When planning an event for your business, there are many ways to measure success. From overall attendance and ticket sales, to prospects captured or sales made. But by focusing solely on the hard-number financial returns of events, it can be easy to overlook another important benefit for your business – free marketing!
Not just any marketing either, user-generated content marketing in the form of attendees posting photos, videos, and reactions to their personal social media accounts, and in turn “marketing” your business for you. According to AdWeek, 85% of users say visual user-generated content is more influential in their decisions than brand-generated photos and videos.
This then begs the question, how do you get event attendees to post about your event and how much fun they had, or how great they think your company is?
The answer is simple, build an awesome Instagrammable wall! Not sure what that is? Don’t worry we’ve got you covered. We will explain what an “Instagrammable” wall is, how to build a great one that is optimized for top-notch photos, and creative ways for encouraging your attendees to take pictures and post them.
Essentially, it is a wall or backdrop of some kind that you put together at your event as a designated area for people to take pictures intended to be posted on their social media accounts.
There are multiple ways to do it but the key is to make sure it is not only visually appealing but features your branding in a non-tacky way.
You also have to determine if you will encourage people to take photos on their own phones, or if you will provide a photographer or automated setup like with an iPad.
The first step is putting together a visually-appealing backdrop in which people will take the pictures. You want to strike the balance between just being a pretty backdrop for a photo, and featuring your logo and branding colors. This ensures that attendees want to take a photo in front of it, but you also get some benefit out of it.
Once you have a backdrop set up, the next step is the logistics of how the photos are going to be taken and how you are going to make sure they look top-notch.
While hiring a photographer is certainly an option, that can get quite expensive. And if you ask people to take their own photos, you force one person in the party to sit out, or they have to ask someone random. The other issue with this is that you leave it up to the photography skills of random people and the qualities of their phone cameras.
Instead, consider setting up an iPad on a stand where people can walk up, enter their email address, and then the iPad takes the photos on a timer and emails it directly to the attendee. The plus side of this approach is that not only do you get extra email addresses for marketing purposes, you also have the ability to watermark the photo you email with your logo. There are many software and apps that help out with this too! eTech has iPads and stands for rent so you don’t have to buy them just a singular event, and we ship quickly.
Ring light with iPad photo setup
You also want to consider lighting. If the lighting is poor, the photo quality is poor and you lower the likelihood that people actually post the photos. By setting up proper lighting, that can be rented from us at eTech here, you help make people look their best.
Some people love a good photo opp, especially one with a pretty background, professional lighting, and a high-quality camera. Others though, might be a bit more camera shy.
The more people that post photos at your event, the more exposure you get, so you want to do everything in your power to convince your attendees to participate. User Generated Content is great for branding and lifts
One way to do so is running a competition where you randomly select a photo from Instagram from your event that used your event hashtag, and give the lucky winner some type of prize like a major discount or gift card.
If people think they may win something by posting a photo from your event using your hashtag, they may be more motivated to do so.
For those that do post online, even if they aren’t the winners of the competition, be sure to like, comment, and potentially even share the postings. It can help humanize your brand, and you attendees might appreciate the attention.
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