Event Marketing Planning Tips: How to Choose the Best Events?

Trying to identify which events to get involved with and/or sponsor can be a difficult chore for a marketing team at a startup or expansion stage company. Oft times there are hundreds of options to choose from in a given market segment, and your company’s limited marketing budget and manpower constraints prevent your team from participating in or sponsoring more than a handful of these events.

Here are four recommendations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your event marketing planning process.

1. Know your target and plan ahead

Before your team starts identifying and evaluating events, it is important to:

• Determine how much money and time your team plans to allocate towards event marketing, so that you can select an appropriate number of meet-ups, local events, user groups, national events and exhibitions that your company would like to participate in or sponsor.
• Look at your company’s product marketing strategy and determine how the event channel can be utilized to help your team best address each pillar of its strategy. In most markets, events can be broken down into the following three main types of event marketing opportunities:
• Partnership Building Events: These are events that are attended by periphery players in your company’s market and offer opportunities to build partner relationships.
• Brand Building and Customer Lead Generating Events: These are industry, function, or trade association events that offer an opportunity to interact with potential buyers and users that will help improve brand recognition and generate leads.
• User Satisfaction Events: These are user groups and conferences focused on improving the user experience and increasing customer satisfaction and customer retention rates. However, these events also improve brand presence and indirectly generate leads through customer referrals.

2. Make sure your event identification process incorporates the following three factors:

• Product Functionality, Product Requirements and Use Cases: These factors should be used to determine what types of relevant industry and user events exist.
• Target Market Segment Characteristics: This is a set of target industries, geographies, and company types or consumer types that your company targets in the market. These factors should be used to determine what types of relevant trade events or consumer networks exist.
• Target Audience: This is the persona with whom you would like to interact with at the event. This will either be the buyer or user at a brand building and customer lead generating event or user satisfaction event, and the potential partner company product manager at a partnership building event. The buyer persona and customer persona should be used to determine what types of relevant functional events exist.

3. Measure the event fit and impact

Be sure to incorporate cost, size, attendance demographics, sponsorship, and speaker information for each relevant event into your event evaluation process. By comparing each of these factors, you should be able to determine the fit of the event and cost per potential partner/buyer/user, so that you can estimate the potential return on investment. Obviously, the level of return that you will get from an event will also depend on your type of participation or sponsorship, so you will want to factor this information into your selection process as well.

4. Learn from past experiences and incorporate this into your evaluation process

Identifying events should be an iterative process and you should refine your event participation and sponsorship schedule every year to maximize its impact. To get the most out of this process, it is important to have your team record detailed records of their event participation or sponsorship experiences and track the leads and opportunities that result from your company’s participation in or sponsorship of each event. By incorporating this data into your event evaluation process, you will be able to more effectively estimate how this event compares to other events you are considering in the future, and determine if altering your level of participation or sponsorship would increase your return on investment for this event and others going forward.

These suggestions should help your team improve its event marketing planning process and increase the return it sees from the event channel.

If you are interested in learning more about event marketing, then I highly recommend reading my blog post from last week on creative event marketing tactics to stretch the marketing budget.