Going deep and getting tactical on 2022 B2B event strategies

Who'd have thought, at the end of 2021, we'd still be talking about how COVID is affecting our event strategies?

Last Friday our weekly CMO Coffee Talk series covered all things events - in-person vs virtual vs hybrid, creating a memorable experience, putting events in context with broader campaigns and buying journeys, etc.

The chat highlights are a fascinating window into the strategic and often very tactical elements CMOs are still grappling with as we head into 2022.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of your peers, let me know!

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The non-alcoholic beverage space is EXPLODING…everyone is aware of all of the drawbacks of alcohol…fascinated by this growing area of the market. Could be a great theme for an event.

We are offering a virtual experience cookie making class with King Arthur Flour.?They are a customer of ours.

Matt also mentioned virtual Escape Rooms - these are a LOT of fun.?It’s also a great opportunity to have multiple teams get to know each other virtually.

For our user conference we launched a new feature called SBOM and boxes had Skittles + Bacon candied + Oreos + Mints with a fun card among other things, we used the food to reinforce the features.

We hired a card trick guy and included a deck of cards with our branded logo and he engaged the audience in doing card tricks, seemed to work well.

We also tried a virtual comedy hour - that did NOT work.?The person tried but really, really tough to get that going virtually.

I steer away from comedians - that whole thing can go sideways in a hurry -- I've seen it lead to HR issues, lawsuits, alienated clients … just not worth it given how many other options there are!

For internal events, the virtual escape rooms have worked well for us too. We also did an office Olympics with a bunch of events (name that tune, scavenger hunt, name that employee, etc). That worked really well.

We have been running into more companies that send back gifts or deny delivery because of corporate rules about accepting gifts. I’ve tried cookies below the standard $25 threshold and sill had issues.

There’s also the recreation of the spontaneity of in person that can be replicated in virtual/hybrid. Purplecork’s breakout rooms allow people to “run into” new people virtually, which is a lot of fun. Bizzabo also has several pieces of functionality that allow you to create those spontaneous moments that make in person events so special virtually/hybrid. Broadly, I think grouping people strategically that have similarities - whether it’s geo, vertical, function/role - is critical. We have seen smaller, more intimate groups that have similarities have worked best during the pandemic/virtual only times.

In smaller virtual events, people just put LI address on chat to connect.

We're outfitting a bus and bringing the event to our prospects. Starting in warmer climates, outdoor events.

All will be hybrid and all will require vaccinations checked via an app.

Our EU teams went to a couple of events in Sept/Oct. but figure in person events might not happen in Q1.

The other thing to consider is that if you are planning to invest in hybrid, budget goes up — tech + production = $. We are anticipating 30% more events budget on top of 2019 if going hybrid.

Worried about our in-person Users Conference in April.?We have rescheduled 3 times so not sure the venue will give us any options.?We are planning hybrid.

At the first in-person conference we participated in in October the conference producer talked a good game about COVID precautions but then was WAY too lax about enforcing them on site.

We have our Sales Kick-off in January and we are planning to hold it and do on-site testing so our international team can get back home.?Any employees who don’t want to come are encouraged to stay home.

We just flipped on our SKO - was planning Miami, then Portugal and finalized on fully virtual.

We just hosted a 60+ partner presentation followed by dinner in Times Square. NYC Restaurants require vaccination cards for all indoor dining. The office presentation & dinner event were VERY well received, 100% have vaccine cards.

For me it really depends on the location. Spent the weekend in NYC and was super impressed with Covid approach. That city gets the value of vaccinations, precautions, caution, tourism.

My company has had a great year and wanted to have an in-person celebration/2022 kickoff meeting but there is growing hesitation about holding it in Q1.

We have our flagship conference coming up in early Feb. in Vegas. We are all in on hybrid - we are requiring vaccines and masks for the in person attendees.

MarketingProfs had watch parties for their B2B Forum. It worked well.

AWS re:Invent cut their reg goals in half, and they ended up with half of the # of attendees as 2019. We have revised our plans accordingly.

I am also bracing for 1/2 to 1/3 of the attendees but that the sponsorship costs will be level to 20% up over prior years.

Our GTM-Kickoff - Jan 12-13 in person with an international contingent and hybrid . We’re streaming and recording sessions. Most people are planning to travel and likely 3 tests will be required.

The two conferences we've been involved with in Q4 had about 25% lower attendance than normal and next week's is expected to be the same.

Last week of Feb we have a company retreat in person, will not do hybrid, come or not your choice, not mandatory to attend, will be mostly fun and team building and bonding as we have approx 150ppl hired during covid. Mandatory vaccine and covid test to attend in person, 95% of employees have signed up, will see if that holds, all expenses paid.

We have vaccine requirement as well - now considering “booster” requirement also , but hard to manage that!

Our Hybrid event will be a physical event, record everything, then post for streaming replay after, rather than trying to do live simulcast, much lower cost than simulcast, gives remote folks access to content for wider audience, will see what happens.

We do hybrid and record all sessions. We then post the videos online to start the long tail value. Next we blog about some of the sessions to further get value. Then at a previous company we compiled about 50 of the blogs into a book featuring all of the speakers.

Regional and smaller vs national/bigger seems to be the theme.

Sporting events and dinners are working for us.

We did go ahead and make a bet on 2 medium events next year, but we have negotiated walk away clauses without penalty.?There are risks on both sides. So venues are willing to do that.

We had a pretty epic fail on an event this year too - pulled our staff out, but then turned our 40x40 into a sponsored lounge - it was a brand play at the end.

We have a HUGE industry event in January - World of Concrete in LV (I know you are all envious). And we are hearing from partners that they are going in-person for their big customer events on 2022.

We had great results from AWS reinvent (so far, no closed deals yet) as an early stage company, small booth, but great conversations and interest.?People were really happy to be there.?Crazy interest in swag.

Bad salespeople want events, Good sales folks will hit quotas in spite of events.

We negotiate cancelation clause.?That we can cancel and get $$ back.?With venues they are allowing 30 day cancel.

We upped our registrations for our monthly thought leadership webinar series from 100 to 250 when we started offering to ship cookies to registrants.

How you run live vs virtual is different too.?Live events = rock shows. Virtual events = TV programs with interactivity.?We expect to experience them differently, so important to understand production requirement differences.

Our virtual user conference was a big success, but sponsoring other people's virtual events was worthless.

We have been able to negotiate additional benefits for live events that have gone virtual. Having a lot of success with F2F events in London which our top sellers there are loving.

Smaller, partner events are all in my plan for 2022.

I won’t sponsor an industry platform’s webinar or event, but I will pay to share my own content via that industry platform. Exactly as Jaime said - if I just add my logo to someone else’s content, it’s an expensive list purchase. But if I get to access an industry leader’s audience AND share my own messaging and content, yep 100% I’ll do that.

We are seeing better engagement and return on our own smaller targeted events vs. sponsoring others virtual events.

We’ve pushed our in-person customer Summit two years in a row and now it’s scheduled for May 2022. As I hear your stories I’m now really debating if we can and should push forward or not. The value of in-person relationship and community building is so valuable but there’s the fear that there is so much out of our control and if we should just make the decision to go completely virtual or frankly invest the budget elsewhere in our customers.

We’re super close to cancelling our April 2022 in-person customer event again and going virtual. We already postponed it by 6 months. We target distributors who are having a tough time and we don’t think we’ll get the attendance. So, we’ll probably switch it to virtual. We’ll have to be very intentional and careful with how we message the change to virtual, so it doesn’t affect our brand in our customer’s eyes.

The whole CFO piece of this discussion is interesting too.?“You made pipeline without events last year right?”

I think it depends on the event & the sellers you get to the event. Not enough people send SDRs with a quota to events. But if they prep well, SDRs are ferocious event staff.

Events also give young professionals (SDR’s) something different. A break from daily war-dialing. They’re excited to be there. They are coachable. They are accountable. AE’s and sales team are tougher to wrangle.

I would say events/webinars need to be a part of the entire buying journey and funnel stage… the content, objective, CTA and delivery mechanism is what changes… just like any marketing tactic.

At a previous company we did a two-year analysis tracking all contact/leads from trade shows we attended to see opportunity pipeline for the contact and the account. The results showed that for us trade shows were just VERY expensive top of the funnel activities that did little for pipeline. For smaller focused conferences the results were better. So we fought the battle (against Sales) to dramatically reduce the spend on general trade shows. This was all pre-COVID.

More about Purple Cork (they do craft cocktail events too!) https://join.purplecork.wine/matt-heinz/

We were doing ( and still do) a lot of wine/cocktail virtual roundtables, but started to see a little fatigue. So we started testing other times and gifts - breakfast baskets for coffee sessions and chocolate tasting kits so people can include their kids after hours have both worked really well lately.

https://theescapegame.com/remote-adventures/

https://www.on24.com/predictable-pipeline-workshop/

We just took part at our first in-person event in 2 years and we went for research, not leads. We did get some leads but we are entering a new market and it was a way for us to have a presence, learn about the market and get some unique insights on our competition.