powerful tool, but at the same time they can be tricky to manage and organize.
As a matter of fact, if you don't use the right tools, share content tailored to your audience, or attract the wrong target audience, you are risking the wasting of time and money on counterproductive activities.
Physical events, such as trade shows and exhibitions, are an effective marketing tool for specific types of industries because they allow you to get your business promoted and meet your target audience in person. Here are some benefits of live events:
A very interesting example of physical event is the one we handled for IDIR S.p.A., a company with over seventy years of experience in the automotive industry, specializing in the distribution of spare parts (one of the top companies in Italy by revenue and projects in the aftermarket).
For IDIR, we managed the organization of their presence at the Autopromotec trade fair. We took care of the design and every single aspect of the stand, from the tables and desks to the recycling bins.
During the event, IDIR wanted to promote a new photovoltaic canopy project. Unlike traditional trade shows, where clients receive dozens of business cards that are often lost or forgotten, we fully leveraged the latest digital marketing tools.
The stand featured three touchscreen monitors, each with a different landing page where visitors could find information and leave their details.
The stand featured three touchscreen monitors, each with a different landing page where visitors could find information and leave their details.
If all three monitors were occupied, visitors could request assistance from one of the two hostesses. Equipped with tablets, the hostesses guided customers through the digital forms.
The data collected during the event was fed into the CRM and automatically assigned to the company’s sales team.
With over 200 contacts gathered, multiple business negotiations were initiated, leading to the sale of IDIR’s services and the development of new strategic partnerships for the brand.
The ROMI team produced all the documentation assets for the special box, the landing pages displayed on the monitors, the procedures for the hostesses, and the post-event sales procedures for the sales team.
As you’ve likely realized, both digital and live events are essential tools for promoting your business and driving sales for your services.
However, understanding which events are best suited to achieve your business objectives is far from simple!
The risk is promoting a webinar or participating in a trade show that is not appropriate for your market (or not well-organized), leading to wasted time, money, and missed opportunities with potential customers interested in your services.
But if you choose to entrust your marketing strategy and events to ROMI Agency, Italy’s first agency specialized in marketing for service-based companies, you’ll have the support of a team with great experience in organizing both physical and digital events.
We are called ROMI, which stands for Return on Marketing Investment, because our goal is to ensure that the companies who rely on us achieve tangible economic results from their marketing activities.
We do this by offering businesses the opportunity to have an Outsourced Marketing Team, led by a Marketing Manager, with all the specialists necessary to define and implement marketing strategies. If you want to integrate events into your marketing strategy to create new business opportunities, book a consultation with us!
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