There’s no channel quite as impactful as talking to your clients and prospects face to face. And there’s no channel mix quite as effective as one that includes in-person events.
Events consolidate key messages and cement relationships. They can build a lot of goodwill and help your brand stick in the mind for far longer than a blog or a social post.
But they are hard to get right. They take a lot of time, effort and attention from multiple stakeholders, and depending on your ambition and competition, can cost a lot of money too.
We’ve helped clients run various kinds of events as part of a commercial strategy, sometimes as the culmination of long-term marketing campaigns, others as just one interaction of many across the buyer journey. In this article, we draw upon our experience of demand generation, ABM and event planning and management to show you how to bring them all together and turbocharge your pipeline growth.
Why should you run an event?
First things first. Why should you incorporate events into your marketing strategy at all?
Most business people, especially sales and client teams, understand the value of personal connections for building relationships. The shock of the Covid lockdowns proved that there is no substitute for a face-to-face meeting or the buzz of a live event for creating new contacts or strengthening existing connections.
Events in general are an excellent way to build relationships, it’s the little interactions over coffee face-to-face, at networking drinks or in a breakout space, while in a learning environment away from the usual day-to-day work. This is when people are more open to new experiences and opportunities and more likely to pay attention to what you have to say (and to sell).
If you are trying to expand your share of wallet with your clients, events can help them understand that you can do more than what they are currently paying you for. And if you are trying to close deals, an event is an excellent way to showcase your people, technology and methodologies in one place. Live product demos with your product and solutions owners offer a personalised space for instant feedback and Q&As that a blog post or a video simply can’t.
Events as a standalone campaign are effective at holding attention and increasing recall of your brand name, but the real value comes when events are combined with your long term marketing strategy, and results are turbocharged.
Taking the long-term view
Many marketing teams have had their hands burned after running an expensive event that doesn’t get the ROI they were expecting, and they lose out on a bigger budget for the next year.
In our experience, success comes when you view an event as part of a wider strategy.
"Event marketing” is often seen as a lead generation tool – collecting emails at your booth to send spam to later. But the ROI is lacking. In fact, HubSpot let slip in 2023 that they no longer pay to attend events because they just don’t see the ROI in them; they only host their own.
At Winshaw, we find proprietary events are most effective as a demand creation channel. When viewed as part of a wider content marketing strategy, companies can keep the messaging to their ideal customer profile (ICP) consistent and sustained over a longer period of time.
Event hosting vs. sponsoring
There are some advantages to letting another company do the heavy lifting on event planning and management, with the risk of low attendance on them. If you are solely looking for lead generation, you can make use of someone else’s existing network and marketing channels, and it’s convenient to have them all in one place to network. Plus, you can put your senior employees in the spotlight and build their profile.
However, you will also go without control over branding, messaging and audience. A large part of anyone else’s network will not match your ICP, and your message will be diluted by other sponsor speakers' agendas. It’s harder to measure ROI, and in the end, attendees will associate the success of the event with the host, not the sponsors.
For us, while sponsoring another event is cheaper and less hassle, we see event hosting as far more effective for brand awareness, client relationship building and demand generation.
What kind of events work for which goals?
There are pros and cons to different kinds of in-person and virtual events. If you are looking to build demand or brand awareness, the more visibility you can shed on insights from the event, the better. Converting them into evergreen content will boost your demand generation campaigns and maximise the value of the event you’ve spent so much effort putting together.
Conferences: These large gatherings are good for educating your target market, improving brand awareness and raising your senior leaders’ personal brands.
Seminars: More focused educational sessions on specific topics, usually for half a day, are good for deep-diving into issues that really matter to your community.
Webinars: Online seminars. These are a low cost option to reach many people and are easy to record so live attendance is not as important as in-person events. Recordings can be chopped up into more content to extend reach after the live stream.
Workshops: Hands-on interactive sessions where attendees work through exercises. Builds skills through collaboration.
Roundtables: Small group discussions around a theme. Encourages participation. Relationship focus.
Open Houses: On-site visits to company facilities. Shows capabilities and culture. Personal touch.
Trade Shows: Large multi-company exhibitions. Wider brand exposure. Lead collection.
Lunch & Learns: Short educational sessions over a meal. Convenient format. Casual relationship building. Can also be a breakfast before work.
Social Events: Networking receptions without formal agenda. Relationship and goodwill focus.
Activity Based: Some networking works best when there is a distraction. A day at a sports event or out of town can put people at ease, form bonds and leave them more open to opportunities.
How to build and run your event
Now you’ve decided to run a proprietary event, here are some steps you can take to ensure that you are laser focused on ROI.
1. Choose your audience
What’s great about running your own event is the control you have over the target audience. You only invite people from your ICP, so all messaging and content at the event is highly relevant.
Events are not just about net new opportunities. Invite existing clients to show them what else you can do. When you think about the pareto principle, that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clients, focus on the profile of that 20% when choosing your audience attributes.
2. Book your dates and venue in advance
It might seem obvious, but waiting too long to get your venue booked or choosing a date without thinking about your audience can scupper your event before it even begins.
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B2B buyer diaries get booked up, so a save-the-date should be with them at least 3 months in advance.
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Avoid summer holidays, short weeks after bank holidays, and Christmas party season.
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Research high-profile events that your target attendees will also be interested in, and find a date that doesn’t clash.
3. Produce content that speaks to ICP pain points
The content and format of your event should mirror that of your demand generation content strategy, addressing your ICP’s specific pain points. If you don’t already know their pain points, speak to sales, client relations and customer success teams – they talk to prospects and clients all day. And if you’re coming from a standing start, then it’s time to get some customer research underway. Interview existing clients or run surveys. Dig into annual reports to find out what they talk about most. Is there any new legislation coming up that will impact their business or operations? What economic or market upheavals have been in the news lately?
No marketing strategy can start without customer research, let alone events.
Once you understand your audience, then you can create the content that resonates with them and their pain points.
4. Deploy sales teams for the personal touch
How you deliver your articles, videos, podcasts to your intended audience is key to the ROI of your strategy. You don’t want to waste ad spend on too wide or too narrow a net.
This is where your sales and client teams can add a lot of value but it’s critical they are bought-in from the beginning; they will need to prioritise their time to help you when you need it.
It’s much easier and cheaper for them to invite their black books of prospects and clients personally than it is to market an event to them through your cold broadcast channels.
Sales should jump at the chance to get their clients’ attention. They can use this time to organise quarterly review meetings with key accounts, catch ups with prospects and solutions demos on the sidelines of the event.
Events are a golden opportunity for sales and marketing to align and help each other.
5. Promote the content to the right people
Now you have your ICP, and a refined target audience, you have the right basis to promote your content. Match your audience in your social channels (usually LinkedIn) and run through your email lists to ensure you can reach the right people.
Tease the event with a regular cadence of social posts and emails, with the same messaging across channels that speaks to the same themes of the event. Add sign-up CTAs to relevant content on your website. Intersperse this thematic content with event-related announcements such as speaker profiles and side activities.
Even though your client teams are inviting existing contacts, it’s still worth targeting their wider companies. There will be more opportunities within large multinationals to expand your share of wallet and into departments who may not have heard of you but still need your services.
6. Design the event content
This is about balance. The content needs to be educational and relevant to your audience, but it can’t be all about how you can help them, or else it will feel like a sales pitch. So, balance out the case studies with sessions on market and industry insights.
That said, case studies of your work are excellent, because they show capabilities in a story. But it’s critical that they come from your client’s voice, not yours. Instead of “how we helped them” it should be “how they helped us”.
7. Align speakers with the message
Keep in touch with your speakers, and ensure they and the host are briefed well. A good moderator is worth every penny to keep the audience energised and engaged, and to keep panellists on the right message.
Keep slide decks to a minimum, ideally only imagery that backs up what they are saying. The last thing you want is a 30 page powerpoint full of bullet points.
8. Get the right employees in
As well as your client relations and sales teams to greet their clients and prospects, you will want other boots on the ground to help the day run smoothly.
There should always be representatives of your leadership team, both as speakers and attendees, to help answer prospect questions and give them an idea of the culture of the business.
9. Add some sparkle
People go to events all the time, and after a while they all blend into one. So you have to make sure yours will stay in their memory. This can be as simple as choosing an interesting venue, giving away branded freebies to take home, putting on a good lunch, and hosting a fun afterparty.
10. Convert event into evergreen content
One of the reasons people are put off by hosting events is the amount of time, effort and budget spent for one or two days, only for it to end once the last speaker has left the lectern. By recording audio and/or video, you will have endless opportunities to recycle content. Use bitesize clips to post on social and to embed in blog articles or emails.
If you choose to keep the event as a standalone campaign, it should be managed with a “tease, launch, sustain” model:
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Build up to the event with content.
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Harvest content from the event.
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Repurpose the content into different formats for multiple channels for a period of time after the event.
With more ambition, you can even turn a conference webpage into an online content destination, updated annually, with specialised research reports that align with the purpose of the event.
Why events have to live on, and how to do it
It can be argued that the post-event weeks and months are the most important part of it. With your evergreen content created, and goodwill earned from a successful day, it’s time to strike while the iron is hot. With the mindset that events are one moment in a long journey. Contacts are somewhere in the funnel, it’s up to you to nurture them for months afterwards with relevant content that plays upon the themes of the event and the pain points of your audience.
So, now is the time to capture and interpret those insights surfaced at the event that back up your messaging, and distribute them as content to attendees and those who missed out.
Turn your event webpage into a hub for all event-related content, as well as articles created from insights. If you are consistent with your key messages over the following months, there will be ample opportunities to cite insights from the event in future content.
Finally, disseminate photos, videos and write ups internally. It’s often overlooked, but it’s important to give employees a sense of your brand and capabilities, especially those companies with remote/hybrid working.
