Marketers spend more than $50 billion every year on events to promote their brand. Usually, the goal is to create a strong connection between the event and the marketers’ brands through sponsored dollars that can yield a return on investment over time. With this kind of commitment, extending the reach and impact through social media is an opportunity for marketers to improve overall ROI.

At Earshot, we are monitoring and scoring social media posts in real-time for thousands of events every year so that major brands can quickly connect with attendees and amplify the experience to a larger audience. With thousands of opportunities to discover and engage attendees with relevant content through social media during these moments, marketers can achieve incredibly high engagement and share rates and impact results pre, during, and post event.

After having seen success with events ranging from Lollapalooza to the Consumer Electronics Show, here are 5 ways we see leading brands utilizing social media at events to achieve better event-based ROI:

1. Drive offline behaviors like sampling or sign-ups
Connecting the digital to physical world is the ultimate conversion metric. Leverage social media as a new brand channel during these live events to drive conversions on site and win new customers.

2. Identify new brand advocates and influencers
Using logo detection and other influencer discovery tools, social media can reveal new advocates at live events who are sharing brand specific content and where brand affinity and brand recall are at their highest.

3. Activate surprise & delight campaigns and capture earned media
Use the event as an opportunity to provide a VIP experience for the right influencers at the right time. These micro-influencers will share it through their social networks and amplify their brand experience to their followers for more earned media.

4. Retarget attendees post-event in a more relevant way
Capture user-generated content or use event-specific data to drive more creative, contextual campaigns that will be more valuable to those who were at the event and experiencing it firsthand.

5. Leverage the intelligence to inform future events
Look beyond the macro sentiment or word clouds and capture insights from location-verified social posts to mine the collective opinions of real attendees for a mini focus group.

Every event presents an opportunity through social media for pre, during, and post event intelligence and engagement. By using new tools that can help create an audience of attendees in advance of the event, engage attendees during the event, and retarget and measure the success post-event, marketers can open up a new channel to deliver better ROI for their sponsored dollars.