A Marketer’s Guide to Getting the Maximum Impact from Live Events

There is a chance that your marketing program isn’t taking advantage of live events. Events can be a golden ticket for your marketing program. From attendee interactions to data and analytics, live events are integral parts of the buyer’s journey. They drive awareness, create new leads, and accelerate opportunities. Unfortunately, creating a winning event plan hasn’t always been clear-cut. Even when the right intentions are in place, the impact of live events can be hindered without having the right tools and systems that allow marketers to capture and act on event interactions. The perception around live events needs to change – it’s time to maximize their impact. We’ll show you how in the eBook, A Marketer’s Guide to Getting the Maximum Impact from Live Events.

Are Events Still Relevant in the Digital Age?

24%-40% of marketing program budgets are spent on live events. But marketers approach live events as if they’re offline activities, devaluing their benefits. With the help of event management technology, the impact of live events is easy to prove. Live events pull back the curtain on the wants, needs, and desires of prospects and customers like few other marketing channels can.

What value do live events bring when integrated into the marketing mix?

Great engagement channel: It is easier to capture information when face-to-face.
A way to capture expressed interest: Tracking sessions attended, booth visits, and more gives direct insight into what attendees are interested in.
Accelerate leads: When face-to-face with a prospect, you can identify a problem quickly and propose a solution.

Why is our relationship with events and marketing complicated?

For one, data and insights from events aren’t captured into one easily accessible platform, making the data difficult to gather and analyze. Often, it is wrongly believed that events can’t be easily optimized on a website or across digital channels. This offline mentality speaks to old school events and not the current industry. Finally, planning and executing events can be hard work. Manual processes and tech fragmentation can’t scale, and marketers need automation to be able to scale their opportunities to drive results.

The Event Opportunity

There isn’t one kind of event. The beauty of events is their adaptability in both scale and purpose. They can be small or large, grand or simple, and each can address a specific goal. Events fall into three categories:

Tier 1: Large and/or complex events:

• Large Annual User Conferences
• Trade Shows
• Expos

Tier 2: Mid-sized and/or less complex events

• Workshops
• Trainings
• Award Ceremonies

Tier 3: Smaller and/or simple events

• Roadshows
• Internal Meetings
• Training Programs

Create the Right Mix

Some events help reach new audiences and increase brand awareness, while others accelerate pipeline, build customer loyalty, or in some cases—both. You want to build a mix of events you host and events you attend, each designed to reach and attract new buyers, move them down the funnel to purchase, and engage and maximize lifetime value. Combined, all these events offer thousands of high value touchpoints and interactions with prospects and customers—each one an opportunity to either find new leads, accelerate existing ones, and each one opportunity to get to know a prospect or customer better, helping to see them more clearly and get valuable information that can help your Sales and Marketing teams follow up faster and better.

Maximizing the Value of Your Events

How you capture and use event data is key to how successful your live events program can become. 

There are three elements to best in class live event marketing:

Capturing the right data: Determining the right data to capture for each type of event, and at each stage of event execution
Data consistently captured: Automating data capture across all your events to build a profile of buyer interest
Data that is quickly and intelligently activated: Integrating event data with your CRM and MAP to enable rapid, relevant follow-up

It takes the right tools for the job to capture data at events and then analyze and act on that data. Event tools to consider are:

• Event registration
• Mobile event apps
• Appointment scheduling tools
• Onsite check-in technology
• Session scanning tools
• Lead retrieval tools/beacons
• Feedback surveys

Activating Your Event Data

Without a clear strategy to activate your data, it’s worthless. When looking at your data, you should focus on:

• Integrations with other marketing tech
• Providing a clear full picture for prospects and customers
• Getting hot leads quickly to sales
• Getting warm leads to marketing with enough qualification data to enable relevant nurture streams.
• Enable pipeline and revenue attribution to your events

Don’t Miss Your Opportunity

Capturing a person’s interactions with your company is what you do.  If you didn’t analyze how many people visited your website or how long they stayed, you’d be missing out on easily accessible data that makes a big impact in the long term. By now you can see that your events program demands the same commitment and attention as the other tools in your marketing toolkit. Because of all of the firmographic, demographic, and engagement data, you can capture at events they sit as a wholly unique and dynamic marketing channel. By capturing the signals your attendees are sending you as they attend your event, they’re letting you in on a secret: their interests and purchase intent. Take advantage of live events as a tool in the marketing mix. Maximize your marketing impact by using live events. Want to know more? Read the eBook, A Marketer’s Guide to Getting the Maximum Impact from Live Events.