Month: March 2015

Want to really engage customers? Hold an experiential marketing event

Thursday 26 March 2015 by Amazing News Editor

 

If you want customers to really engage with your brand, to understand its ethos and have a positive emotional response to it, you might need to go further than a tear-jerking Christmas TV ad. You need customers to see a human side to your brand, rather than a faceless entity that simply sells them stuff – and the way to do this could be experiential marketing.

What is experiential marketing? Well, it can take a few different forms, but essentially involves holding a fun and interactive event that helps customers to actually ‘experience’ your brand. The goal is to encourage interaction and engagement with the brand, its products and its staff in a face-to-face way. You also want to humanise the brand and tell its story, and hopefully to get customers to associate positive emotions with the brand.

A case study: how experiential marketing works in practice

If you can’t quite picture how an experiential marketing event would work for you, take a look at the Asda Price Guarantee marketing event that Amazing Tents helped out with in February 2014. This is a fantastic example of how events can help customers to engage with a new product, or in this case, a new idea. The supermarket was launching a new Price Guarantee, so invited customers and locals along to talk face-to-face with Asda staff and to find out how the new Guarantee worked.

As well as introducing the new concept and getting customers to engage with the brand and its real-life staff, the event also had two other functions. It was a family fun day in the green grounds of Tamworth Castle in Staffordshire, with a bouncy castle and face-painting held in the SaddleSpan event tent provided by Amazing Tents, and it was an opportunity for Asda to film a new TV advertising campaign to promote the scheme. The SaddleSpan tent proved itself the perfect venue for an experiential marketing event, especially on such a lovely sunny day where a more open structure could be used.

Why are events like this so successful?

Firstly, the ‘fun day’ element of experiential marketing events like this one gives customers a reason to attend and it also gives them a fun, positive experience – happy emotions they then associate with the brand. It also enables to engage with the human face of the brand – in this case, its staff – and to be the first ones to test out new ideas and schemes. Lastly, there is the added bonus of using events like this, where everyone is having fun and engaging positively with the brand, to film advertising and marketing material.

Everybody wins!

Experiential marketing events really are win-win, which is why they are so successful. The customers have a fun day and the brand gets exposure for its new products/services, as well as being able to directly engage its target market.

 

 

 

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Is it too early to start planning 2016 conferences? Never!

Friday 20 March 2015 by Amazing News Editor

 

For organisers of any kind of event, it’s imperative to plan early. This helps you secure the best venues, give your guest list plenty of notice and finalise all those details and finishing touches that will make your event a success. So, is it too early to start planning conferences for 2016? Definitely not – in fact, if you haven’t started yet, you might not have enough time!

It’s all about the venue – book it early

Conference venues with the largest capacities and in the most convenient locations get booked up very early, sometimes years in advance. You’ll need to move swiftly and have a lot of the big decisions finalised if you want to secure your ideal venue.

However, if you haven’t started planning a decade in advance and the venue you wanted has been booked up, there are plenty of other solutions available.

An idea that you may not have considered is to use a temporary structure for your conference, one that you can locate practically anywhere you want (provided there is enough floor space). SaddleSpan event tents are frequently used for conferences, having both a large capacity and the flexibility to accommodate the varying needs of different events. They’re modular systems, so can be reconfigured to suit your needs. So, if you need a few large ‘zones’ rather than one massive space, you can choose a modular tent, such as the SaddleSpan S5000 tent (max capacity 2,800 people) to help you organise your event.

This solution not only gets you a unique venue, one which helps set your conference apart from other events, but it also gets you the location you want. Simply find a site with a big enough footprint for your tent, and you’re all set. These tents can be customised, lit, furnished and decorated very easily, and you can even put down flooring to add extra comfort to the interiors.

What you should be planning now for 2016 events

Securing your conference venue now is the most crucial thing to do, but there are plenty of other items you need to be checking off your ‘to-do’ list, however early it may seem. You need to book your essential services and vendors, from security and transport to catering and bar teams, because availability can be tight for these, especially if your event is a big one.

With all of these essentials ticked off your list, you can now spend your time organising the content of your conference, setting the agenda and booking key note speeches. Don’t forget your guest list either – this should be done at least in draft form as soon as possible. Give delegates plenty of time to respond to your invite and complete the registration process (this is another thing you’ll need to set up in advance). You can then send them timely reminders as the event draws nearer.

Whatever you do, don’t leave important details to the last minute – start planning your 2016 conference right now!

 

 

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7 quirky touches to make a vintage outdoor wedding extra-special

Friday 13 March 2015 by Amazing News Editor

 

Outdoor weddings can be absolutely gorgeous if the weather is right, which is why of course most people hold them in summer. However, if you have the protective roof of an event tent or marquee over your head, you can hold a fabulous outdoor celebration in any weather.

The vintage theme and outdoor weddings go hand-in-hand, calling to mind afternoon garden parties and post-war street parties. There are lots of little touches you can use to really add charm, style and personality to your own vintage-style wedding – here are just a few ideas to get you started:

  1. Bunting! No British garden party is complete without some cute and classic bunting. You can even make or design it yourself to match your wedding colour scheme, and you can hang it everywhere from wedding arches to the roof of your event tent.

 

  1. Food and drink vans. Forget about greasy burger vans – we’re talking about one of the many speciality vintage-style mobile catering businesses which specialise in quirky weddings. You can hire ice cream vans, traditional sweet shops or donut and coffee carts – it’s up to you!

 

  1. Unusual transport. Think outside of the box when it comes to your transport – depending on the distance and the weather, you can arrive at your wedding on anything from a decorated bicycle (and leave together on a tandem?) to a classic car or a vintage-style bus.

 

  1. Colourful wedding cakes. If you don’t fancy a traditional-style wedding cake, mix things up a bit with one of 2015’s biggest wedding trends – colourful cakes! Great vintage looks include pastels, edible patterns such as lace, and oversized floral decorations on top.

 

  1. Cocktail bars. If your wedding is more Great Gatsby than classic afternoon tea, pop up a cocktail bar in your event tent to really get the party started! Venues like SaddleSpan tents have plenty of room for a bar of any size or configuration – you could even make it the centrepiece of the layout. All you need then are some expert mixologists and some yummy recipes to try out on your guests – make sure you have the right glassware too, to complete the effect.

 

  1. Beautiful blooms. As well as decorating your marquee with some gorgeous vintage bunting, don’t forget to choose some colourful vintage-style flowers too. A key look of the year for weddings is for bright, bold, cheerful colours, but paler pastels and more old-fashioned flowers (i.e. carnations, peonies, heritage roses, dahlias and sunflowers) are all lovely choices too.

 

  1. Personalised tables. The key to the charm of a vintage wedding is personalisation, adding your own touch to everything from invitations and favours to table decorations. If you have lots of space in your event tent, go for large tables with dramatic flower arrangements – the flowers matching the vintage-style bouquets you’ve decorated the rest of the space with.

 

 

 

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Event tents and blustery breezes – how do they perform in windy conditions?

Friday 06 March 2015 by Amazing News Editor

If you’re planning an event, you need to plan for the weather. In the UK in particular, conditions can be very changeable even in the height of summer. You need to make sure that you have a roof over your guests’ heads and some shelter in case the heavens open or a strong wind picks up. If your event is outdoors without any shelter – make sure you have a back-up plan just in case.

Events in tents

If you’ve picked a SaddleSpan event tent for the occasion, be it a corporate, marketing or personal event like a wedding or birthday, you can comfortably check ‘shelter’ off your list. The great thing about these temporary structures is that they provide excellent shelter from the elements, but with the same feeling as being outdoors. They can adapt to both good and poor weather conditions – if it’s sunny and warm, you can even open up the doors to make the structure more open.

What about the wind?

One of the biggest concerns people have about hiring event tents and marquees for outdoor occasions is how they will perform on a particularly windy day. The last thing you want is draughts making your guests chilly, or an irritating ‘flapping’ noise of the tent struggling in the wind drowning out a best man’s speech or a key note speech.

The good news is that because SaddleSpan tents are used specifically for outdoor events, they have been specially designed to perform well in windy conditions. They are semi-tensile, which means that they hold their shape and produce minimum flap noise and movement. The ‘saddle’ shape of the tent is also important, as it gives the structure impressive stability even in high winds.

Many of the SaddleSpan configurations can be totally enclosed, which really does do what it says on the tin. An enclosed tent provides protection and shelter for all people and equipment inside, without the howling wind being able to get through. Once inside one of these tents, you can escape the horrible conditions and focus on having a successful and fun event.

What about open Saddlespan configurations?

As well as enclosed structures, these tents can be partially or completely open at the sides, just like a large marquee. This makes them fantastic for outdoor events in the summer sunshine, as well as for festivals where they are mainly used as bars and stage covers.

However, if the weather changes quickly, what happens to these open structures? The wind does not lift the tent as you may imagine, so there is no danger of them blowing away. In fact, they perform in just the same way as the enclosed configurations – the shape, semi-tensile structure and above all, the expert installation, all ensure that your event venue stays exactly where it’s supposed to be.

 

 

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