There has been much speculation over the years regarding the longevity that trade shows and face-to-face events will have in future marketing programmes due to reduced corporate spend on such activities, as well as increasing popularity of online tools such as webinars and ‘virtual’ events. The truth is that face-to-face events are more essential than ever as they take your prospects from an awareness stage through to interest – and hopefully onto a sale…
There’s an old saying in business that people buy from people. With this in mind, getting relevant people together as often as possible to talk face-to-face and develop relationships can have a very positive impact on sales. And the focus here is on ‘relevant’. Event marketing is not about getting ‘bums on seats’, it’s about developing the right messaging that will resonate with the required target audience. Event marketing opens up communication with the target audience, the key focus of any sales person within an organisation.
So what are the other benefits of event marketing and how are they positioned among your marketing deliverables?
1. Builds awareness
In the build up to your event, you will send a series of marcomms out to keep your audience interested and updated. This generates and sustains a strong market awareness for your offering with key decision makers in your target market.
2. Brand Positioning
Event marketing gives you a chance to build and develop a thought-leadership position within your target market, positioning you as experts in your market space and an understanding of your audience painpoints so that you can help address these.
3. Creates interest, generates new prospects and leads
Event marketing strengthens existing customer and partner relationships and exploits client extension opportunities. It opens up communication and dialogue with your target audience, generating new leads/contacts from within the target market.
4. Builds a community
This form of marketing provides a platform to build and sustain relationships with both existing customers and prospects via a ‘permission-based’ marketing programme. It also builds and sustains relationships with industry experts/partners that you may collaborate with, as a speaker or contributor, and it creates a community-based database to leverage future marketing activities.
5. Research
The issues/topics for discussion that you design into your agenda, will be researched and then validated with your target audience to help keep you abreast of current market thinking. Responses from your database should be tracked to build a solid picture of interest, areas of current focus and key business ‘painpoints’.
6. Cleans your database
The event process ensures that you develop a clean database of key decision makers in your target market.
Top tips for event marketing
1. We all know that events come in many shapes and sizes and therefore an event should be designed to suit your target audience. For example, an evening function will add an air of informality. This is especially true when organising an event abroad – understand your audience wants and needs
2. Keep your event concise and relevant – attendees need to walk away having learnt something new
3. Keep it part of an integrated programme – ad hoc marketing activity will not bring in the long term results so should be delivered alongside activity such as online newsletters and/or lead generation activity
4. Keep the event small, personal and targeted
Metrics
When putting metrics in place for event marketing, this is wholly dependent on the type and size of event you are organising. At McDonald Butler, we find that breakfast briefings work very well for thought leadership style events. These are small, informal round table discussion groups with facilitator and speaker. Metrics for this style of event include:
– An agreed database of 100-150 target companies with an agreed key decision-making unit of two to three core targets
– Secure senior executives from a minimum of eight target companies to attend the event
– Creates a wider community of ‘interested but unable to attend’ contacts from 10 additional companies who can be leveraged for future events in the marketing programme
– Seek to secure three new business meetings following the event programme
If working in collaboration with a partner, a bigger executive event may work for you or if wanting to give a less formal tone, an evening function may be better suited. Judge your audience and what impression you are trying to get across.
You may have a great response to your event marketing invite but if you are struggling to get the relevant leads signed up, what should you do to address this?
Top tips if you are falling below targets:
1. Find out why numbers are low/response is not good – is it the messaging? The date? The location?
2. If you are an agency, give your client visibility as to what is going on and why. Ensure a status update regularly over this time as last minute surprises are not usually welcome!
3. Try reissuing the invitation to non-opens
4. Ensure you follow up by calling each person on the invite list, detailing more about the event objectives and benefits. This will build up a relationship with them and make them more open to communication.
ROI
An integrated marketing programme will ensure leads are nurtured through the buying cycle – hence why ad hoc activity should be avoided. Combining face-to-face events with email marketing and lead generation, opens a dialogue and builds a trust between you and your prospect.
By setting your objectives at the outset of the programme with measureable outputs, you will be able to assess the success of your programme. Map out how many leads did not know about you at the start of the programme, through to how many clicked through on your email marketing and/or attended an event, through to how many agreed to a sales meeting. You can then review your marketing spend against sales won as a result of the programme, resulting in your ROI figure.
Make sure you focus not only on attendees to your event but also on those who were interested but were unable to attend, or who signed up but then had to drop out. These are key leads too and must be incorporated into your post-event follow up.
Post event, a debrief document should identify who was at the event, what their needs were and whether they were a potential lead. This will give your telemarketing team assistance when following up, as well as tag ownership for follow up.
When relaying results to the Board, ensure you include what the target was for sales meetings at the start of the campaign alongside the actual, detailing when, what and who were involved in the sales meetings. Also include leads which need further nurturing and qualified leads which are at the earliest stage of development. This will show the marketing funnel which represents the sales pipeline of tomorrow. Highlight which current sales leads are opportunities with a value attached to them.
These results can then be clearly shown with percentage conversion rates worked out between each stage (or adapted according to your strategy). This will allow you to predict future results based on future activity.
