Last week, South Florida Interactive Marketing Association was honored to host special guest speaker David Añón from eMerge Americas. eMerge Americas is a yearly conference that takes place in Miami, Florida and is where digital marketing meets technological innovation and modern business strategies. Añón is the vice president of marketing for eMerge Americas and shared with South Florida IMA members and guests why and how the event has seen such great success in a short three years.

As Añón explained every facet of eMerge Americas’ integrated marketing strategy, the key takeaways were:

• Measuring the success of an event is not about how many people attended, it is about how many sponsors want to come back again.
• When it comes to brands, events, and business, it is all about how you make yourself appear, how you promote yourself, how you visually market yourself.
• Marketing leading up to events, during events, and post event needs to be a focus.
• “PR is a powerhouse in marketing. PR is underserved because it is amazingly strong”
• In order to market your event or brand in general, you must build out consumer personas. Build out your consumer personas and then cater targeting towards them.
• You must understand what your essence is as a company before you can understand the consumer persona.
• Every audience wants a great experience.

Añón summarized the basics for streamlining event marketing in the digital age:

• Know your audience and who you are hitting; who do you want to focus on?
• Know who you are as a brand.
• Know what you are trying to offer, know your product and how it serves.
• Integrate Omni-channels: digital marketing, PR, content, design.
• Bring it all together in an integrated marketing strategy that has consistency and uniformity.

Overall, when you look at marketing, there’s a difference between art and design. Design has a purpose, there is a function and flow. Integrated approaches to campaigns across departments for small business is dire. It does not matter if you are a PR agency, digital agency, design, everyone should play well together, because at the end of the day, the uniformity that you put across will play into how people perceive your brand. When you deviate, you cause leakage and you want to stay away from that as much as possible.

If you are looking for a marketing networking organization in South Florida to sharpen your digital marketing team or learn valuable marketing tactics for your brand, be sure to check out South Florida IMA’s membership opportunities.