Driving successful event marketing strategies was a key theme at Cvent CONNECT 2018. During “The State of B2B Event Marketing 2018: A Benchmark Research Report” breakout session, Matt Heinz, principal of Heinz Marketing, provided a roadmap for optimizing B2B event marketing.
Challenges to Reaching Our Customers
- Busier than ever: We don’t always have time to do the things we want to do, and attending an event is another to-do.
- Self-educated: Content can be found online
- Skeptical, distrustful and jaded: Attendees are skeptical of event content, and sometimes view it as thinly veiled sales pitches.
Cutting Through the Noise
- Email remains the "workhorse": Email marketing generates the best results pre/during/post event. Be cautious of overusing this channel, as prospects will simply unsubscribe.
- Optimize Technology: The mix of technology used for events is overwhelming.
- Uncertainty about ROI: 25-50% of marketing budgets is spent on events, but proving how events drive revenue is difficult.
- Marketing to sales disconnect: 50% of marketers say that the marketing to sales hand-off is ineffective, making it harder to close sales.
Successful Event Marketing Strategies
Expand the Marketing Mix
The more channels you use to reach potential customers, the more likely you are to succeed. And perhaps even more important than the number of channels you use is your ability to integrate your channels into a unified approach.Stay Connected Mid-Event
Once you’ve connected with event attendees, continue to share helpful information with them while they’re still at the conference. This could be in the form of additional content, offers or mobile push notifications.Leverage Content
Events create a large volume of content. Repurpose your content by sharing event highlights or summaries with prospects post-event and promoting key messages through social to widen the universe of recipients and broaden message impact.Track All Events for ROI
A successful sale cannot be tracked to a singular event. A favorable customer outcome is part of a larger customer journey that blends personalized outreach, informative event content, and sales interactions across multiple events and marketing channels.Understand the Correlation
It’s important to find the correlation between how your prospects responded across the various marketing channels and how they later engaged from a revenue standpoint. Knowing what worked and what didn’t will provide useful guidance in shaping a results-driven multichannel marketing approach. For more information on the Heinz Marketing session at Cvent CONNECT, visit here.
