If you’re starting your forward planning and need to evaluate third-party events, this is this place to start. Whether you’re looking at trade shows, conferences, partner events, in-person, virtual, or hybrid, these key considerations will help you make the right decisions to impact your business. Seasoned event marketers know the worst thing you can do is to just go to the event because you’ve always gone in the past. Leveraging the following criteria, along with a robust event portfolio planning and management process is critical to driving performance and optimization over time. Here are four must-have considerations.
Alignment to Objectives
Ask yourself, “Does this event address an identified business, brand, marketing, or sales objective?” If not. Don’t go. Full stop. You can further consider if the event has some specific strategic value to your company or partner, as well as how the event aligns to awareness, consideration, preference, conversion, loyalty, advocacy, or thought leadership. Also consider whether or not this event is the best way to accomplish your objectives. If there were three events, and you could only choose one, which would the the absolute best. In some cases, an event is not the answer. For example, if you’re trying to drive broad awareness for a product or brand, your budget may generate better impact with digital advertising.
Target Audience(s) in Attendance
Event producers generally do an excellent job promoting their event to exhibitors and sponsors. As part of their promotion, they often talk about the total number of attendees, and the percentage of “Decision Makers”. You might be impressed. It might seem like an amazing opportunity with the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. Don’t fall for it. Most companies don’t need to talk to everyone at an event. And what is a “decision maker” anyway? You make decisions every day, as do I. In most B2B cases, decisions are made by a fairly complex committee, including, well, just about anyone who touches the product or solution.
Instead, do the math. Know specifically who your target audience is. Review materials provided by the producer. Have conversations with them. Ask them to provide a detailed breakdown of attendees by whatever criteria you’re targeting. Whether its consumer demographics, company firmographics, or business roles, titles, etc., you may find the actual number of the people you care about at the event is much lower than you initially thought. Regardless, use this information to consider how may of this population you will get a chance to engage with, and then what your conversion rates are down the line to forecast cost per contact, lead, qualified lead, and sale. Tis will help you get to a projected ROI pretty quickly and help you decide if the event is the best investment in time and resources.
Past Event Performance
If you’re measuring your events correctly, this should be easy. If not, start. Examine your or your business partners’ past attendance. How’d you do? What were your objectives? Did you achieve them? Look closely at awareness and consideration metrics, as well as demand generation metrics. Don’t forget about expansion metrics for existing customers. Bottom line know your ROI and costs to achieve each objective.
The next thing to understand is diagnostic metrics. Why was the event a success or not? Was it the event? Your content or experience? The promotions on the part of the event producer or yourself? Sales engagement on your team? Competitive disruption? Be honest about what worked and what didn’t before selecting or deselecting the event. It might have been great, but you did not have the right resources or diligence in your approach to be successful. Or ,the event was truly a dog.
Opportunity to Engage
Here’s an interesting one. It ties directly to engineering experiences to achieve your specific event objectives. While sponsorship packages are many, sometimes, the components or tactics available don’t provide the right opportunities to meet your objectives. If you want awareness and thought leadership, speaking opportunities are crucial. If your objective is consideration, you’ll need opportunities to demonstrate your product or solutions, perhaps exhibition space, or workshops for attendees to experience it first-hand. If your customers are in attendance and you need to have intimate conversations, you’ll need meeting space… The list goes on, but matching your objectives to the right opportunities to tell your story in a meaningful and compelling way is critical to your success. If you don’t see experiences you need on the prospectus, or there are elements of the sponsorship you just don’t see the value in, change it up. Negotiate with the event producer. They are almost always willing to provide you with the tools you need to be successful. Remember, there is a cost beyond sponsorship fees – Your cost to create content and experiences to fill these tactics. You can save a lot of money by not leveraging non-value-add elements for your particular situation, and instead negotiating those things that will help you achieve your objectives.
Some other things to consider here include partner integration, either taking advantage of their sponsorship investment or vise-versa, direct access to target audiences and leads, and ensuring your content fits with the content of the event. Additionally, understanding what sponsorship levels your competitors are investing in can help you decide which approach you should take. Brand congruency is important in some cases, in others, not so much. Know your position based on your objectives. Also, Pre-event promotion and post-event content syndication an be extremely valuable in generating longer-term ROI, again depending on your objectives.
There are several criteria you can use to evaluate an event. These are the most critical. By applying these best practices in your event selection process, you’ll be well on your way to building a strong event portfolio to meet your objectives. We’ll explore additional criteria in a future article.