Digital marketing takes place in the virtual realm of smartphones and computers, of Facebook and Google. But unless you are delivering an entirely digital product such as an eBook or song file, at some point the virtual has to connect to the physical. Food orders need to be delivered and eaten. Clothes must be purchased and worn. And in the case of events, people need to show up at a specific place and time.

One of the trickier puzzles in digital marketing is how to use online tools to get people to take action in the real world. It’s one thing to get someone to enter their email address in an inquiry form, or to download and install an app–these actions take seconds and cost nothing. But it’s another thing entirely to convince someone to remember the date, time and location of an event, and to then get up off their couch, get in a car (or on a motorbike), and go there.

There are of course marketing tricks that can be used to get people to attend events (giveaways, lucky draws, swag bags, famous influencers, etc.), but these gimmicks won’t help to bring in your target customers, they will simply help you get warm bodies in a room and make it appear full. It takes much more than gimmicks to ensure that your ballroom isn’t only full, but that it’s full of the right people.

That was a challenge Fourdozen faced when working with The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) to help it market study abroad fairs in Vietnam. Read on to see how we used digital marketing to produce packed events, filled with relevant attendees.

The event should deliver real value

The success of your digital marketing efforts depends in large part on the concept behind the event itself. The event, especially if there is an entrance fee, needs to provide something of real value to your audience that they can’t find elsewhere. That value usually comes in the form of information or entertainment (coincidentally two of the pillars of good content marketing). Make sure that when you plan your event, you stay laser focused on the unique value that the event provides to your audience.

TABS’s study abroad fairs provided a unique value to its target audience of wealthy Vietnamese parents with teen children: the fairs offered families an opportunity to meet directly with a large group of admissions officials who traveled thousands of miles to Vietnam, and thus the chance for families to get information and make connections they couldn’t otherwise find elsewhere.

Collect contact information and use it to follow up

Trust but verify. People who register online for free events may have been excited when they entered their email and phone number into the sign up form. But, three weeks later when the date has come, they will have likely forgotten or have found something else to do. It’s crucial to collect valid contact information and to use that information to remind your registrants about the event in a systematic, coherent way.

Working with TABS’, we focused on collecting the two most crucial pieces of consumer information in Vietnam: email addresses, and more important, phone numbers. We then planned our multi-channel followup calendar in a strategic way to release emails and text messages on specific days with reminders and additional information, culminating in direct phone calls on the day of the event.

Messaging should be clear and concise

Like any product, events should be branded in a consistent manner that appears coherent to the casual attendee. From advertisement, to email to signage in the ballroom itself and the uniforms that staff wear, everything should be working together. By creating coherence between your event and your marketing campaign, you create a memorable experience that can more easily be replicated in the future. Colors and names should be chosen carefully to create something unique and memorable.

With TABS, we helped select an event theme, geared around an airplane, and then used a bold, blue color to anchor both the marketing campaign and the physical materials. We created an easily searchable and instantly memorable event name so that when guests arrived, they enjoyed a seamless experience that started with an advertisement and ended with a conversation with an admissions official.

Digital can do a lot, but it can’t do everything

The challenges of digital marketing for events serve as an excellent reminder for other projects you might work on, which is that you should never get your head too far down the rabbit hole of the digital world to imagine that it can do everything. Campaigns need to be anchored in reality. Bear that in mind, and don’t neglect the offline components of your projects, including the people involved.