Events are an amazing opportunity to bring your brand experiences to life, but nailing your brand identity at events can be a challenge. What propels you forward in your respective industry? Is your brand inspiring? Does it tell a great story? It’s important that your brand inspires and tells a great story while also turning customers into “brand evangelists.” This is where event identity comes in.
In this blog post, we’ll look at how event identity can help create meaningful experiences by conveying your message in a powerful way.
What Is Event Branding?
Event branding is the foundation of your brand. Event branding is how you visually communicate the look of your brand based on how your event strategy was developed.
Event Branding vs Event Identity: Understanding the Difference
Don’t Overlook the Basics
When developing your event brand, attendee experience should be top of mind. Take the time to ask yourself these critical questions about your audience:
- What’s important to them?
- Does your brand communicate why the audience matters?
- Does your brand tell a story that communicates beliefs shared across the organization?
With this in mind, let’s dive into how you can create a powerful and effective branding experience.
What’s Important to Your Audience?
To start, consider what is important to your audience. Do they want to network, learn something new, or stay on top of industry trends? Use polls to gain insight into their wants and needs.
Try asking these questions in a pre-event poll:
- What does their ideal balance of networking and content look like?
- What are their current challenges and problems?
- Are they inclined to participate actively or listen passively?
Once you know their expectations, you can align your messaging with your company’s brand and design event-specific branded experiences or stories.
How to Align Your Brand to Communicate Why Your Audience Matters
In order for your event branding to be successful, it’s essential for your brand messaging to resonate with your audience. Aligning your brand with your event isn’t just about communicating information. It’s about telling a story that your audience will connect with. This involves incorporating elements of your event identity and crafting a narrative that speaks directly to your attendees.
To get started, interview stakeholders, customers, and partners to gather feedback on how they perceive your event identity and brand. Use this information to create an outline for your brand story, then fill in the details based on the insights you’ve gained.
Creating your brand message isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Consequently, we are seeing the rise of “Brand Storytelling” companies entering the market. Consider working with an agency to help craft the perfect version of your story. With a strong story and clear messaging, you’ll be better equipped to win over audiences and stand out from the competition.
Are You Aligning Your Event Brand With Your Beliefs?
It’s crucial to communicate your company culture and values to create successful events. Take the time to understand what makes your company unique and appealing and build your events around that brand story.
Experiential marketers know the value of engaging audiences with their brand. They engage the event audience with their brand to create an unforgettable experience. By incorporating immersive storytelling that illustrates your culture and story, while also acknowledging the community surrounding your company, you can bolster your brand identity and enhance the event experience for your internal team and external clients, prospects, and partners.
With these guidelines in mind, you can start creating your own unique event identity and branding strategy.
What is Event Identity?
Event identity is often lumped under event branding, but it’s a category of its own. It encompasses a company’s name, logo, colors, graphic design assets, and style, appearance, and arrangement of these elements throughout an event. It’s crucial to have a clear understanding of your goals and objectives and ensure that every piece of branding is in line with your company values and image.
Brain Rules by John J. Medina tells us that people are likely to remember only 10% of the information they hear, but if a relevant image is paired with that information, they retain 65% of the information three days later. This highlights the importance of event identity, which includes your logo, colors, fonts, and tone of voice. These elements impact the recognition and trust of your brand throughout the customer journey.
Elements of Virtual Event Identity
Logo
A memorable logo is an essential part of your event identity and creates an instant connection with your audience. Simple designs work best, cutting through the noise and helping your event attendees process information. Audiences respond best to images and logos laid out in a clean and simple way, according to Psychology of Design.
Color
The colors you choose for your event also influence your attendees’ emotions throughout your event. For example, blue can evoke feelings of loyalty and tranquility, while yellow can convey creativity, happiness, and intellect. Be inspired to create the right mood with color at your event using Pantone’s Guide to Communicating with Color. View the Color Theory Guide here.
Fonts
Similarly, using the right font is crucial in evoking emotions and encouraging action. By using the right one, you encourage decision-making and inspire people to share your information. How does the below comparison make you feel? Which one inspires action?
Here are the top 10 most loathed fonts according to graphic designers: The Werd from The Marketing Machine.
Tone of Voice
Has anyone ever told you it’s not what you say, but how you say it? Your tone of voice is also an essential aspect of event identity, as it conveys the personality of your event. It tells your audience who you are and what you stand for.
Understanding your target audience’s preferences and needs is crucial to communicate your message effectively. If you’re targeting teenagers, then using an authoritative tone might turn them off. But if you aren’t a “fun” brand, don’t try to be. Cater to who you want to attract to your brand.
Defining Your Event Branding With OVATION
For over 30 years, OVATION has been helping to make complex events simple by ensuring that the platform, people, and content come together to create a mind-blowing experience!
