Pro Event Branding Tips For Running Your Next Event

When you’re lost in the midst of planning every minute detail for your event, chances are you could overlook the most important aspect of all – building a powerful brand that speaks volumes about who you are.

In a nutshell, branding is what your events look and feel like. To brand your event is to inject the personality or heart of your company through primarily a visual medium. If your event were a person, what would their personality be? Friendly, fun, inspirational? By thinking about these kinds of questions you can be sure to create a brand for your event that will connect with your audience – by meeting their needs for entertainment or information. Get the most professional assistance and user group event production by Trademark.

Why is Event Branding important?

So why does branding matter? Branding your event helps you to build the right kind of relationship with your audience. They’re coming to your event for a particular reason, right? So by creating a brand that promotes who you are, you can gain trust, build loyalty and gain exposure from those who resonate with your message.

By building a strong brand that works across all of your communication channels, you share a cohesive message about the core components of your business – who you are, what your event is about, and the benefits your audience will get by attending.

Here’s some tips that will help you brand your event like a pro:

1. Define your unique brand identity

Your brand identity is important as it’s the identity of your company and it communicates what you are selling. If you can’t define your brand, then how can your customers?

Your brand is made up of the following aspects:

  • Logo
  • Fonts
  • Colours
  • Imagery
  • Tone of voice
  • Values
  • Persona

Defining these brand elements are important, as they’ll be used as the basis of all your promotional material and help build recognition for your event.

2. Keep it consistent

Inconsistency is a brand killer – it sends out a confused message about who you are as a company and what your event can give your audience. Like The Falls Festival, it’s important to keep your brand consistent throughout all of your communication, as it builds trust. By keeping consistency in your messaging, you’re showing that you are reliable and true to your values.


3. Establish an online presence part 1: Social Media

To bring your brand to life, an easy and cost effective way is to create visual content for the key social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It’s well known that visual content on these channels creates more engagement than text based content, so to establish your presence and build your brand, Canva is a good place to start.

Perth Fashion Festival have created an online presence across all of their channels by using visual imagery and clear typeface that is consistent across Twitter and Facebook

4. Establish an online presence part 2: Inbound Marketing

As you build your online presence, there’s more that you can do that will help to continue to communicate your brand. Why not write a series of blog posts for a trade magazine, build an email newsletter to keep people up to date with your event, or develop a fun infographic that people will want to share? Creating your online identity is as much about promoting it as it is about developing the event itself.

5. Print isn’t completely dead: Create in house posters and flyers

You know, despite the growth of the online world, print isn’t completely dead. By creating posters and flyers for your event, it will strengthen the message of your brand. But it’s important to get it right.

Try to focus on:

Colour: Getting the colour balance right is important. Use the key colours defined in your brand palette, but only choose two or three to make a stronger visual impact.
Typography: Experiment with typography, keeping consistency with your brand font. You can use the way the words are positioned to draw the eye in to your poster.
Composition: The way the poster is laid out will have an effect on how many people are attracted to it. In the Malaga Festival example (bottom right), you can see crowds of people flocking towards the typography. This draws attention to the event in a clever but subtle way.

6. Name the event

In order to really impress you’ve got to come up with a great name for your event. Try to use just one word, or a couple of words so it’s easy to remember and easy to spell. Rather than making a name too literal (like ‘Summer Food Festival), why not try a play on words, like Jamie Oliver with The Big Feastival.

7. Create a tagline

Creating a tagline for your event can be tricky, but if you have a clear sense of your brand, you’ll be able to create one that follows your mission (why your event was created) and your values (what you’re all about). TED does this excellently with the tagline ‘Ideas worth spreading’. Simple, yet effective. When creating a tagline, think about what you’re offering to your audience, and why they should come to your event.

8. Create a hashtag

Hashtags. Those little things seem so powerful in the world of social media, but the truth is not a lot of people know how to use them. For an event, using a hashtag can really ramp up your exposure, by pulling in more potential customers that are searching around that particular phrase. Smooth FM know that to bring more people to their ‘good food month’ and ‘night noodle markets’, it’s not only beneficial to hashtag those terms, but the areas that people may visit from too.