How to Harness the Power of Storytelling in Event Marketing

Let’s be honest… it takes a lot of time, attention, and energy to plan and execute an event. The last thing you want is to waste your resources on an event that falls flat. After planning and executing dozens of events for clients over the years, we’ve learned some of the most important best practices for creating an effective and unforgettable event. Harnessing the power of storytelling is one of the foundational pillars of effective event marketing.   

Building your event around a compelling story is beneficial for several reasons. It makes promoting your event easier by creating a more intriguing hook for guests or media outlets. It unlocks creative ideas and opportunities to engage attendees. It is easier to promote, and it creates a more memorable experience for attendees. Ultimately, it enables you to connect with your audience on a deeper level.

How to Harness the Power of Storytelling in Event Marketing

Here are some specific tips and ideas that marketers can use to harness the power of storytelling in event marketing:

Start with a Strong Story

The first step is to come up with a strong story that will resonate with your audience. You need to decide on the core idea behind your event. The “story” of your event should be relevant to your brand, your values, and your overall blueprint for your brand story.

Here are a few questions to consider: 

  • What is the overall purpose of the event? What messages or emotions do you want to convey to the attendees?
  • What are the core themes or ideas associated with your brand or organization?
  • Are there any key moments or events in your company’s history that could be used to tell a story?

Make it Personal for Your Audience

Helping your audience see themselves in the story is an important factor. The events that resonate the most are ones that allow you to connect with the audience on an emotional level. When your attendees can see themselves in the story, they’re more likely to remember and enjoy the event.  

Creating an event that resonates with your audience can be challenging because so much of your attention is focused on your marketing goals. Taking time to ask these questions can help create an event that personally resonates with attendees: 

  • What is the target audience for the event? What are their interests and pain points?
  • What could make it a must-attend experience for your target audience?
  • How can you improve their experience or their life through the event.

Engage All the Senses

Visuals can be a powerful way to tell a story, but it’s equally important to think beyond visuals and incorporate elements that appeal to sight, sound, touch, taste, and even smell. In the iconic words of Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.” The way you deliver your story determines its impact on your participants, so have fun with it! 

Here are a few ways you can create an “immersive experience” that supports the story you want to tell:

  • What emotions do you want attendees to feel during the event? 
  • How can you evoke these emotions using sound and lighting design or visual elements?
     
Real-World Examples of Storytelling in Event Marketing

Over the past few months, we’ve been able to design and implement several event marketing strategies for our Green Apple clients. Here are some examples of how storytelling has been used in their event marketing plans:

The Skylight Grand Opening Event: Sip & Sample 

After months of renovation, The Factory at Franklin wanted to create an opportunity for guests to explore the reimagined space and celebrate the grand opening of The Skylight—the new bar at The Factory at Franklin. We designed an event called Sip & Sample that highlighted The Skylight’s narrative of being a space for the community. We brought together new and current vendors of The Factory and invited the community to join us for this exclusive grand opening event.  

Crain Construction’s 90th Anniversary Celebration

Known for building relationships and structures that last a lifetime, Crain Construction wanted to celebrate their 90th anniversary alongside team members, former employees, customers, and industry partners who supported their growth over the years. By hosting the event at Prancing Horse of Nashville Ferrari Dealership—one of their most recent projects—we were able to create an immersive experience that celebrated the past while generating excitement for the company’s future. 

United Communication’s Project UNITE Celebration

United Communications is a local internet company making tremendous strides in providing high-speed internet access to rural communities across Middle Tennessee. They came to Green Apple Strategy looking for a way to celebrate a state-funded grant for their Project UNITE initiative. Every aspect of the event, including the location, speaker list, and food choices, was designed to demonstrate the company’s commitment as a local provider.

Let Green Apple Plan Your Next Event

Special events are a powerful tool that can be used to enhance your marketing goals. If you’re ready to develop a compelling story or theme for your upcoming event, ensuring a memorable and impactful experience for your attendees, we’d love to talk. Reach out to us for a consultation.

5 Questions to Consider Before You Start Planning for 2024

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from building hundreds of annual marketing plans, it’s that proper planning requires a disciplined approach that evaluates the past and looks toward the future. This approach enables you to learn from past successes and failures, understand the changing market landscape, and align marketing strategies with your overall business objectives.

Setting aside time to consider these questions can enhance every part of your annual marketing plan — from setting more attainable goals to thinking more strategically about your annual budget.
 

5 Questions to Consider Before You Start Planning for 2024

Here are a few questions we ask our clients to help develop their annual marketing plan: 

1. What lessons were learned from the successes and failures of the current year’s marketing efforts?

Developing a marketing plan can be challenging for a variety of reasons. You can’t expect to implement the same ineffective tactics and strategies and generate different results. On the other hand, what worked last year isn’t guaranteed to work again. 

That’s why it’s helpful to truly dig into what worked and what didn’t. For example, let’s say that you ran a marketing campaign last year that was very successful. What made the campaign so successful? Was it the target audience? The messaging? The timing? Once you know what worked, you can replicate or change those elements in future marketing campaigns.

2. What are the overall business goals and objectives for the upcoming year?

As a business owner or marketer, you know that your marketing plan should be aligned with your overall business goals and objectives. That’s why it’s so important to ask yourself this question before you start building your plan. 

This is where getting insights and perspectives from stakeholders across the company can be valuable. For example, if your company has a goal to launch a new division or product, you’ll need to invest significant marketing resources toward that effort. If you’re interested in building your team and hiring more employees, you could incorporate that goal into your marketing efforts. 
  

3. What are the main challenges and opportunities in the market that you need to address?

New technologies are emerging, new competitors are entering the market, and customer expectations are evolving. Discover what your potential customers might be thinking as time goes on before you start building your marketing plan.

By understanding these challenges and opportunities, you can adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. You might focus on developing more personalized marketing campaigns, or you might invest in new service offerings that can help you stay ahead of the competition.

4. How can you improve and ensure alignment between marketing and other departments within the organization?

In order for your marketing plan to be successful, you need to have alignment between marketing and other departments within your organization. Improving alignment between sales and marketing is an essential step. As you develop your plan for next year, be sure that your marketing and operations departments are working together to address any scalability issues. When everyone is working together in the same direction, you’re more likely to achieve your marketing goals and objectives.

5. How will you evaluate your efforts and pivot if needed? 

What are you going to do if your tactics fail or another opportunity arises? Knowing the answer to this question before you build your marketing plan can be incredibly helpful. It’s difficult to fix the plane if you have to build the instruction manual while it’s crashing. By building mechanisms for evaluation and adjustment, you create the opportunity to pivot your marketing efforts without abandoning your entire strategy.

Let Green Apple Strategy Help You Plan 

Need some help getting started on next year’s marketing goals? Check out this Green Apple guide to start planning!

Our team can help you build an effective strategy to help your brand achieve its business goals. Learn more about our process or connect with our team to start a conversation.

Marketing Outside of the Office: 5 Ways to Be A Successful Marketer Without Being Stuck at a Desk

Can you be a marketer without working a traditional 9-5? The answer is a resounding “YES!” Today, more and more marketers are finding success—for their careers and for the brands they represent—without spending all day behind a desk. 

Modern, untraditional marketing initiatives take many forms, including influencer, affiliate, guerilla, stealth, and street. I’ll unpack each of those in this blog post so you can learn more about how the marketing landscape is changing to include new techniques that largely occur outside of the office.

Influencer Marketing

If you’ve spent time on social media, you’ve encountered influencer marketing. This type of marketing is highly effective, relying on endorsements and product mentions from individuals with a dedicated social following who are viewed as experts within their niche.

For example, a popular fitness vlogger may be asked to post a video on TikTok promoting certain supplements or athletic gear. She then creates content around the product and shares it with thousands or even millions of followers. Because they already trust her expertise, they will be more likely to purchase the product she is advertising. 

Influencer marketing is effective because it relies on the relationships the influencer has previously established with her audience. Instead of the brand building trust with the audience directly, the influencer’s endorsement does that for them, quickly creating a bridge between the audience and the brand. 

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing refers to sharing a link to a good or service on your website or blog and earning a commission each time someone purchases the product from that shared link. 

This type of marketing involves little to no startup costs, as most affiliate programs are free to join. Plus, there are several different paths to choose from as you’re getting started, including promoting your link in search results or through email marketing, developing your own influencer program, or creating a website based on product reviews or coupons.
 

Guerilla Marketing

Less intense than its namesake guerilla warfare, guerilla marketing relies on the element of surprise to create wonder and awe in the day-to-day lives of potential consumers, both in person or online. It requires less upfront costs than many traditional marketing methods. But, what guerilla marketing lacks in costs, it makes up for in hands-on execution and creativity. 

Consider Bounty’s surprise gigantic messes in the streets of New York City – think an oversized popsicle and a huge spilled coffee cup – to advertise the effectiveness of the paper towels. Out-of-the-box ideas like this are noticeable and thought-provoking, meeting potential buyers where they are and leaving a memorable and positive impression. 

Stealth Marketing

In contrast to guerilla marketing’s eye-catching techniques, stealth marketing aims to fly under the radar. Brands want to showcase a product or service, but in a more indirect campaign that drives awareness more than sales. 

A popular form of stealth marketing is product placement (i.e. when a product is strategically placed in a T.V. show or movie). However, it can also occur via reviews, company partnerships, and web content produced or endorsed by a third party. The most important part of a stealth marketing campaign, or any marketing campaign, is to be genuine or risk ruining your reputation. 

When done well, stealth marketing can create excitement and conversation around a brand. It can make a brand more memorable and help potential customers feel empowered in purchasing decisions. 

Street Marketing

Street marketing is the close cousin of guerilla marketing. Like guerilla marketing, effective street marketing can be accomplished on a low budget if it’s big on creativity. 

A key difference is that while guerilla marketing occurs in person and online, street marketing is limited to just that: the street and other public places like sidewalks and transit stations. 

Street marketing includes tactics like placing static ads in unexpected places, such as an ad for Roto-Rooter on a manhole cover or using enthusiastic brand ambassadors to pass out product samples. 

Develop the Best Marketing Strategy

Our team at Green Apple has years of experience developing modern strategies for brands throughout the United States. If you’re ready to move your marketing outside of the office, reach out and let our team put together a plan that will stop your audience in their tracks.

Four Event Marketing Best Practices for Unforgettable Experiences

When it comes to telling a brand’s story, events are incredibly powerful. A well-planned, well-executed event can gather stakeholders, communicate brand values, and build community connections all over the course of two hours. However, the opposite is also possible. An ill-planned and poorly executed event can strain relational ties, communicate inefficacy, and harm PR efforts. 

If you want to support your marketing strategy with an exceptional event, try the following event marketing best practices for an event that can increase brand awareness and bring in new business.

Four Event Marketing Best Practices for Unforgettable Experiences


Set Aside More Time Than You Need

Realistically, how much time do you need to plan, schedule, and run a successful event to promote your business? A week? A month? Six months? A year? Events run the gamut, ranging from sponsoring a local charity gala, throwing a party at a major trade show, or celebrating a groundbreaking with government officials. Green Apple Strategy has helped our clients plan all these events and more — we know how sufficient time can lead to excellent outcomes. 

While some events take days or weeks to plan, others require months of collaboration. As a rule of thumb, estimate how long you think it will take and double that amount of time. It’s impossible to start too early. The scope and cost of events tend to expand, and making extra time for unexpected delays is a best practice you won’t regret.


Over-Plan Your Marketing Event

In addition to setting aside sufficient time for an event, we suggest a similar course of action when it comes to organizing and planning an event. Brands new to event planning may assume that it consists of simply listing what you need to do and assigning those duties to different individuals. 

In fact, event planning requires lists of materials, vendors, attendees, organizers, and expenses. It also requires sketching out a timeline for choosing, confirming, and paying for all the components of the event. If you don’t have an individual at your organization who specializes in event planning, the responsibility of the event is often placed on team members who already have full-time roles at your company. This can cause stress and strain as people add even more to their already full schedules.
 

Team Up With an Experienced Marketing Event Partner

To prevent overwhelm and resentment, it’s best to partner with an event marketing agency that has experience planning and throwing large events. Often, a high-level overview is lost when brands try to add event planning to their areas of expertise. Key components, invites, or aspects of the event fall through the cracks, learning to frustration and embarrassment. 

Outsourcing your event planning and marketing to an experienced partner places the responsibility on them to keep tabs on the overarching strategy and the on-the-ground details and logistics. Your brand can still retain creative control and assist with idea generation and execution while receiving the support you need to throw the best event possible for your brand, your board, your customers, and your community.


Drum Up Anticipation Through Marketing

Event planning is so complex that advertising, marketing, and PR for the event can fall by the wayside. Leaving marketing for the last minute almost always affects turnout and deliverables, making the event a less powerful vector for brand loyalty and visibility. Instead, marketing and publicity should go hand-in-hand with the process of event planning so that the event can be promoted every step of the way. 

Promoting your event means identifying publications and media outlets that should feature your event, reaching out to invitees, sponsors, and community partners who have a stake in your event, and creating a coordinated social media strategy to create anticipation for your event. Sellout events create palpable buzz, interest, and curiosity about brands. (We should know—our sellout event for The Factory at Franklin led to an extensive waitlist invested in future events that is now an engaged email marketing audience.) When it comes to event marketing, there’s no such thing as creating too much excitement. 
      

Let Green Apple Plan Your Next Event

Special events are a powerful tool that can be used to enhance your marketing goals. If you’re ready to use event marketing best practices to build connections while increasing brand awareness, reach out to us for a consultation. 

Events are an incredibly powerful part of building a company’s brand story. Here are some of Green Apple’s best practices for a well-planned and well-executed event.

From Idea to Impact: How to Develop a Memorable Brand Story

Every successful company started as an idea. 

Whether it was a concept sparked by a business conversation or originally written down on the back of a napkin, every brand has a story to tell about how it evolved from idea to impact. As a marketer or business leader, your ability to tell that story (i.e., brand storytelling) affects how well your potential customers remember who you are, connect with your mission, and care about your products or services. 

Brand storytelling not only explains how you differ from your competitors; it also humanizes your brand in a way that allows people to relate to it. It helps customers understand who you are and why your business exists. 

For example, Green Apple Strategy was founded as a marketing and PR agency that builds marketing strategies with the entire business in mind. Rather than offering “one-off” marketing projects like creating a website or managing social media, we come alongside businesses to develop and implement marketing strategies with their “core” business areas in mind. As a result, a big part of our work has been helping businesses find their “story” and tell it effectively in today’s digital age. 


Develop a Blueprint for Memorable Brand Storytelling

After working with dozens of clients in various industries over the years, here are a few best practices we’ve learned when it comes to developing your brand’s story:

Discover your why.

To borrow the famous adage from Simon Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Discovering your why when marketing your business should always be step one. Rather than leading with your products, services, or solutions, take a step back and examine the motivation behind your actions. It’s more than just making a profit (or at least, it should be). It’s the big, bold vision that motivates your company.  

Help your audience see themselves in your story.

While your brand story unpacks your origin and unique differentiators, it’s essential to remember that the best marketing makes your audience feel like the hero in the story. It’s important to make sure your audience can see themselves in your brand story. That means highlighting their specific challenges or obstacles and why you care about helping them solve the problem.

Make sure your brand story aligns with your business goals. 

Your brand story should align with your business goals and integrate into all areas of your business—including marketing, sales, and all internal and external communications. Potential goals to build your story around include revenue growth, clarifying what your business offers, differentiating from other companies, or growing brand awareness. 

Don’t forget to be human. 

Remember, people connect with people. Your brand story should have personality. Boring books don’t attract readers. In the same way, your brand story should be inspired by the presence of people who participate and develop your company — written with the specific personality that represents your company. 


Questions to Help With Brand Storytelling

As we work with brands, we get to know their history, unique value proposition, ideal target audience, and dreams for the future. Each of these impact the brand story we craft. While it’s important to create a unique narrative, here are a few helpful questions that could help you identify the important elements and narrative arc of your brand story: 

1. How and why was your company founded? What inspired its creation?

2. What were the specific challenges or problems your company sought to address in the market? How does that connect with the problems you seek to address today?

3. Were there any significant events, experiences, or turning points that shaped the early days of your company?

4. What were the core values, principles, or beliefs that guided the founders in establishing the company?

5. Did your company experience any transformative moments or breakthroughs that set it apart from competitors?

6. Who is your target audience? How does your product or service positively impact the lives of your customers? 

7. What is your company’s vision for the future? How do you plan to evolve and make a positive impact?


Take Your Brand Storytelling to the Next Level

Creating a compelling brand story is worth it because it becomes something to reinforce in every marketing campaign. If you’re struggling to identify a brand story or marketing message that resonates with your audience, our team can help. Reach out to our team to learn more about our process or schedule a time to chat.