KWSM Takes Vegas: The Power of an Integrated Digital Marketing Approach

At KWSM, we value teamwork, and work to cultivate a collaborative environment. A recent client event showed us how powerful the results can be when we use all of the agency’s capabilities to support a common goal.

Read on to discover how we created The EPURI Experience Las Vegas, a worldwide launch for a new brand of energy drink entering the market. We’re taking you behind the scenes for all the blood, sweat and (happy) tears involved in creating an experiential event.

The Task At Hand

When planning the EPURI launch party, we knew we needed to think big. This global brand would be exposed to consumers in the U.S. for the first time, and it had to be impactful and memorable. The EPURI Experience Las Vegas wasn’t just a party, it was an experience, and the marketing had to reflect and communicate the significance of this brand launch.

We started this assignment as we always do – with an all-team brainstorm and strategy session. We realized immediately that this undertaking would require the strength of every department in our digital marketing agency, all working together to produce the desired outcome. Luckily, those are the projects we like best.

Graphic Design

Communicating a new brand often begins with the visuals. We had already created the EPURI website and sales materials, and we knew that delivering a cohesive look and feel across all the party collateral would help create a seamless brand experience. Even without a big event, it’s always important to keep your branding consistent across your website, social media, and printed materials.

For The EPURI Experience Las Vegas, we coordinated a 3-step process for our invitations: the teaser, the official invite, and the reminder. We “teased” invitees with a digital save-the-date that featured compelling creative and gave them a little taste of what the event was about, but left out just enough information to keep them wanting more. For the official invite, we decided to go the traditional route with paper invitations. After all, when do you receive a paper invite these days? Special events! If you treat your event as a special event, your attendees will, too. Perhaps the most important part of our plan was the reminder. Everyone has busy schedules and it’s important to follow up with your invitees to make sure the event remains top of mind. We reinforced the printed invites with a series of e-mail reminders. This was very effective. With each e-blast, we saw a bump in RSVPs.

While we were designing the invites, we also had to think ahead to our graphic needs for the party itself. Our location, Drai’s Beachclub Nightclub, has an amazing system of video screens that can be coordinated to synch with music being played in the club. We designed a series of motion graphics featuring the EPURI cans and branding to be played throughout the evening, creating an immersive experience for our guests.

Web Design & Development

The best way to get our party invitees excited about the product and ready to learn more was to drive them to our website. We created a special landing page for the event, and included the link on all of our email and mail communications. Using a landing page as a destination for important information is a great tactic to drive more traffic to your website and give visitors the chance to look around and learn more. We frequently use this strategy with advertising and content marketing campaigns, and our event was no different. We used push communications to get them interested, and then pulled them back to our online hub to further educate and engage.

The event landing page was consistent in look and feel with the rest of the website, and included a compelling description of the event and a prominent call-to-action – in this case, RSVP.

In addition to simply collecting responses about the party, we built out other important pages on the website – additional landing pages so that artists and musicians could submit their portfolios to be considered as performers at the event, contest submission pages, where people could enter to win tickets, and data collection pages, where we gathered a bit more information about those who were responding. Creating these pages allowed us to learn more about who our audience was and helped us grow our fan base leading up to the event. This was especially important since EPURI was a new product, never before available in the United States.

Photography & Videography

We knew we needed professional photos and videos of the event, not only to capture a spectacular evening, but also to give us content to work with on our social media and website, and material to use to promote future EPURI Experiences.

With any big event, it always pays to have a professional photographer on hand. Great event photography can have a serious impact on how people view and respond to your brand, and can even open you up to more publicity opportunities. (For instance, after the event, The Las Vegas Weekly contacted us about doing a photo spread on The EPURI Experience Las Vegas, and we had dozens of great photos to give them – free publicity!) To adequately cover the event, we had a roving photographer and videographer capturing candid party moments, a photographer stationed at our step and repeat to photograph guests as they arrived, a manned selfie machine in another area to help guests capture their own content (for sharing on social media, of course!), and two fixed videographers to capture the art, fashion and music performances throughout the entire event.

PR & Influencer Marketing

Even though our invite-only guest list was limited to 500 people, we wanted to get as much traction out of the event as possible, and that means garnering publicity both before and after the big evening. By putting out a press release for The EPURI Experience Las Vegas, we got our event in front of the media. That helped push our event onto websites around the globe, reaching new audiences with one release. We also made sure members of the local Las Vegas media were on our guest list, so that they could experience the event first-hand, and hopefully, write about it later.

Since our objective was to reach new audiences and expose them to product, it was essential to go beyond our own reach, especially since we were just launching the brand. Paid media is a great start, but it also helps to leverage business partners, vendors, existing customers and local business groups to help promote the event. We invited a variety of influencers to The EPURI Experience Las Vegas to help us reach different audiences and connect with their fans and followers. Our influencer outreach campaign drove millions of impressions through organic posts and established business relationships with potential partners.

We invited influencers as guests to our event when we felt that their audience would be interested in our product. When considering influencers, there are many things to consider. Do not just look at the follower count; that’s not a true indicator of someone’s value as an influencer. Look at whether their aesthetic matches your brand’s aesthetic, and take a close look at their engagement. If they have hundreds of thousands of followers and are only getting a handful of likes on each post, something is not right. Also, if you see that the people commenting on each post are the same, that may be a red flag.

Working with influencers resulted in hundreds of thousands of impressions with new audiences. We saw new people engaging with EPURI, and we picked up several hundred followers across all our social media channels.

Social Media

We knew it was important to be active on EPURI’s social channels before, during, and after our event. Since events happen in real-time, attendees often use social channels to engage with other participants in a live environment. We spent weeks teasing and promoting the event on social media, and from setup to break down on the day of the event, we made sure to give our audience a behind-the-scenes look at everything that went into creating The EPURI Experience Las Vegas.

During the event, we live-streamed performances from our entertainers on Facebook & Instagram. Thanks to Instagram’s new “Add to Story” feature, we re-posted any content from attendees who tagged us in their stories throughout the night. Our event featured several unique performers throughout the evening, and we wanted to bring our fan base into the action. From synchronized swimmers to Laser Girl & The Violution, all the way to headlining DJ Kaskade, we made sure viewers at home could feel like they were a part of The EPURI Experience themselves. We were able to interact with those watching on social media, and those in attendance in Las Vegas, in real time throughout the evening.

Because there was so much to cover, we coordinated our coverage efforts as a team and assigned one social media channel to each person to manage throughout the night. And, we created an event-specific hashtag so we could track what everyone was posting. The work didn’t end when the party was over. The next morning, we had to round up all the content that was created and publish highlights with our favorite photos, videos and posts of the night.

Bringing It All Together

As a full service digital agency, we understand how all these elements come together to help reach our clients’ goals. The EPURI Experience was a great example of teamwork within the agency, and the power of combining a variety of digital resources to produce results. However, even if your event or objective is smaller scale, it’s still important to consider a well-rounded approach. One element on its own – whether it’s social media, video or a website – won’t make as big as impact as having a coordinated strategy to integrate the tools into an overall plan.

Want to learn more? Contact us today to discuss a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your business.