Stepping out from behind your screen and meeting face-to-face with your blogging tribe is an amazing step you can take for your business. It brings with it a whole new level of connection and community, it can greatly strengthen your brand story and it can be very profitable.
If you are dreaming of running an event or well on your way, here are my top five tips for branding a blogging event –
First up you need to view your blog as a brand and an event of any size is a brilliant opportunity to enhance your brands image and this is how you can do just that.
1 It’s all in the name
Creating a catchy and memorable name for your blogging event coupled with a tagline that captures the essence of what your event is all about, is a key part of your overall brand. Think bigger than just your blog name and choose a specific name for your event that evokes what your event is about and connects emotionally with your audience followed up by a punchy tagline. Some great examples of this are, Melissa Ambrosini’s past event – ‘Step it Up’, ‘Want it. Hurt for it. Earn it. Love it’ and an Earth Event called ‘Soulpreneurs’, ‘Authenticity and abundance in business and life’.
2 Create captivating visuals
Having a logo and specific branding guidelines designed for your event is key to getting your brand message out there in a professional and memorable way. Have a branding design board developed for your event so that you can make sure that everything designed for your event such as web landing pages, social media and printed advertising follows your event brand guidelines. If events are something that you want to run on an ongoing basis, developing these guidelines will help your events become instantly recognisable.
3 Create an unforgettable experience
If you want to leave a memorable mark in the minds of your guests, you need to create a memorable branded experience. You could hire an event stylist if styling is not your thing but take charge of the finer branded details as these can be woven into all aspects of your event. Everything from you event website, invitations, logo, decorations, attendee gifts, handouts, notebooks, pens, posters, banners, you name it, can be artistically branded with your message. You do not want to overwhelm your attendees or make things feel cheap and nasty, so hone in on your one key message and follow your brand style guide so that throughout the whole event you are portraying a unified brand story. Immerse yourself in Pinterest for some amazing event branding ideas and check out Fresh Promotions who offer a great range of products that can be individually branded with your message.
4 Think about how you want your audience to feel
Put yourself in your audiences place and envision what kind of impression you want to make on them. Write up a description of your ideal attendee – age, interests, passions ect and base your branding around them. This should be woven into everything, from the type of venue you choose, the music you play, the scent of the room, the way you structure the room set up (for intimacy or more autonomous learning) and the branded goods and styling pieces you choose for your event.
5 Create a sense of exclusivity and community
A successful event is one that people vie to attend and talk about long after it’s over. To help create this sense of urgency and exclusivity, cap your numbers and create a sense of hype and expectancy about limited spots for your must attend event. If you can get a well known figure in your blogging niche to endorse your event, better still to attend the event then this can do wonders to entice people to attend. You could run a promotion that the first certain number of attendees get a special gift or you could offer your event tickets only to people that participate in your brand in some way. An example of this is a recent event called Infinite that Rachel MacDonald and Tara Bliss ran in May 2015. They offered people a ticket to the event if they purchased a spot in the BSchool program through their affiliate links, thus creating exclusivity and member only access to their event.