HOW TO: Become a successful event marketer

Face-to-face events can be extremely lucrative with the right planning, execution

and a sharp focus on ROI

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. So what are the other benefits of event marketing and how are they positioned among your marketing deliverables? It 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 strong market awareness for your offering with key decision makers in your target market. It positions the brand: Event marketing gives you a chance to build and develop a thought-leadership position within your target market, positioning you as experts in your field. It creates interest: 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. It 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, and it creates a community-based database to leverage future marketing activities. It generates 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 pain points.

It cleans your database: The event process ensures that you develop a clean database of key decision makers in your target market. Top tips to stay on target At the start of your event marketing, ensure you have some clear metrics in place to enable you to track success – this could include the target number of prospects or prospect companies to attend or the target number of sales meetings to result from the activity. 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? 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 to avoid last-minute surprises. 3. Try reissuing the invitation to any non-openers. 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. Demonstrate events ROI An integrated marketing programme will ensure leads are nurtured through the buying cycle – hence why ad hoc activity should be avoided. By setting your objectives at the outset of the programme with measureable outputs, you will be able to assess its success. 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 any follow-up activity. When relaying results to the board, alongside the target sales meetings for the programme versus the actual meetings, also include leads that need further nurturing and qualified leads that are at the earliest stage of development. This will show the

marketing funnel that 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. McDonald Butler is a B2B Marketing Agency that specialises in technology marketing. For more information visit http://www.mcdonaldbutler.com