B2B Marketing: Leveraging events to attract clients

2. Events in the Marketing Mix Events as Top Marketing Activity To Existing Customers** Events as a % of Marketing Budget* *Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIIR), March 2015. **Influitive/Demand Metric Research Corp, October 2014.

3. User Meetings ConferencesTrade Shows What are B2B Marketing Events? 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 3 Product Launch & Training Experiential Events

4. Why is there so much love for events among marketers?  98% say exhibitions deliver unique value over other sales channels* 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 4 *CEIR Young Professional Exhibitor Needs and Preferences Study, April 2015.

5. Achieve multiple sales and marketing objectives in a compressed time period 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 5

6. Events provide a lot of data 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 6

7. Face-to-face interaction 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 7

8. But there’s a catch! 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 8 Event ROI

9. Introducing Event ROI CEOs: How important is it to consider ROI when planning an event?* 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 9 Not Important 17% Somewhat Important 19% Very Important 35% Vitally Important 29% *IML, Event Industry Global Market Research Study, January 2014.

10. Some ROI contributors 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 10 Sales Leads Product or Brand Awareness Sales Closed

11. A word about branding  “Create a connected brand experience”*  Brand advocates spend 2x as much and recommend/share 2-4x your typical customer* 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 11 *DoubleDutch: Why Events Are the Best B2B Marketing Channel in the World, February 2015.

12. Creating Great B2B Marketing Events 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 12 Engagement Event-Tech Follow-up

13. Focus on Engagement 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 13

14. Create Experiences 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 14

15. Embrace Event-Tech 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 15

16. Deliver value 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 16

17. Continue the conversation 2014 - eventuosity, LLC. 17

18. www.eventuosity.com Justin Panzer, Founder & CEO Eventuosity, LLC. 3220 Market Street, Suite 369 Philadelphia, PA 19104 justin.panzer@eventuosity.com @eventuosity eventuosityapp +EventuosityApp /company/eventuosity /user/eventuosity

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As marketers, we are often the front line in bringing clients, prospects and even employees together to achieve key business objectives. Recently, I was asked to speak to an MBA class of marketing students to look more deeply at the role events play in the marketing mix and how they can effectively drive business growth.
If you’re going to add events to your marketing mix, you’re in good company. - Face-to-face exhibitions are the predominant marketing tool for companies that include them in their marketing mix, accounting for more than 40 percent of companies' total marketing budgets. Similarly, though the title of my talk is “attracting” clients, maybe it should be attracting “business” since events are an important consideration in marketing to existing customers as well as finding new ones. In a recent customer marketing study, 61% of those surveyed said events are their top activity for marketing to existing customers.
Let’s remember that there are many different types of events that play a role in B2B marketing. Trade shows and conferences are probably the two we think about most often but there are several others. Those listed here are some of the most common types of events but the list is certainly not comprehensive and these are not all mutually exclusive. Notice that, as I discussed on the previous slide, there are events like training, user conferences, new product launches, and others that are as much about growing business with your current customer base as they are finding new clients.
Recently, the CEIR asked trade show exhibitors why they view participation in events as an important part of their marketing plans. 98% of them said exhibitions deliver unique value over other sales channels. In the following few slides we take a look at what that unique value is.
First, events allow us to achieve multiple sales and marketing objectives at once and in a compressed time period. Think about it. Over the course of even a single-day marketing event you can reach multiple prospective customers, meet partners, demo new products to existing clients, and interact generally with your industry much more easily than if you had to do each separately and from some distance.
And while we’re interacting with all of these different groups in one place, think about just how much data we’re able to collect. Think about some of the ways that we learn about prospects or customers at an event. The most straightforward is just talking to them. But in today’s events landscape there are dozens of other ways to capture data about preferences and behavior including badge scanning, social media interaction, polling, and short range communication technology.
A third reason that events are important to so many marketers is that it gives them the ability to meet one-on-one separately from any formal event programs. According to Jeffrey Cesari of Shimmer Events, “You really do lose important face-to-face interaction of impromptu conversations…over a coffee break.” (via Meeting Professionals International (MPI), 2014) This is why despite advances in virtual meetings, only 3% of marketers say that they’re using them to replace live events entirely. (MPI 2014)
So we’ve got a lot of good reasons to use events. But there is a catch. No conversation about event marketing would be complete without discussing event ROI.
Event production or participation often means a significant financial and time commitment by an organization. Marketers are required to show justification for events with quantitative data that indicates an alignment with company strategy. This may sound fairly straightforward but it’s much easier said than done. In fact, it’s been reported that 59% of event marketers currently have no way to calculate event ROI (Hubspot/Eventbrite, State of Event Marketing, 2014)
When considering event ROI, we can measure the value of participation based on both sales and marketing strategies. But what, specifically, should we be measuring? First, remember that every business is very different and there is no one-size-fits-all method for calculating event ROI. Top objectives typically cited for events on which ROI is measured are: New, qualified sales leads generated – this can be measure in total number or some other scoring system Meeting clients – again, there are numerous ways to measure this like savings on travel, a new sale, etc. Building product and company/brand awareness – this one can be a little tougher but there are metrics like net promoter scores, social shares, etc. that will work in this regard. Obviously, the most common objective is to generate sales. But we also need to make a determination on how to isolate which sales truly are a result of our event. Isolating event-driven sales is a topic for a later time. Honestly, we could spend an entire class on Event ROI. The takeaway for tonight is to set goals and be sure that you have a way to measure against them.
Before we leave the the conversation about event ROI I’d like to spend a minute talking about an important marketing metric that should be included in your ROI calculations – brand awareness. Whatever method you and your other organizational stakeholders choose to measure brand growth, remember that events are an incredibly good way to move the needle. Over 2/3 of event attendees engage in online activity while at the event. So, make your event part of an overall connected brand experience and you’ll find that you’re creating brand advocates. Brand advocates are people that find value from their interaction with you and ultimately do a good portion of your marketing work for you by sharing with others.
So if you know what your goals are and you know that events are a good way to achieve them, what are some of the things that to think about when actually putting an event together? The final section of my presentation will cover some of the things that are key to event success.
Be active at your events and encourage your attendees to be active as well. Not only will it make the attendees feel that they got more out of your event, you’ll also capture a lot of data about preferences and behaviors that can aid in your marketing and sales efforts. Generating leads is great, but generating qualified leads based on observed behaviors will dramatically improve the close rate after your event.
Einstein said that “Play is the highest form of research.” A great way to drive engagement is to use experiential marketing in your events. Experiential marketing is the inclusion of interactive activities that drive immersion. Keep in mind that your prospects are attempting to learn about your company and your products. Let them interact in some way with them to get the most out of their time. Again, if you’re paying attention and have the right tools in place you’ll gain an incredible amount of data that will help your marketing and sales efforts later.
I just mentioned having the right tools in place. This is a perfect time to mention event technology. Event-tech is a pretty broad area but it’s one of the hottest topics of conversation among event marketers today. The use of technologies like iBeacons, which I’m showing here, not only allows you to share and collect data, but it also gets your customers using their own devices to do your marketing for you.
Which leads to this. Attendees at your events need to get as much value out of them as you do. Their time and budget are limited so provide them with content and interactions that are going to be of value to them. Focus on quality of interactions as opposed to quanity – for both you and your attendees. Some ideas to keep in mind: Have your conference presenters serve as facilitators instead of lecturers. Don’t be overly “sales-y” in your interactions but make the value of your products or services obvious by responding to customers’ concerns Share content succinctly that addresses real customer topics. Think about the way we consume information – in Tweet-sized bites. This can be as effective offline as online. This ties back to our early conversation about brand advocates. If your attendees feel you’re delivering value then you won’t have to shout. They’ll do it for you.
I saw a great quote recently that I think is a perfect way to end here. The quote is from Ricardo Molina of the BrightBull marketing agency. Mr. Molina was asked about event trends for 2015. He says: “I see a big challenge: The current skillset of an event marketer. It has become very apparent that knowing how to market an event is not, and will not be sufficient for event marketers… Those that want to excel will need to have a strong grasp of CRM systems, and Marketing Automation systems and learning how these work and integrate.” Remember that nurtured leads are much more likely to convert to sales than non-nurtured leads. The event itself is only one piece of event marketing equation. You must continue to interact with prospective clients and support the sales organization between events if you truly want to maximize ROI. And while this quote speaks specifically about Marketing Automation and CRM, I would add that event marketers need to familiarize themselves with many different event technologies to achieve event marketing success.

B2B Marketing: Leveraging events to attract clients

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B2B Marketing: Leveraging events to attract clients

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