Author: Ian McGonnigal

Event marketing can be extremely effective for businesses looking to engage with their target audiences and drive everything form brand awareness, to demand generation, to customer loyalty. Unfortunately, event costs in 2022 were 22% higher than 2019, and are expected to rise an additional 7% in 2023 according to CWT. Rising event costs can quickly eat into your marketing budget and impact your bottom line. In some cases, event marketers take an approach to cost cutting that’s highly tactical and compromises event performance, or worse, arbitrary. Here are six ideas to on how to use event strategy to reduce event costs, while improving ROI.

1. Start with Event Objectives

Before deciding on cost-cutting measures, step back and consider what the purpose(s) of the event is in the first place. Thinking about what you are trying to accomplish will help prioritize which events and elements are mission critical to achieving objectives, and which are nice to have.

2. Know Your Target Audience(s)

Understanding your target audience(s) is critical in reducing event costs. By knowing their preferences and behaviors, you can make informed decisions on which events they are likely to prioritize attendance. Remember, in an economic environment where budgets are held flat, or reduced, attendee companies will cut back on business travel and education budgets as producers are cutting back on the costs of their events. Know their triggers and pain points. Understand which event formats, locations, content, and experiences will resonate with them. By creating a personalized and memorable event experience tied to attendee wants and needs, you can drive focus on the most important brand experiences, increase attendance, and improve the ROI of your events.

3. Review Your Event Portfolio

Examine the entire events calendar. Remembering event objectives, make sure the right events addressing your target audiences in the right regions are included. Look for gaps and overlaps in coverage. Adjust event roles and experiences, combine events where it makes sense, and eliminate events that are less likely to meet objectives. Wherever possible, examine past event performance against objectives to help prioritize actions. Another way to look at it is zero-based planning. If you could only participate in one event this year, which would it be? Why? Slowly include additional events until you’ve built a portfolio that meets objectives, addresses audiences, and fits the event budget.

4. Align Brand Experiences to Event Strategy

When designing everything from the attendee journey, to the event agenda, to sessions and tracks, to expos, content, and brand experiences, make sure everything aligns to your objectives and audience wants and needs. Build a short business case for each and every element of your event. Does it further the strategy? Does it help meet event objectives? Does it address target audience wants and needs? If the answer is yes, great! If the answer is no, adjust or remove the element.

5. Repurpose Content

Events tend to be forcing functions for content development. They are also great places to capture or broker new content. Content could be in the form of in-person, social, or digital elements and can take on many formats like copy, photography, video, keynotes, sessions, etc. By capturing as much of the content as possible, editing, expanding, and repurposing it for other events, social or digital content syndication activities, or even as promotional fodder for future events, you can build a powerful cost avoidance plan to reduce the costs of future content development.

6. Leverage Technology

Technology can be a powerful tool in reducing event costs. Consider leveraging virtual and hybrid event formats to reduce travel and venue costs. Find the right project management tool to improve team productivity. Leverage AI in registration, check in, content development, attendee acquisition, content syndication and everything else. Invest in the right registration tools to automate processes. Use chatbots to engage registrants and attendees. Leverage mobile technologies to enable attendees and reduce on-premise support. Put the right measurement platforms in place to take the guess work out of performance and optimization. There are hundreds of technologies and tools that event planners can use to improve productivity and reduce costs.

Being smart about reducing event spend can not only help meet budget requirements, but also improve the performance of your events. Taking a strategic approach is more about optimizing and maximizing ROI of your event marketing program, than cutting it.

Lastly, you don’t have to go it alone. Connect with peers in the industry, experts, partners, and others in your ecosystem to learn what they’re doing. Also, investing in the right strategic partner to objectively review your program and guide you through the right approach for your specific situation can be worth its weight in gold.

When designing event experiences, understanding your audience is a critical element of an effective event strategy. One of the best ways to do this is by creating a customer persona, also known as an audience persona, buyer persona, or marketing persona. A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on data and insights about your target audience. By creating a customer persona, you can better understand your audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, and tailor experiential marketing efforts accordingly. In B2B event marketing, it’s important to go beyond the typical role and title. “Decision Maker” is not a Persona. “CxO” is not a persona. Event marketers should address their target audiences a human beings; people with multidimensional personalities, diverse interests, thoughts, and emotions.

Here are some best practices for creating an effective customer persona:

1. Start with research: The first step in creating a customer persona is to gather data and insights about your target audience. This can include demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, as well as psychographic information, such as interests, values, and behaviors. You can also examine techno-graphics, or media consumption habits. You can collect this data through surveys, interviews, social media analytics, observations of their environment and behaviors, and other sources. Observe and measure their actions and behaviors at events. Which events do they attend? Why? How to they respond to promotions? Are they networkers, session participants, or exhibition dwellers? How do they typically engage?

According to a study by HubSpot, companies that conduct customer research are 466% more likely to be successful in their marketing efforts. This highlights the importance of starting with research when creating a customer persona.

2. Identify key characteristics: Once you have gathered data about your target audience, you can start to identify key characteristics that define your ideal customer. This can include things like their goals, pain points, purchasing habits, engagement behaviors, and communication preferences. By identifying these characteristics, you can create a more accurate and detailed customer persona.
3. Give your customer persona a name and backstory: To make your customer persona feel more real, give them a name and a backstory. This can include information about their job, family, hobbies, work environment, relationships, and more. By creating a relatable persona, you can better understand their needs and motivations.
4. Use visuals: To bring your customer persona to life, use visuals like photos, videos, or illustrations. This can help you and your team visualize your ideal customer and make them feel more tangible. Be sure to consider their demographics here.
5. Use your persona to inform your event marketing efforts: Once you have created a customer persona, use it to inform your event marketing efforts. Every event brief or experience brief should include high-level persona information. This can help you curate or tailor your messaging, content, agenda, creative, and brand experience to your persona’s preferences and needs. By using your customer persona to guide your experiential marketing strategy, you can increase your chances of reaching and engaging your target audience before, during, and after the event.

Using Personas in Event Marketing and Experiential Marketing

By understanding your event attendees’ preferences and behaviors, you can create a more engaging and memorable event experience.

Here are some more tips for using personas in event marketing and experiential marketing:

1. Identify key segments: Not every attendee needs a persona. When creating personas for event marketing, identify key segments of your target audience, such as industry professionals, or VIPs, analysts, or press and media. By creating personas for each segment, you can tailor your event experience to their specific needs and preferences.
2. Customize your event experience: Once you have identified your key segments, customize your event experience to meet their needs. This can include everything from personalized invitations and outreach, to targeted content, and bespoke interactive experiences that cater to their specific interests and preferences. Don’t forget about post event engagement and content syndication. An executive has different needs than a member of the press.
3. Use data to track engagement: To measure the success of your event marketing efforts, use data to track attendee engagement. This can include everything from registration data, to session attendance, to expo dwell time, to social media engagement, survey responses, and tracking pipeline performance against peer groups based on content consumed. By analyzing this data, you can refine your personas and improve your event marketing strategy over time.

By understanding your audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, you can create more personalized, engaging, and targeted brand experiences and event marketing campaigns. Personas can be used to build more memorable event experiences, and allow you to better connect with your audience and achieve your business, brand, sales, and marketing objectives.

Event Measurement seems to be extremely complicated these days. With so many event technology companies, measurement tools, and event metrics available, it’s no wonder many struggle with finding the right answer. CMOs and marketing executives might be interested in measuring brand impact. PR pros are looking for media coverage analytics. Sales leadership wants to know about demand generation, leads, and pipeline influence. CFOs are concerned about impact to the budget. And event professionals need to understand what worked, and what didn’t across everything from event promotion and audience generation, to: brand experience effectiveness, speaker performance, session and track content, social media engagement, and post-event content syndication impact. Whew!

OK. Take a deep breath. Maybe a few. You OK? Good.

The answer to all of your stress is to simplify your measurement approach. Let’s start with one simple question. “Does measuring events bring you joy?” For me, there’s nothing like the smell of fresh spreadsheets after a rainstorm. Or the beautiful rainbow of colors splashed across a data visualization dashboard. Who am I kidding? Event measurement is tedious and boring. But it is necessary to understand the impact of our work, and to get better at what we do. It is the first step on the path to event enlightenment.

We’re not going to talk about specific event measurement methodologies, processes, or specific event metrics here (that’s for another article). However, here are some foundational principles to help you simplify your approach to event measurement.

Event Measurement Should Be Based on Objectives

Consider your one-to-three objectives for participating in or hosting the event in the first place. Notice I said 1-3. Having too many objectives for any event dilutes its focus, weakens the creation of meaningful experiences, and reduces the ability to accomplish these objectives. For every metric, measurement tool or technology you’re planning to deploy, make sure the questions you are trying to answer are directly related to your business, brand, marketing, or sales objectives. Everything else is ‘nice-to-have’ but not necessary. See, I’ve already brought you joy.

Focus on Measuring Outcomes Over Outputs

Outputs are the actions you took to build the event. An outcome is something that happened as a result of your actions. For example, if you sent out 1,000 invitations to a VIP experience, that’s an output. If 11 VIPs showed up and started a meaningful conversation with your sales team which led to opportunities being created, that’s an outcome. Focus on the eleven, not the thousand.

Measure Significant Things

It is so easy to get trapped in the minutia of measurement. And while sometimes understanding the details is interesting, no one really cares. What impacts of your work would your CEO care about? What event measures are ‘resume-worthy’. Attendees eating 3,700 chicken sandwiches vs. the vegan option doesn’t matter. Increasing attendee purchase intent by 23% does.

Understand Success, Then Diagnose

We all want to be the hero of our story and celebrate the success of the team. Hopefully, you set some major objectives for the event and accomplished them. What big numbers support your success story? Even if you weren’t successful, how close did you get? Failures are just as important or even more important than successes because they allow you to learn from the experience and improve over time. Which brings me to diagnostic measures. What elements of the event contributed to the event’s success? What are the reasons for falling short of objectives? No need to get too deep here. Again focus is key. What are the major contributors? Find the metrics that help you understand that, and focus on improving those areas, or leveraging them in the future to replicate your success.

Use Measurement as a Foundation for Change

If you are not planning on making adjustments to any element of your event, do not measure it. Said another way, don’t measure stuff you’re not going to change. Measurement is most potent when it is used to establish baselines and track progress when you experiment with new and different approaches. Whether you’re working on attendee acquisition, agenda design, content relevance, or sponsorship, measure for change. Event measurement is not “one-and-done” Measurement is most valuable when it is tracked, trends are identified, and optimization is applied over time.

Event measurement requires an investment of time, resources, and money. It can take an exorbitant amount to time to be sure with all the spreadsheets, databases, data visualization tools, powerpoint reports, etc. There are also many soft costs associated with event measurement (time spent by employees to measure, analyze and report on events). According to a study by Bizzabo, companies spend 21% of their budgets on measurement and analytics of their events on average. This will vary based on the size of the company and complexity of their event portfolio of course. Understanding this, and investing appropriately, while working to simplify your approach will help ensure the best outcomes at the lowest cost. It’s important to balance the cost(s) of measurement so it does not outpace the value measurement provides. Applying these best practices should help simplify your event measurement approach. And hopefully, over time, bring you joy.