The Devil Is in the Details: How to Produce a Successful Experiential Event

As a full-service marketing agency, we don't just play in the digital space, we have a large portion of our business that is focused on the experiential or live events side. As an agency that provides both digital and experiential marketing, it's so important to understand how to leverage the offline or real life opportunities in a digital capacity. And there are great ways to leverage events to lower costs and make sure that those events have life after the fact, so that the marketing dollar spend is maximized and not just a one-off item. There are also very important things to consider for events that will help mitigate costs such as working with an agency like ours, which has developed long-term relationships with vendors, so our negotiation is favorable to our clients because we do a volume of events with different vendors, so they trust us. They know that they can get events done in a shorter period of time with less fuss ultimately making them open to negotiations. 

It's also really important to multitask your decor. That's a great way to keep costs down. For example, if you're doing a multiday event, can you take those florals, decor items, risers, the chairs and repurpose them into the evening's events for the next day, or make sure that you're using the same space, but maybe just using a different lighting theory, so that you can make sure that you're using your space efficiently.

I think one of the big failures for people doing events for the first time is that they don't understand how venues work and all the different costs and expenses that go into producing an event. For example, understanding what 'plus plus' means for a hotel event is important because it affects the bottom line. When hotels host an event, you have to understand that the two pluses, plus taxes and plus gratuity are accounted for as to not go over budget. 

Another great way to mitigate marketing costs is by bringing in different sponsors that you have curated relationships with. Elevate My Brand has done a lot in the food and beverage space and we leverage those relationships to mitigate cost for clients. For example, we did a big three-day event for Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS) and also have a great relationship with no NOLET'S Gin is always trying to get in front of the C-suite, and/or high-end target audiences and were able to bring them in as a beverage partner during the event. NOLET'S did bottle giveaways and had signature cocktails for the event and we basically paid for labor, which was an amazing way to be champions on behalf of our clients by mitigating costs and providing an amazing product and service.

Those are just a few ways that the devil is in the details when you're creating fantastic events. Obviously thinking outside the box and being extremely creative don’t hurt either. 

We'll get into that a little bit later…