4 Tips To Promoting Your Personal Brand Through Events
Have you ever attended a talk and was blown away by the speaker on stage? Their powerful confidence, radiating charisma just draws you in and makes you believe in their cause and see the way they envision the future. That is the power of a great personal brand and events are an effective way to promote your brand.
I have been a speaker, event host and event organiser in the UK, USA, Canada, China and online across the world. I've had the privilege of working with some of the world's best organizations, such as Google, NatWest, O2, TEDtalks, InnovateUK, Guangdong Province Science & Technology Board and the International Personal Branding Week Brazil. Through my speaking and events, I met a lot of amazing supportive people who understand my mission to help people like you establish your personal and corporate brands online, so you can be visible online and bring more value to your audiences.
In this blog, I want to share my top tips on promote your personal brand through events.
Try being a guest speaker first.
If you haven’t already considered it, attend a few events as a speaker before you organize your own event. This is a great help in many ways. First, it gives you an opportunity to observe how the event organizer talks to you or maybe even guides you on what you will talk about at the event. This will give you an idea on how you will arrange and talk to the speakers at your event. Secondly, this practice establishes you as a thought leader in your field – a go-to person in your area of expertise and an inspiration for others. Lastly, you don't need to worry about the logistics of organizing an event, such as location, catering, attendees, but you get the benefits of exposing your personal brand to a targeted audience.
Once you are in a strong position, you can act as a guide to your own event speakers to keep every speech effective and relevant. In addition to that, being a speaker at others’ events gives you exposure and the all-needed PR. With great public relations, a firm grip on the subject and deep knowledge of how events are conducted, you can make your own event a success.
Branding workshop at Club Workspace London
4 Tips on How to Run an Event for Personal Brand Promotion
1. Know the Right Type of Event for You
Before you run an event to promote your personal brand, you need to know that there are many different types of events. You need to see what you are most comfortable with. Here is some detail on the different types of events you can choose from.
Live streaming
Virtual events
Seminars and workshops
Trade shows
Offline Conferences
Dinners and lunches
It is important that you are fully prepared despite the type of event you select. While virtual events and webinars might seem easy compared to seminars and conferences, you still need proper preparation to make them count. Keep in mind that it is easier for people to walk out of the event when they are attending it online.
Kaitlin Zhang (right) Guest Speaker at NatWest London
2. Choose the Right Platform for Promotion
In the digital age, a majority of some of the most popular brands in the world market themselves online. Social media marketing combined with specialized online platforms power initial promotional efforts of today’s brands. For example, for my talk at the Twitter Influencer Networking Event by NatWest Women in Business, it is obvious that we should focus more on using Twitter and Twitter live video streaming as a main promotional tool. Depending on the event, your marketing strategy should change accordingly.
In addition to using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for advertising your event, you should consider platforms like EventBrite, EventZilla, Peatix, etc. These platforms help you promote your event and sell tickets to a wide range of audience. For my branding workshops and events in London, I use Eventbrite because it's popular in London so many people will find my event when they search for events on the platform itself. Eventbrite also shows me a dashboard of where my traffic is coming from and allows me to track how well my promotions are converting. Lastly, I also use the affiliate marketing tool to allow others to earn a share of the ticket price when they refer attendees to me.
Leading a branding workshop at O2 Think Big Hub, London
3. Describe Your Event Persuasively
You have to create strong reasons for them to come to your event. You have to make your description short, but every word in it must have meaning. While explaining how to write a great event description, Tanya Ha explains, “Avoid empty, superfluous words that don’t give the reader useful information.” In the descriptions, it is also important to give relevant details about your speakers, “Your guest speakers don’t have to be famous and they don’t have to be scientists, but do explain who they are and why they are relevant, or bring an important perspective to the topic” (Tanya Ha).
4. Find a Venue That Fits
The biggest and most luxurious looking venue in town is not always the best venue for your event. Your focus should be on making the entire event affordable and effective within the budget you have. Rather than paying huge costs for big venues, negotiate and try to get the venue booked for free. Instead of paying in the form of cash, you could offer some unique services to the venue owners or their community. This same thing echoes in one of Whova’s articles, 10 Things to Consider When Choosing Your Event Venue, “As a cost-conscious organizer, you may want to keep the venue cost down to allow more room in your budget for food and beverages and entertainment” (Whova).
At Oval Branding, we host events at Club Workspace, O2 Think Big Hub and a few other strategic partners that offer great event spaces.
Have you attended one of our events? Please leave a comment below.
Sources
Whova. “10 Things to Consider When Choosing Your Event” https://whova.com/blog/things-consider-when-choosing-event-venue/ 01 September, 2016 https://whova.com/ 17 August, 2017
Ha, Tanya. “How to Write a Great Event Description” https://www.scienceweek.net.au/how-to-write-a-great-event-description/09 February, 2016 https://www.scienceweek.net.au/ 17 August, 2017
Spencer, Nina. “How to Choose the Right Speaker for Your Event” http://ninaspencer.com/articles-keynote-speaker-nina-spencer/choose-speaker-event/ , http://ninaspencer.com/ 19 August, 2017
