To stand out, Ramp creates highly specific, memorable experiences for key personas. For example, they hosted a suite at a Beyonce concert and specifically invited women CFOs, encouraging them to bring their children. This creative, thoughtful approach generates significant interest and goodwill.
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The podcast's business-themed Halloween costume contest, featuring ideas like a "terrifying tariff," successfully engages its specific audience. This fosters a strong sense of community and brand identity by creating inside jokes and shared experiences that resonate with their target listener persona.
Even people who can buy anything are delighted by thoughtful, childlike moments. Small, personalized touches like custom jerseys or a surprise photo slideshow create a unique feeling that can't be purchased. Focus on creating these 'in-between' moments that tap into a universal desire for recognition and fun.
Instead of a generic conference happy hour, Harris Kenny organized a sponsored, invite-only laser tag event. This unconventional approach generated significant buzz, attracted a highly targeted "if you know, you know" audience, and reinforced the brand's unique identity in a stodgy enterprise sales space.
Big Cabal Media's Zococo publication launched "Hertitude," an all-women's festival staffed entirely by women. Initially planned for 150 attendees, it sold 700 tickets on the first day, demonstrating a huge, untapped demand for safe, community-focused events that go beyond typical conference formats and resonate deeply with a specific demographic.
Instead of broad webinars, Briq creates hyper-specific ones like "Airport Projects in the Southeast" designed to attract one specific target account. This tactic frames a demo as an exclusive educational event, increasing engagement from a key prospect by speaking directly to their immediate context.
Transform your customer base into a community by hosting exclusive meetups. This strategy builds a "culture machine" where customers feel like family, fostering loyalty and generating organic referrals without a hard sales pitch.
Instead of focusing on immediate ROI, structure events to foster genuine connections and goodwill ("karma"). This builds a stronger, more resilient brand over time, even if it means creating opportunities for competitors by inviting them.
Attendees have an "experiencing self" and a "remembering self." The latter only retains a few key moments. Effective event design focuses on creating 3-5 powerful, memorable touchpoints that will stick with attendees and drive business outcomes long after the event ends.
In-person events create a powerful, hard-to-replicate competitive moat. While rivals can easily copy your digital products or content with AI, they cannot replicate the unique community, experience, and brand loyalty fostered by well-executed IRL gatherings.
As AI makes high-quality digital outreach easy to create, inboxes and call lists are saturated. Small, intimate, in-person events have become a non-scalable but highly effective way to cut through digital noise and build genuine relationships.
