Event Marketing is Complicated!

Sponsoring or hosting conferences is integral to many B2B tech vendors' marketing mix. However, event sponsorship's return on investment (ROI) can be hit or miss. More prominent, established vendors with large marketing teams and larger budgets often feel it's important to maintain the perception of their brand and market leadership by having a presence at various events. But the more events they do, the more cookie-cutter and generic their presence seems to become. Smaller vendors and startups like mine don't have the luxury of sponsoring everything and anything, so we must be more selective on when to use events to promote our brand and drive demand.

Over the past two decades, I've supported and/or participated in more than 100 corporate and industry events.? As an analyst with Forrester, my activity was mostly limited to creating and delivering keynote or breakout session presentations and participating in one-on-ones with customers.? As a marketing and product strategy leader, I gained exposure to many more moving parts of event planning and execution but never had the opportunity to manage an end-to-end event sponsorship.

Until now!

In this article, I'm sharing some of the approaches I used and key learnings discovered from my recent event sponsorship - the first one I've personally driven.??

My context

Some background to understand my company's stage and what we're looking to achieve with events marketing: I currently head up marketing for a small B2B software company. We have high confidence and clarity on our ideal customer profile (industries, company sizes, regions, and roles), and we have identified our product-market fit and the most compelling use cases that will attract and deliver the highest value to customers in the shortest time possible.?These can all change as we and the market mature and learn, but it feels good to have this foundation.

The great news is that our customers love our product, adoption is very strong, and we are enjoying expanded use cases with a near-zero churn rate. Our challenge is market awareness. Those who know us respect and value us, but most still don't know we're out there. We consider investing in industry events to help raise awareness, educate the market, and drive qualified leads that our sales team can pursue.?

My approach

Step 1: Short-list relevant events

There were dozens of events that our team found relevant, so we started by determining what was most important for us.? We decided any event we seriously considered had to be:?

1. Entirely focused on our ICP. Any event where our target audience was just one of many industries, roles, and use cases would not be worth it. We'd easily get lost in the crowd.
2. Attended by existing customers. While you want to increase brand awareness and generate new leads from event sponsorship, connecting in person with existing customers is just as valuable.? This allows us to accelerate sales cycles, identify new cross-sell/upsell opportunities, and connect happy customers with new prospects for real-time references.
3. Affordable. Sponsoring major industry events hosted by market-leading brands like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, or any other multi-billion dollar mega vendor can easily run into six figures all-in—even for entry-level sponsorships. It's just not an option for smaller vendors or startups.?
4. Established. Newer events that still needed to build a track record of success in attracting the right audience with positive feedback were too risky. We looked for events with a documented track record.

Step 2: Consider the Four S's

We had our short list of potentially valuable events but didn't have the budget, resources, and capacity to engage in all of them. So when discussing each event across sales and product leadership, I suggested four buckets - "the 4 S's" to categorize our potential event participation:

• Skip. In this most important category, we selected the events that didn't sufficiently meet our qualification criteria listed in Step 1 and removed them from consideration altogether. We passed on 80-90% of our initial list with this focus.
• Survey. It's not all about booths and sponsorship. Your product, sales, marketing, and leadership team members can realize value just by registering as attendees and surveying the conference. Attend these events to understand the market, technology, or competitive trends, engage with partners and industry influencers, see existing customers, and meet new prospects. For a smaller company like ours, we'll consider surveying a small handful of events per year.
• Stalk. There are some events where even a registration may not be worth the investment, but you know that many current customers or prospects will be attending. If enough of them would be open to meeting with you for a sales meeting, a dinner, or other social activity, it can help accelerate existing sales cycles or open new upsell/cross-sell opportunities. It may be attractive to some customers looking for a valuable, convenient alternative to take a break from whatever the hosting event offers during that time.?This is purely opportunistic, so will be less frequent.
• Sponsor. It would help to have a marketing budget and a go-to-market (GTM) strategy, which will tell you how much you're willing to invest in event sponsorship for the year.? Since event costs vary widely, this could be a single big-bang large event or a few smaller events.??

Step 3: Build and execute the project plan

Even the smallest event sponsorship has so many moving parts that a project plan and timeline are essential tools. They keep you focused as the event manager and provide necessary communication and transparency to your large cross-functional team, which supports the successful planning and execution of the event.

Every event sponsorship will require different activities and focus areas, but here's a summary of the major project plan categories I used to build our plan. Most, if not all, of these activities will require cross-functional support and input across sales, product, marketing, finance, and others, which is why defining roles and responsibilities is so valuable.

Summary of Project Plan Components

• Event contracts: Review and sign the contract, schedule deposit and final payments, select booth placement, and make any additional procurement decisions.?
• Sponsor onboarding: Depending on the event's maturity, there may be an exhibitor portal to register, and you may need to share brand and marketing copy with the host to promote the event.
• Internal kickoff: Build your RACI or DACI and determine who will attend, support, approve, and be informed.?
• Define KPIs: Determine what relevant measures will determine if the event delivered ROI. (e.g., qualified leads, booth traffic, sponsor and partner engagement, acceleration of existing sales cycles, new upsell/cross-sell opportunities with existing customers).
• Pre-event operations: This includes attendee registrations and travel coordination, ordering of show services (e.g., Internet, electricity, furniture, etc.), shipping of booth materials to the venue, etc.
• Pre-event marketing: Booth design and messaging, onsite and virtual content plan (e.g., demos, videos, collateral), lead retrieval plan, promotion plan (e.g., social, email), swag, raffle, and other creative and messaging activities. If you secured a speaking opportunity, plan for that as well.
• Pre-event sales: Develop a contact plan and email nurture for existing customers and prospects, and schedule onsite customer meetings and/or activities (e.g., dinner, drinks, etc.) if the budget allows.
• Pre-event product: Prepare a live demo environment and demo scripts, and assign on-call engineering support.?
• Onsite: Booth assembly and disassembly, coverage schedule to ensure resources are always available when the booth is open, scheduled customer meetings, and attend relevant sessions for market and competitive research.?
• Post-event: Ship everything back, upload captured leads into the CRM and marketing database, assign for follow-up, send follow-up emails to new contacts, debrief on the event with the team, and collect data/insights and report.?
• Measure: Monitor overall engagement generated from sponsorship and score the ROI based on predefined KPIs. Solicit feedback from onsite and supporting team members to determine what worked well and what can be improved next time.

My Learnings

I am happy to report that our event went exceptionally well.? It surpassed our expectations in terms of sales-qualified leads and booth traffic. Most relevant was the quality of the conversations at our booth - the average conversation per visitor was > 20 minutes. Some of my top takeaways:

• The entire business contributed. Every employee at our company played a supporting role in one way or another—be it sales, engineering, finance, operations, etc. It all started with our CEO stating that this was an essential investment for us as a business, and everyone was expected to do what was asked to make it as successful as possible.?And they did!
• The right people were onsite and prepared. Since this was our most important event investment for the year, we made sure to have a mix of roles and expertise so we could navigate anywhere the conversations went. We had solution strategy and product experts onsite delivering full-featured demos and sales and marketing leaders to answer any other questions. This investment in onsite attendance paid off, as we would often manage 2-3 separate conversations simultaneously.?
• Why did they stop to speak with us? Many visits were from existing customers and prospects in current sales cycles, but our marketing strategies drew attention as well. Many attendees stopped to watch our scrolling demo video and asked for more info, and others asked to elaborate on the tagline and differentiators listed on our backdrop. Some were excited about our raffle (a Lego Millenium Falcon!), while others stopped to watch live demos being given to others.
• Prepare, but don't over-prepare those demos. Our team worked hard to identify the top use cases and differentiated functionality that we believed would be most valuable and attractive to the attendees and built demo environments and scripts to support those conversations. The reality was that every demo and conversation was very fluid, and what worked best was the team’s ability to demo on the fly by listening to what was most important to the visitor and adapting.??
• Discover partnership opportunities. While identifying technology or service partnership opportunities was not a top priority going into the event, we had a variety of valuable conversations with several other attending and sponsoring vendors that have continued since. With enough personnel onsite, there is no reason we couldn’t have been more proactive in identifying potential partners pre-event.
• Comfortable shoes. Okay, this was a novice marketing move. I was going for that nice professional look and asked the team not to wear sneakers. Standing for hours is tough. I’m thinking of custom Nikes in our brand colors for next year!

Note: You’ll notice in the article that I didn’t go into specific details about my company (Vertex Software), our product (cloud-based 3D visualization software), our ICP (global manufacturers), or the event we sponsored (Siemens Realize LIVE). This is because those details would not likely be interesting to most of you, who are likely bringing very different solutions to market.