Many companies excel at producing vibrant face to face events for customers and prospects, but they struggle articulating the revenue impact. This in turn impacts budget, and an overall understanding of true impact face to face offers relative to other demand gen activities. Much like any other activity in your business, producing an event must bring value and have a measurable goal. Below are some things you can do to better understand and articulate your events true economic value.
Before an event:
Before you even begin planning for your event, make sure to identify actionable and measurable goals that align with your event content and intent. How will you know if the event went well or not? Is it pipeline impact? Press? Conversions? New customers? Once you decide on your overall event intent, make sure to set metrics and the associated tactics that make sense. For example, if you want to garner more Conversions, enable your event attendees that have engaged with your event content (attending a session, etc.) to tell you if they are interested in speaking to a sales rep. Engage your sales team as well by letting them know your intent of driving them more opportunities. Set a realistic number of conversions you want to collect and make sure your marketing stack is prepared to consume your complex event data so it can track and measure relevant activity after the event. Which brings us to technology. Make sure you’re effectively tracking attendee participation and engagement, by enabling your attendees to raise their hand, or opt-in. Also, be prepared to act upon these hand raisers both within your marketing stack and sales team. If your technology is not ready, hold off until it is. Nothing is more frustrating for an attendee than a follow-up request falling on deaf ears.
During the event:
During the event, the most important action you can take is to keep your attendees engaged with content that is relevant to their goals and desires. While a lot of it goes back to preparation; there are 3 specific steps you can take to ensure success as the event takes place:
- Watch what content your attendees consume with effective active and passive session and demo tracking tools.
- Capture attendee preferences, questions and renewed interest with effective mobile and online feedback solutions
- Act upon these questions and renewed interest in a live environment during the event by integrating this event data in real-time with your marketing stack through effective nurturing, and sales activity dissemination.
Your content is intended to motivate, educate, and generate demand. The best way for you to accelerate the buying cycle is to capture and act upon this renewed interest during the event!
After the event:
If executed well, the consumer journey should accelerate after your event ends. Your potential customers learned about your product through your amazing event content and now are eager to learn even more about your products. Make sure you capture this renewed interest within your marketing stack so that you get pipeline and revenue contribution credit! Encouraging a customer or prospect to take valuable time of their schedule to attend your event is quite the feat. Getting them to consume your content and raise their hand if they’re interested in learning more is the holy grail for an event marketer! Plan your resources well so they don’t end after the event. Make sure your sales team follows up personally with these hand raisers, and treat all attendees or via automated campaigns delivering content that extends the conversation and accelerates the buying cycle. Validar is uniquely suited to assist you in capturing individual attendee renewed interest via our attendee registration tracking and feedback solutions. We’re also very proud to provide direct integration solutions with systems like Salesforce, Eloqua and Marketo so this data can be acted upon appropriately. Call us if you want to learn more!
