You’re in event planning mode. What should we give away? What’s the entertainment? Should we have a specialty cocktail…? All questions that fly in the excitement of creativity and planning. But, press the pause button and take a step back; there will be plenty of time to consider these fine and ‘fun’ details. It’s time to do the heavier lifting to set your team up for success, ensuring ROI and repeat funding for next year.
Companies often subscribe to a one-size-fits-all approach to setting event KPIs, often hyper-focusing on things like, number of attendees, booth visits and leads generated. While these measures offer some gauge of worthiness, they can be limiting as comprehensive indicators of true effectiveness - mainly in cases of lack of alignment with sales and flawed attribution modeling. Events come with an expensive price tag, and with that, expectation of pipeline creation and acceleration as ultimate demonstrators of success. Developing a goal-setting discipline anchored by these absolute outputs will drive focus and organizational alignment. That said, expanding your data set to capture measures tailored to each event will establish necessary linkages to marketing objectives, such as thought leadership and demand gen, and allow you to compare performance in the context of your overall event strategy, as discussed in my last blog.
Whoever said, “the devil is in the details,” must have managed events. Cross-functional dependencies make events some of the most challenging initiatives to pull off, and good project management practices go a long way to affect positive outcomes. Start first by identifying key stakeholders, outlining objectives, and creating a working group to plan and execute the event. Next, develop your timeline and program plan with specifics like the event KPIs and content calendar, and distribute to all stakeholders. As the event draws closer, the planning file will also house such executional documents as:
What’s the one thing all events have in common? The desired outcome of revenue production by way of relationships enriched through meetings held at the show. Job one is to get customers and prospects to your booth, conference, session or breakfast, and more importantly, gain commitment for that coveted follow-up meeting or demo.
Like any great marketing campaign, effective event marketing relies on great content. Save-the-dates, keynote teasers, press announcement(s), high-value drawing promos, research studies, booth talktracks, live podcasts, and post-event nurture content are all examples of golden opportunities to reinforce your brand and market position in the context of featured themes. An event-specific message map will help document content themes and serve as reference for all stakeholders. Make sure to also factor product releases, launches and relevant third-party coverage when building your content plan and cadence of communications.
You did it, you pulled off a great event. So, now what? Get those new contacts into your CRM system, once screened for ICP alignment. And brainstorm ways to repurpose any and all compelling content created for and generated at the event. Task account owners with personalized follow-up. Tee up nurture streams. Session video or presentation materials make for great webinars and translate well for SDR play development, as does creative, personalized direct mail campaign for highly qualified targets. All of the above tactics are opportunities to tie in the themes from the event with your value proposition and gives recipients the opportunity to focus on your product, away from the distractions of the show.
Finally, schedule a debrief with event stakeholders to report on the KPIs and discuss feedback. Log the feedback in your program plan - you’ll be looking for it next year and be happy to have the historical record.
While the greatest of the marketing program budget line items, no other program offers meaningful interactions with your customers and prospects like events. Create an event plan that sets the stage for fruitful exchange of information, allows your team to shine, and your audiences to take note of your product and organization. This is the real-deal path to event ROI.