“Management would like us to run a live event every quarter this year.”
“Ok, why? What do they want to achieve?”
“…”
Sound familiar?
Events often seem to represent the glamorous side of marketing. Out in the world, getting face-to-face with an audience that’s increasingly digital, breaking out the branded t-shirts and the cool merch. But they cost a lot more money than an email, and many marketers say they don’t deliver measurable value. So, what’s going wrong?
Not setting a clear objective! Events can serve several different purposes, but never all of them at once. So, take your pick from what you want to accomplish:
Generating Leads
Let’s start with the big daddy. You can absolutely generate new leads through events.
Lead generation events tend to work best when you have something big and new to talk about. We’ve run events to launch Spotler AI, or our Maturity Model. Incremental improvements to our platforms are better suited to an email announcement.
How to measure success with Lead Generation events
The most important metric is what sort of people came. They will need to be budget-holders with a pressing issue that you could solve. Numbers are a secondary metric; remember that at any given moment, only 5% of your entire audience will have both a pressing need and the mandate to deal with it immediately
Generating Demand
Lead generation’s less flashy cousin.
In Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene Schwarz describes customer awareness as coming in 5 distinct stages:
- Unaware
- Problem Aware
- Solution Aware
- Product Aware
- Most Aware
If Lead Generation mostly targets the last 3 stages, Demand Generation covers the first 2. It’s a more educational approach; you’ll be showing your audience that they have a problem but aren’t aware of it (Unaware) or that there is a solution to what seems an unsolvable problem (Problem Aware).
Events that take a Demand Generation approach avoid one of the biggest problems; event guests do not like being “sold to”. The Marketing Meetup (did we mention we sponsor the Guildford event?!) has grown into a global phenomenon on this very principle.
How to measure success with Demand Generation events
Numbers, numbers, numbers.
While Lead Generation needs to aim at organisations with an immediate buying need, Demand Generation can go after your entire market. You’re going for awareness here, positioning yourself to be top-of-mind when they enter a buying mood.
Thought Leadership
From a distance, Thought Leadership can look similar to Demand Generation. In reality, it’s one step further back.
Demand Generation still targets the people who will use your product; in our case marketing managers. Thought Leadership builds up your company’s reputation, so that when a marketing manager goes to the CEO and says, “I want to use Spotler CRM”, the CEO replies “Oh yes, I’m familiar with them. Go for it.” rather than “Who are Spotler?”
How to measure success with Thought Leadership events
This is where it gets tricky.
Thought Leadership has the longest tail of any marketing activity; at my last role before Spotler, I worked for a telecoms reseller who hosted an annual conference where both leads and customers could meet vendors and industry experts, as well as network and meet the team I worked with.
One regular attendee was the Head of IT for a medium-sized hotel chain. He would attend every year, listening attentively to the keynote speakers but never engaging with anyone from sales.
Then, on his 5th straight appearance, he collected his badge, marched up to our CEO and said “I’ve heard enough from you guys at these conferences, I want you to take charge of our new telecoms upgrade.”
That’s an extreme example, but it shows the value of putting in the long-term work. It’s also an example that wouldn’t show up in any marketing metric I can think of; repeat attendance is a good signal, but the lack of conversations would probably lead you to disregard that particular lead.
Customer Re-Engagement
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when digital activities fully overtook offline marketing. In any case, the more of the buying journey that happens online, the more special face-to-face interactions will feel.
There’s also the idea of “conspicuous consumption”; by spending the money necessary to host an event, your audience is primed to think you have something worth the effort.
How to measure success with Customer Re-Engagement events
The best form of success here would be a noticeable drop in your churn rate; you’ve pulled customers whose eyes were starting to wander back from the brink.
You can also judge success by the number and tone of customer interactions. A customer who wasn’t unhappy, but maybe wasn’t making use of everything you have to offer starts doing more advanced things, or adding extra functionality if you’re a wide-ranging software platform like us.
Conclusion
The most common cause of believing that events are a waste of time is being unclear which of these objectives an event was supposed to meet. If you get clear on that right at the start, you’ll put yourself in a much better position to succeed.
Ready to add events to your marketing mix? Grab yourself a demo of Spotler Events and start planning your objectives!
Spotler Events: event registration software
Spotler Events is the tool that handles the complexity of bookings, registration and follow-up all in one place, so you can focus on the content and the people. Take a look with a demo today.
