Product launches and marketing events are great ways of getting your brand in front of the media, influencers and the public. They’re a huge investment in terms of time and money, so you really need to make them work. The problem is that, with so many other companies doing exactly the same, the attention of influencers, journalists and members of the public can be stretched very thin.
Therefore, if you want to attract people to your event, you’ve got to find a way of standing out from the crowd. And the most effective way to do that is by using the kind of special effects that will give it a real wow factor.
Razzle dazzle ‘em!
There are many reasons why adding special effects to an event is a great idea. Here are the top five:
1. Attract influencers
Influencers get many invitations to promotional events, enabling most of them to pick and choose which ones to go for. This means that if there’s someone you particularly want to promote your products to their social media followers, you’ll need to work hard to attract them to your event.
When we talk about ‘influencers’, we’re not just talking about the A-list celebrities with millions of followers and who command huge fees just for saying your brand’s name. You may have heard of ‘micro influencers’, i.e. people with a following of between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. But there are also ‘nano influencers’, i.e. people with a following under 10,000. If you don’t have a huge budget, nano influencers are probably the best influencers to target. Researchers have discovered that nano influencers offer much greater value for money than those with greater followings, delivering $1,000 in sales for every $50 spent on them (in terms of promotional freebies rather than fees) – an ROI of 1,900% This compares with an ROI of just 500% for influencers who have more than 100,000 followers and who can command fees and demand more expensive goodie bags.
And the best way of attracting nano and micro influencers to your event, of course, is to promise them a spectacle! Something exciting and visual that’ll look great on their social media channels – if you’ve got a water projection screen with your logo on it, or you could use confetti, theatrical smoke or bubble tubes for example, an influencer is far more likely to stand in front of them to take selfies and create videos.
2. Attract footfall
Perhaps you’ve taken a stand at a trade show or exhibition, or maybe you’re organising a promotional event in a shopping centre or transport hub – anywhere where there’s going to be a lot of footfall and a lot of distractions. That means you’ve got to work hard to ensure people notice your stand and also think it’s interesting/exciting/cool enough to come over and have a closer look. How do you do that? With special effects of course.
Make your stand attention-grabbing with water effects, whether it’s a fountain, moody rain effects, a rain curtain, or a water projection screen onto which you can project your logo or videos of your products.
On the other hand, make things moody with smoke effects. Jets of smoke will attract attention as they’ll be seen by people way back in the crowd, and indicate there’s something that’s worth checking out.
If you’ve got a big enough space to operate them safely, it’s worth considering Sparkular effects. They’re a great way to attract attention and add excitement to your event. They produce sparks that look like tall flame jets, but are a lot safer than using real fire jets. Big bursts of glittery fireworks can’t fail to steal the show, especially if you want to give your guest speakers a dramatic entrance – and they’ll look great on everyone’s social media photos and videos!
If safety is a consideration – and you don’t mind sweeping up – confetti machines are a great way of creating a spectacle. Confetti effects will create a wow factor at any event, whether you’ve got confetti cannons blasting away across your whole stage area, or use confetti guns for a smaller, more targeted effect. By the way, some confetti guns double up as T-shirt guns too, enabling you to create excitement by firing branded shirts out into the audience.
3. Create a social media buzz
One very effective way of getting great value from your marketing events and product launches is to shout about them on social media. And as long as you’ve got lots of great content, you can do this long after the event has finished.
At the event itself, make sure you’ve got someone who’ll capture and post images and videos across all your social media channels. This will not only generate a buzz and maybe encourage more people to come and visit you in person, it’ll also generate more engagement which will result in click-throughs to your website, getting them ever closer to that all-important Buy Now button.
Over the following few days you can continue to post content about the event – talk about what a great event it was; highlight the best bits; put quotes of the nice things people said about it. In the longer run, you can do a retrospective from time to time – this is what we did last month or last year, etc. Some lovely exciting images will be great for the run up to Christmas for example, as you talk about things that happened during the year.
As long as the photos and videos are exciting, fun or interesting, people will stop scrolling in order to look at them more closely… after which you’ve got them hooked! This is why you need to think about adding visually appealing special effects at your event, because it’ll provide a great backdrop for visually compelling content that will get engagement again and again.
4. Get publicity
If you create great photo opportunities at your marketing event or product launch, you should be able to get some great publicity from it. Whether it’s in trade journals, the local media, national media outlets, or through being shared widely on social media, the more publicity you can get from your event the better. And greater awareness of your brand is more likely to result in increased sales.
When your content is shared by others, it gives your brand ‘social proof’, an air of authority that you can’t get from advertising. In a Neilson survey, it was found that 88% of people trust recommendations from people they know; while sharing content isn’t a direct word of mouth recommendation, it is an endorsement that will increase trust in your brand.
5. It makes your brand memorable
Strong emotions have a positive effect on your memory. Scientific research has shown that “emotional events are remembered more clearly, accurately and for longer periods of time than are neutral events.” It doesn’t matter what the emotion, if it’s strong enough, you’ll remember everything around it – just ask anyone who was an adult in 2001 to tell you what they were doing on 9/11.
Thankfully it’s not just negative emotions that will make something memorable, positive emotions work too. When you buy a packet of sweets you enjoyed as a child, you may well buy them again occasionally, just because they remind you of how you felt when you tasted them for the first time.
Therefore, special effects at your marketing event or product launch will help create an event that creates an emotional connection with an enjoyable event, imprinting your product or brand on people’s minds, making them more likely to search out and buy because they remember it so well.
Special effects hire: how EntFX will help you create a memorable experience
We have been helping brands get the most from their marketing events, product launches, and promotional events for nearly 30 years. Our experienced team of special effects experts have worked on a wide range of live events and promotional shoots for corporate clients and fully understand what is needed to enhance the occasion and create a crowd-pleasing wow factor.
We can help you plan the best effects to help your brand make a big impact on your target market. Whatever the venue restrictions, we’ll help you come up with a creative solution that’ll add an extra dimension and delight audiences.
Call us on 01707 269 566 or fill in our online contact form to tell us about your event and we’ll arrange a suitable time to discuss things in more detail. If you just want to hire equipment or also hire an experienced team to operate your special effects, we’ll help you make sparks fly at your event!
