savvy marketer’s playbook to event marketing success · 2019-10-24 · foreword this event...
TRANSCRIPT
SAVVY MARKETER’SPLAYBOOK TOEVENT MARKETINGSUCCESS
EVENT MARKETING GUIDEEvent marketers need a new guide that enhances brand
connections, create brand experience and successful
series of brand gestures. This guide provides guiding
principles that will help answer those tough questions,
provide strategic direction and what B2B event
marketing means to your business.
Regalix © Savvy Marketer’s Playbook to Event Marketing Success
FOREWORDThis event marketing playbook is a guide to developing
a thriving business in this rapidly growing digital industry.
Technological innovations have led event marketing beyond
traditional tactics to methods that are more creative and far
more effective. The ever evolving digital channel has opened
up a world of new possibilities, and the key to success
is identifying areas to work and how to work them. Event
Marketers in all brand categories need to create a marketing
plan that will connect with the target audience, whether they
are live events or online events. An event marketer needs
to ensure that brand experiences reach the intended target
audience. They are no longer just mere target audience for
your marketing plans and consumers of your product or
service. They are your brand ambassadors, recommender’s,
co-innovators, partners and brand advocates. As a result,
event marketing messages have become a conversation
among millions and brands need to make sure they
collaborate with all facets of marketing goals
Regalix © Savvy Marketer’s Playbook to Event Marketing Success
1. The Event Industry
2. Create a Solid Event Strategy
3. SMART Objectives for Events
4. Smart Ways to Boost Your Events:
5. The Event Page
6. Pre-Event Email
7. Pre-Event Social Activity
8. Event Blog Posts & Media Webcasts
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Putting Social Media to Work
11. The Digital Event Value Chain
12. Measuring the effectiveness of the event
13. Create Meaningful Brand Experiences
14. Risk Assessment
15. Conclusion
SECTION
Regalix © Savvy Marketer’s Playbook to Event Marketing Success
THE EVENTINDUSTRY1
(On an average, marketers spend about 30% of their marketing budget on
events ( Source: Forrester), which is a sizable amount. Events provide a unique
opportunity for lead generation, branding, customer and prospect engagement,
and educating attendees. There are not many other tactics in a marketer’s
toolbox that can deliver the same impact as an event. Event Marketing has been
a staple in B2B, where the face-to-face conversation enabled by a corporate
event plays a valuable role in launching and deepening a business relationship.)
B2B perception pendulum swings economic mood. Stakeholder relationships
nurtured through live events are more valuable than ever. B2B net sales in the
coming year will continue to be heavily influenced by live events that offer direct
customer connection and cement relationships as trusted advisors. . One could
call it event marketing, live marketing, experiential marketing or any other sobriquet
and we live in this new world where we are building technological overlay to real-
world places for e.g using QR codes to market your business—all with the motive
of educating and engaging your target audience.
Marketers find themselves facing planning phases where volatility is the mainstay
and respond now is the daily executive battle cry. We are under pressure to
pinpoint priorities and contain spending while still delivering an increase in revenue.
While prudent cost containment is at the core of any marketing plan, one needs
to also engage directly with the target group meaningfully. If the goal of advancing
the relationship remains at the center of the strategic planning cycle, it is possible
for marketers to take it to the next level. Making deft adjustments in response to
market challenges guided by an understanding of the value behind strategic event
formats is critical to crafting a plan that builds customer relationships and scope
for new avenues.
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How do you promote, plan, and execute your events so that they are flawless and hit all of the right notes. Consider the following aspects when you structuring your marketing plan.
• Reach the right people
• Consider the information they need to know about your event
• Make a decision about understanding its purpose.
Key Points to consider during the planning process:
• Successful planning ensures that an event remains competitive
• It creates ownership of strategies and communicates this to the
organization
• It helps communicate where an organization is at present, where it is
best placed to go in the future, and the strategies and tactics needed
to achieve that position.
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1. Event Name
2. Event Date(Make sure your event does not clash with others)
3. Time(s)
4. Location
5. Background (Is it a one-off or Regular occurrence?
What is the focus of the event?
6. Event Description
7. Objectives (Identify the objectives of your event. Objectives should be measurable)
8. Target Audience (Demographic and Psychographic characteristic)
9. Branding (Identify the features that make your event unique)
10. Strategies (Identify strategies that will be used to achieve the event objectives)
11. Budget (Develop a marketing and promotion budget for your event)
12. Medium (Identify mediums through which you plan to
promote your event)
13. Identify how you plan to measuring the effectiveness of the event
14. Tools used to measure the success of the event
THE MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE
CREATE A SOLID EVENT STRATEGY
The event will have to be tied to a strong concept and purpose. Identify an
opportunity and assess the various risk factors associated with its successful
delivery. A large part of the planning process is determining your event goals
and strategy.
• If it’s a unique event or if it’s duplicating an existing event.
• Determine which audience(s) the event will appeal to; select methods and channels for reaching those audiences
• Identify the gap in the market and detail out how the event will bridge this gap
• Overall demand that the event will generate
• Is it financially viable
• Will it have potential for growth
• Detail out the demographics and psychographics of the target group for the event
• Look and feel of the event
• Basis the look and feel, brand tone and manner decide the location of the event
2
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SMART OBJECTIVES FOR EVENTS
Specific to the brand’s marketing objectives
Measuring performance during stages of your event
Achievable or Agreed by the stakeholders in the organization
Realistic or Relevant to the brand tone and manner
Tracking progress of event activities
Integrating events into your marketing strategy
Budget
3
The idea of integrating marketing activities and channels is to compile a
holistic marketing strategy that takes into account the various ways in which
your intended audience receives your message. From here, it’s important to
map out the relevant activity – e.g. a mix of PR, social media, email, online and
offline events – and material to guide the buyer through the buying cycle in as
linear route as possible. At the same time make the cost of sale as optimized
as possible to make the process formulaic too. The great thing about including
an online event in your strategy is that it is cost effective, can involve one-to-
many, be recorded and reused, shared via social media, included in an email
campaign and, when added to your website, increase SEO focus. Importantly,
events help show a degree of investment from the prospect, are a great basis
of pre-qualification and should be integrated into your marketing strategy.
Once you have your goals outlined, you need to consider how much it will cost
to accomplish those goals. Make a checklist and start developing an overall
price tag.
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Plan your event ROI
Shift to Participation Marketing
Measurement criteria for different stages of your event
One has to plan for the ROI from the beginning. Because events can result in
numerous outcomes, you will likely need to measure and improve. This very
fact can make it tricky to measure the ROI of events since they serve multiple
purposes such as lead generation, pipeline acceleration, deepening customer
relationships, etc. Clearly define goals you are trying to achieve and what
should you optimize for.
Events are truly multi-dimensional. Customer interest in events declines when
the purpose of attending is lost. Customers no longer need brands to deliver
product information given the mass proliferation of information available online.
Marketers that drift away from events tend to be those locked in the traditional
one-way conversation of expert opinion. Take a campaign-driven approach to
your digital events and layer in a diversity of online tactics such as webinars,
videos, live chat and virtual sales rooms. The hub of your digital event strategy
is always a compelling campaign site that allows you to add new content
throughout the event lifecycle. This website becomes the digital destination for
your event strategy and creates high value content that can blend into broader
marketing efforts. It is of vital importance that content created for digital events
have suitable production standards to engage the audience.
Measure pre-event activity
• Number of registrations
• Demographics of registrants
Post-event measurable
• Further engagement potential
• Enquiries
The amount of data could be overwhelming. Establish early in the proceedings
the point at which you regard your objectives achieved and the event a
success.
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SMART WAYS TO BOOST YOUR EVENTS4
• Facilitate user defined content creation and publishing
• Make sharing and peer collaboration simple
• Create a brand experience that is consistent with your live events
• Entertain and inform with rich multimedia digital content
• Harness online capture tools to create advanced customer
intelligence
• Invest in production values, particularly video & audio quality
• Redefine how you measure digital events to include social media
mentions/linkage stats
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THE EVENTPAGE 5
The foundation of all the promotion efforts is the event page or website. The
page or website specific to the event should have all details pertaining to the
event and the information should be presented in a format that is persuasive
e.g, inforgraphics, contest etc.
1. Description: Communicate the topic, time, place and target audience
clearly. Include specific benefits for each type of attendee. Make it brief. Use
an endorsements when possible, such as a quote from stakeholders who
have attended the previous event if need be.
2. Pre-Event Content: Tangible content leading up to and/or during the
event for event attendees as a takeaway from the event (this could be videos,
whitepaper, case study or just a summary of the event.) Done right, this can
add to the buzz leading up to the event. Content is about capturing great
memories!
3. Event Speakers: Great speakers draw crowds! Get an industry expert
to resonate the objective of your event and the requirements of your target
audience.
4. Videos: Create simple video interviews of the speakers and post them on
your event page. These can be produced using Google Hangouts or Skype.
5. Prominent “register now” button: A clear call-to-action copy is a must on
your event page which will get the user to take the intended action.
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PRE-EVENT EMAIL6
Create a list and email marketing will be your best channel. Use these event
email marketing guidelines:
1. Subject line: Subject lines that inspire awe, anger, or anxiety lead to
higher open rates. Try a subject line such as ‘What you would miss if you
don’t attend this event’
2. Timing: Consider sending an email on Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday.
Since few companies do it, open and click through rates may be higher.
Anticipate when they are likely to feel less stressed out and more willing to
commit a few hours to your event. They may be in a social mood and even
invite a friend.
3. Image Thumbnail: Show a clickable image of a speaker in the email.
It will help improve clickthrough rates.
4. Social proof: Use positive feedback from stakeholders who previously
attended your event / Mention credentials of your speakers. Use them as
quotes in your emails.
5. Frequency: Send out an emailer every week for a month. You can choose
to announce the speaker lineup, topic and announce early-bird registration
rewards.
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PRE-EVENT SOCIAL ACTIVITY7
Events are social occasions. Here’s how to promote the event with social media.
• Registration opens
• Early-bird registrations
• “ X days until the event!”
• Time and Venue
• Thank your partners
• Mention speakers and their credentials
• Mention registrants
• Testimonial quotes about a speaker
1) Hashtag: Pick an event hashtag that’s unique to your event. You’re going
to always use this hashtag in every tweet and post.
2). Links in social media bios: Usually your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
bios will link to your website. But when you’re promoting a big event,
consider changing these links so they send visitors directly to the event
page.
3). Find relevant audience: Find your target audience . Mention them in
tweets about the event.
4).Tweeting: Tweet early and often. Here’s a list you can consider
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5) Follow people: Follow an expert / target audience in the space, you
might get their attention and they may notice the event. It’s best to follow
people when you have a compelling event promotion tweet at the top of
your stream.
6). Post the event on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+: Mention
speakers, encouraging them to share it with their network by running
contests, persuade the audience to attend / recommend the event by giving
them a gratification.
7) Thank you page: On the thank you page after registration process, offer
to let them share the event on social media.
8) Cross streams: If you find that you’re getting traction on one social
network move the conversation around. If someone shares something
on Facebook, thank them on Twitter. If someone mentions the event on
Google+, say hi to them on LinkedIn.
As you can see, we’re recommending a lot social media activity, taking
advantage of any excuse to connect, mention, post, tweet and link.
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EVENT BLOG POSTS & MEDIA WEBCASTS8
1) Write a pre-event blog post: Could be an interview with one or more of
the speakers.
2) Invite speakers to write guest posts: Speakers will recognize that this is
time consuming; Persuade them and mention that there are SEO and social
media benefits to guest blogging. Encourage them to share that content
with their networks.
Submit to Media Websites
1) Submit to local media outlets: Search for event calendars on Google
in your city.
2). Submit to industry associations: If the event is relevant to their
audience, ask if they will accept, post or promote events by letting them
know that this help improve the audience’s learning curve.
3) Let the press know: There are likely journalists who cover local events.
Contact them with an invite or offer of a relevant article. This could be an
interview with a speaker or a guest blog post from you for their website.
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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION9
1) Target a keyword: Choose a relevant a keyword. The target keyword
should combine the event topic, the word “event,” and the name of your
city.
2) Title tags and headers: Use a title tag and header that include your
target keyword. This helps indicate relevance to Google.
3) Description: A detailed event description which includes the keyword.
Look at SEO checklists available online.
4) Linking: Links are important for search engine rankings, so make sure
to link to the event page from other pages on your site including older blog
posts. This will guide visitors to the page, but also help search engines
know that the page is relevant.
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PUTTING SOCIAL MEDIA TO WORK10
Social media adds value to events by extending their reach beyond the
physical space. However, cutting through the clutter of information and
content in social media is increasingly a concern for relationship centric
event marketers. The solution lies in delivering high quality events that
provide context for the virtual world. Marketers need to create memorable
experiences that people will want to share on sites such as Facebook,
YouTube and other social networking sites.
How to connect with people more effectively:
• The cost of delivering a message today is minimal, explore high-impact and
low-cost publishing platforms
• like WordPress to build your online event presence
• Twitter hashtags and other social sharing linkages are expected for every event
campaign
• Your role shifts from educator to knowledge-facilitators
• Immerse your audience in rich content
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THE DIGITAL EVENT VALUE CHAIN11
Make sure you take a campaign-driven approach to your digital events and
layer in a diversity of online tactics such as webinars, videos, live chat and
virtual sales rooms. The hub of your digital event strategy should always be
a compelling campaign site that allows you to add new content throughout
the event lifecycle. It is vital that content created for digital events have
suitable production standards to engage the audience.
Webinars & Webcast
Virtual Spaces &Places
Leve
l of E
ngge
men
t
Level of Collaboration
Virtual Events
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Digital Events Toolbox:
1. Enable user defined content creation and publishing
2. Make sharing simple
3. Craft brand experiences that is consistent with your live events
4. Educate your audience with digital content
5. Harness online capture tools to create advanced customer intelligence
6. Invest in production values, particularly video & audio quality
7. Redefine how you measure digital events
Try to create an event where you can engage your target audience directly
and educate them about your brand offerings and do so by interacting in
a quality way. A lot of the technologies that are potentially transformative
to events today are essentially invisible. Augmented reality is a great
technology you can use in the live space for project demonstrations.
A couple of years ago it would have felt a lot more awkward, forced,
and gives you a very Matrix /Minority Report feel. Samsung came up
with projection mapping on buildings in Europe. It’s experience in the
public domain that gets attention and really can have the potential to
get the attention online. Sometimes the target audience may just want
to experience the brand before they actually go for the brand offerings.
Events are a great way to do this!
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MEASURING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE EVENT12
The end goal is essentially establishing a yardstick to determine the
performance of your event and the tools to drive decision and action based
on that data. It all comes down to three big questions:
1. Did you achieve what you set out to do?
2. What hard data do you have to prove it?
3. What will you do with that data to improve your performance?
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Process a Marketer Should Follow
Tools should be used judiciously to:
1. Coordinating with sales to define the process and criteria
2. Identifying key management benchmarks
3. Coordinating with sales to define the process and criteria
4. Simplifying metrics so they can be tracked across media
5. Planning your measurement across media
6. Applying process consistently and reviewing it frequently
1. Develop easy-to-use data capture methods that are “BANT” driven
(Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe)
2. Document the incremental revenue opportunity and likelihood to
purchase
3. Utilize technology to engage audiences
4. Ensure lead capture methods are easy and engaging
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CREATE MEANINGFUL BRAND EXPERIENCES13
Brand Team Direction- Focus on authentic experiences- Involve your agency in the strategy- Specify measurable objectives- Set customer talking points- Integrate media, PR and interactive- Commit adequate staff and dollars
Agency Team Execution- Find ways to invest in your clients- Be transparent in planning and execution- Offer scalable, quantitative capabilities- Build a communication strategy- Integrate other functional support and initiatives- Have your employees on site at events
Use the template below to list some of the characteristics / techniques and then
speak to your audience to capture what was working well at that point and what
made the experience extraordinary.
Characteristics / Techniques What Worked What Was
Extraordinary1.
2.
3.
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RISK ASSESSMENT14
Risk is anything with the Potential to cause harm
1. Risk is the likelihood of the hazard causin harm
2.Consider what you can do to minimize the risk
3. Prepare contingency plans to repond if preventive measures fail
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CONCLUSION
CONTRIBUTORS
The fact is, real-life experiences like events
shape opinions and buying preferences
more profoundly than other facets of
marketing. Evens are the driving force
behind the new wave of experiential
marketing which brings customers
face-to-face with your brand to create
memorable experiences. It’s the difference
between telling people about the features
and benefits of your brand offerings and
allowing them to experience these benefits
for themselves.
Krithika Ramamurthy
Joshua Sisodia
Priscilla Selwine
PriyoKumar Singh
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