Optimise your digital marketing for SPE Offshore Europe 2023

The SPE Offshore Europe 2023 conference opens its doors in Aberdeen on the 5^th of September. Held in a city that’s a major hub for both small and global energy companies, many people travel far and wide to attend the energy conference and expo. SPE Offshore Europe is a great way to network and meet other industry experts, promote your services, and learn about new innovative technology across the wide spectrum of the energy sector.

But I want to highlight that despite being only a few days long, the event has a huge impact on the planet and your company’s budget. The real gold dust of conferences is collecting people’s information – but when this can be done online through apps, QR codes, and online content, both paid and organic, what’s the need for endless printouts? 

Here’s how to get more eyes on your brand as an exhibitor in today’s age of digital marketing.

Maximise your return on investment – ditch the carbon footprint

When you start breaking it down, the overall carbon footprint of SPE Offshore Europe is significant. Usually, the exhibitors get various marketing collateral produced and shipped (sometimes from overseas) to the exhibition destination, including display banners, giveaways, leaflets, and brochures. Too often, many of those items are shipped back to the company and some simply end up in the bin. I’ve been guilty of collecting dozens of such giveaways only to leave them back in the hotel room… and during my in-house days, we recycled an endless number of outdated brochures from various conferences.

Switching to a digital marketing campaign to promote your business during SPE Offshore Europe is more cost-effective, offers a higher audience reach, and leaves less waste. What’s not to like? 

5 digital marketing tasks to boost brand visibility during SPE Offshore Europe in Aberdeen

When you focus your energy on leveraging digital marketing, you increase your brand’s visibility for more than just the 4 live event days in Aberdeen. Here are 5 things your business can do alongside SPE Offshore Europe 2023: 

• LinkedIn ads

Although considered pricey compared to Facebook, it’s worthwhile for more sensitive targeting. When running LinkedIn ads, you can narrow down the audience to selected people you want to be noticed by. Do spend time with your sales and marketing colleagues to think about possible variations of job titles – that extra brainstorm session pays off! 

LinkedIn targeting allows you to zero in on company names, individual titles and/or job functions, as well as their seniority, interests, and locations. The “sweet spot” LinkedIn ad size is an audience of about 40,000 profiles. It just so happens that SPE Offshore Europe is expected to bring in about 38,000 attendees. Sure, you can select a smaller audience, but you might run the risk of higher cost for reach and lower engagement. Do ask yourself, how much is a lead worth to your business? 

Make sure to run ads before, during, and after the event for maximum impact – with variations of creative and copy. The algorithm needs time to work out your ideal audience, so turning it on the day before the event won’t be effective. Once live, you can see campaign analytics about which professionals from your target businesses and locations engaged with your ad. Once you have that info, you can use your Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Premium account to do the magic of further outreach and engagement.

• Google ads: target your own brand, the event, and service-related keywords

Setting up Google ad campaigns targeting a range of keywords (brand, event, services) means your brand will be visible to anyone searching for the event or related topics, so long as you’re not getting outbid by competitors. That’s a wide range of potential customers with a search intent. You can also set up ads for your competitor’s names (if you have the budget).

Setting up Google ads can be a tedious process. If you’ve not done this before, it’s best to hire a professional so you’re not wasting ad spend on a campaign that’s not optimised.

• Run display ads in relevant industry publications 

Display ads are a great way to showcase your brand on trade publications that will be covering the event and are relevant to your audience, such as Energy Voice and Offshore Engineer.

As your target audience will already be visiting these sites, it’s a great way to increase visibility. Reach out to their sales executives for advertising packages – they will gladly help you with the set-up process, meaning minimal time and effort. 

• Host a post-event webinar showcasing your technology 

One way to highlight your expertise without a high running cost or any additional impact on your carbon footprint is to host an online webinar. Every person you shook hands with, exchanged business cards, and even connected with on LinkedIn is a potential webinar attendee. Send a follow-up message or email the week after SPE Offshore Europe saying how great it was to meet them, encouraging them to attend your free webinar. 

As they have already shown interest, this is a great way to remind people who your company is and what your technology or services can do for them once the event dust has settled. 

• Run a relevant digital PR campaign during the conference 

Did your company recently have an impressive contract win, have you won an industry award, or is your team growing? Consider any ‘news-worthy’ topics you can prepare a digital PR campaign for and get it ready to launch before the SPE Offshore Europe event, so it runs throughout the duration. 

This will help you to capitalise on your own site’s organic traffic and SEO rankings, promote through special papers and digital publications related to the event, and boost your presence on social media by shouting about the news. 

All these digital marketing tactics will create a much bigger ‘buzz’ for your company than simply attending the event, using old-school flyers, or even investing in a flashy digital display (which likely won’t see the light of day again). Using digital marketing methods will get more people to take notice and build brand recognition for your business. 

Do you need help building that buzz for your brand? If you want better returns from exhibiting at trade events, get in touch with BrandHouzz today to get noticed online by the right people.