Transform your Conference Sponsorship with OOH
Business people are gathering once again for conferences and meetings, with consumer shows and industry events reopening their doors. In the words of a recent Inc. article, “Fasten your seatbelts. 2022 will be the busiest year for in-person events – ever.”
Deloitte reports “live events” now rank among the top five reasons business travel is increasing. They say travel managers consider in-person content delivery to be more valuable than tech-delivered learning. As of the March Meetings Industry Pulse Survey, 81% of meeting planners say they will hold a live event within the next six months. By year-end, that number jumps to 96%.
Sponsors and exhibitors hope to make the most of this resurgence.
People are heading off to conferences and meetings to learn, to network and even to make potential new employment contacts. While the motives for attending events may span the gamut, the modes of getting there don’t deviate all that much: attendees drive and fly to events and conferences.
And out-of-home (OOH) advertising, both traditional and digital, allows your brand to make the trip with them.
So many reasons to sponsor
Brands choose to sponsor conferences and events to augment their marketing with opportunities to make real, live contact with prospects and customers. You can:
· Access a highly-engaged and ultra relevant audience
· Interact with attendees in person
· Generate leads
· Augment your overall marketing strategy
· Build brand awareness
· Highlight a new product or service
· Close sales
Whatever your reasons for sponsoring or exhibiting, OOH can make your presence more visible, more interesting, more meaningful and more memorable. But you can’t simply dust off your old exhibit booth and show up.
Consumers now crave new experiences and they expect to be wowed, yet it is darn hard to impress them. Out-of-home tells your story in an entirely different way. With its versatility, OOH is the channel that allows you to show off your imaginative side, in form as well as content.
A whopping 94% of marketers say OOH is #1 if you want to surprise and delight audiences.
Prime them with a hearty, warm welcome
Whether attendees are flying in,driving, or taking a rideshare, conference-specific OOH ads alert everyone that your brand is on scene – XYZ Company welcomes BizExpo attendees! Roadside billboards are ideal, and airports offer a bonanza of opportunities to greet arriving conference attendees, from the concourse to baggage claim.
Continue to greet arrivals as they travel to the conference venue, with ads on smaller, billboard-like posters, street banners and street furniture or mobile media such as public transit, on or inside taxis, wrapped vehicles or an LED truck. Outside conference? You can put your message on a banner flown behind an airplane circling the event. The options and possibilities are truly endless.
Surround the venue
Thanks to geo-targeting and geo-fencing, you can display your OOH and digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads not only along travel routes but where conference attendees are most likely to be when they step outside the venue to shop or grab dinner with colleagues.
And it’s not only conference-goers who will see your ads. OOH reaches everybody, so placements around town and around the venue can impress a much broader audience at no extra charge.
Reprise proved that you don’t even have to be a formal sponsor to make an indelible impression on your target audience at a convention. The SaaS company used a clever combination of OOH media to create an unmistakable presence surrounding B2BMX, assuring their messaging would become a key takeaway from the event.
Strategically connect with convention-goers
Why are your targets planning to be on hand? Conferences are one big meetup, but the types of people you will meet there are as varied as your company’s reasons for being there. For example:
· The Sponge is there to soak up information
· The Networker is there to make more contacts
· The Innovator is looking for inspiration
· And the Partier is all about having a good time with friends new and old
You can tailor your OOH placements and content to reach “your” people in contextually relevant ways:
· DOOH displays in the bar or conference lounge
· A unique conference hashtag that appears on your ads to start the conversation even before the conference gets underway
· A branded kiosk at your booth or in the main hallway, directly linked to your website
· An LED truck or wrapped vehicle parked onsite as a selfie “studio”
Sponsorships can be very expensive, so you want to be sure you will get maximum return from that investment. Out-of-home offers unique ways to expand your presence. You can make a can’t-miss visual impact and treat attendees to memorable experiences they will be talking about and sharing long after they return home.
