Event Marketing 2019 The CMO Guide - April 2019 - Regalix
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April 2019
The CMO Guide
Event Marketing 2019
www.regalix.com
Introduction
The recently concluded Super Bowl LII was a technological marvel of truly immersive
live streaming and in-person experiences, with 115 cameras providing a 360° view of
the action, 8K cameras for hi-definition, drones, technology innovations like an AR-
assisted 3D view of the venue and more.1 Live events have certainly come a long way
since the early years.
It’s no surprise, then, that most organizations still consider events to be the single
most effective marketing channel for their business. In a recent survey done by
Bizzabo, 41% of respondents said that out of 10 channels, including content and email
marketing, they considered live events to be the most critical marketing channel in
helping them achieve business outcomes. This is an increase of 32% since the last
survey in 2017. Further, a majority of the respondents (85%) indicated that events are
essential to their marketing strategy.2 According to a Gartner CMO report, it’s one
of the top four spending areas, ahead of social media, customer intelligence and
email marketing.
From conferences and product launches to trade shows and virtual meetings, events
are an integral component of the modern marketer’s arsenal of tools. According to
Forrester Research, events comprise 24% of the B2B marketing budget,3 which is a
fairly significant portion of the marketing mix. Events provide businesses with
unique opportunities to raise brand awareness, generate leads, build equity with
customers and partners, upsell, cross-sell, generate demand and more — all under
one banner. Done right, live events could potentially deliver returns for years.
The importance of events in a digital world
The tremendous impact that digital has had on our daily lives is more significant now
than ever before. The way we communicate, meet new people, conduct business,
bank or buy groceries have all been forever transformed by technology. Yet, in-
person events continue to thrive in this glorious digital world. That’s due, in part, to
the fact that we are more than the sum of our digital alter egos. In-person and live
events help us form connections, look into one another’s eyes, listen to body language,
build relationships, develop trust, conduct business and learn from one another.
Businesses often accomplish more in a day’s work when people meet than they do
with months of emailing or messaging.
Those businesses that are most successful typically spend 1.7x
the average marketing budget on live events.10
2 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019
Figure-1
he ene ts that events a ord sinesses toda
Event program goals
Generate leads 83%
Customer engagement 72%
Build brand 72%
Product education
and training
57%
Drive demand 46%
Customer upsell 32%
Source: Marketo4
However, even as B2B marketers cite events as essential to their marketing strategy,
organizations are struggling to leverage their significant investments post-event.
Many don’t follow up on their leads. Moreover, with an increasing number of events
being held every year, companies are also failing to set themselves apart from their
competition. Events are high-stake endeavors that require large investments. Done
right, they provide businesses with a captive audience and a platform of great
engagement potential. So, how does a business ensure success in its event marketing
initiative?
Best practices
Here are some best practices to help you maximize the reach and effectiveness of
your events and get the most out of your investments:
Define objectives
Before planning an event, it’s important to think about what your event goals and
objectives are. Ask yourself why you want to host this event or participate in that
tradeshow, and whether it fits into your overall business strategy. Then give your
answers a tangible shape or form. Setting measurable goals would provide the
impetus needed to identify action items that would help you achieve the desired
goals. This also ensures that you have the objective criteria to rate the overall
effectiveness of your participation post the event.
The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019 3
Set the database in order
Once the objectives are in place, the next order of business is to clearly define the
audience you want to target. Ensure that your contact database is up to date and
scrubbed clean of duplicate and spurious data, that it’s segmented according to your
audience strategy, linked to your CRM and other systems, and GDPR compliant.5
High-quality attendee data is important for you to deliver meaningful experiences to
your audience, ensure their participation and to meet your objectives.
Create a consistent and compelling message
When considering the right message to adopt, it is essential to place attendees and
their needs at the center of the messaging plan. Attendees are looking to learn and
expand their viewpoints. They didn’t sign up to hear a sales pitch. Spend time thinking
about the agenda and how you can weave threads that will create value to your
listeners. Think about how your company can add value to conversations. It’s
important to be consistent; attendees are more likely to believe a message that they
receive consistently.
Detail your content plan
Content is the biggest net you can use to draw attendees to your business. According
to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of B2B marketers use in-person events to
nurture their audience.6 Your content plan roll-out should begin well before the
actual event and continue well after it.
Pre-event
Promotion needs to start early enough to create buzz. Teasers, countdowns, snazzy
invitations, agenda descriptions, videos from past events, presentations, videos of
speakers, and more, all serve to capture attention and interest and drive registration.
Picture this:
Social media, and in particular, Facebook, offers marketers the ability to
promote their events effectively. Totally Thames, the river celebration that
takes place in September every year, employs a split-promotion strategy.
To better engage their target audience, the organizers decided to split the
festival into micro-events and promote each of them separately. This
ensured that there would be something for everyone.
4 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019
Figure-2
otall hames promotes micro events on their
ace oo pa e
Source: GEVME7
Drip Marketing
Drip marketing is a popular email marketing strategy. It involves gradually
introducing content and information to take your attendees on a journey
with you. It is about building interest slowly but persuasively, rather than
being too in-your-face. This can be supported by other activities such as
focused social media campaigns, or it can be integrated with a platform that
helps you distribute tailored emails to your attendees based on their
personal preferences.
At the event
Maintaining engagement during the event requires an entirely different strategy
than generating interest before the event. In addition to presentations for sessions
and content related to the event agenda, pulling in user-generated content should
be an integral part of your strategy. Quotations, video clips of attendees, tweets and
social media posts help ensure that attendees remain engaged. Think about
presenting complementary content that helps position your business as being at the
forefront of your industry. It is also important to have content that will help potential
customers move along the marketing funnel. White papers, eBooks, buying guides,
fact sheets and case studies help build relevance.
The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019 5
Post-event
Most businesses don’t have a communication plan to follow through with after the
event. It’s critical to keep the conversation going with the attendees by providing
them with more valuable content, such as a summary of the proceedings from the
event, customized content based on conversations you’ve had with them, an invite to
a follow-up event or webinar, or a special offer or promotion that they might be
interested in. What works best is shareable content. Attendees want to engage with
your content by either sharing it or recreating it in the form of user-generated
content. Social media plays a vital role in popularizing this type of content.
Picture this:
Salesforce publishes recordings of all their conference sessions on their
website, enabling attendees to watch them again.
Some companies also encourage people to contribute to the conversations
that began during the event, via comments, discussion threads and more.
This helps form communities that remain active long after the event has
ended.
Figure-3
Source: Salesforce uses video content from their Dreamforce Conference effectively.8
6 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019Picture this:
Charity: Water does a great job of sending out reminder emails to people
who’ve pledged to support their cause, including a short video reminding
them of the event.
Figure-4
Source: Charity: Water sends informative ‘thank you’ emails that remind attendees to honor their
commitments.9
The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019 7VMworld, VMware’s prestigious annual global conference on virtualization
and cloud computing, held in Las Vegas last year, drew more than 22,000
customers, channel partners and executives from around the world. From
multiple workshop tracks and keynote sessions to racing drones and
shooting virtual hoops, the conference wove multiple threads of education,
shared learning, community building and entertainment. Once everyone
got home, the company shared pictures and video replays of key sessions to
help attendees relive their time at VMworld, the conference that never
ends.
Figure-5
diences can access all the important content rom
orld 2018 on the e site
Source: VMware11
84% of business leadership — VPs and C-suite — feel that in-
person events are critical to their company’s success.12
8 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019Go digital
According to research by Frost & Sullivan, the event-management software industry
is worth $28 billion. In 2016 alone, over $50 million was invested in modern event-
management solutions. Studies show that event technology adoption can increase
attendance by 20%, increase productivity by 27% and decrease costs by as much as
30%.
There are many ways that various technologies can impact events, some of which
will be discussed in the upcoming section of this paper. However, it is important that
marketers employ technology to gather insights, improve attendee experience, and
monitor and track results. In order to achieve this, businesses need a detailed digital
strategy that covers all aspects of the event.
For businesses that conduct many events in a year, an event software could prove to
be a good investment. On average, businesses that use event software are 24% more
likely to prove event ROI than those that don’t.
Pre-event:
One of the benefits of using technology at this stage is that it enables you to create
excellent brand communication that is far more effective and cost efficient than
possible with traditional channels. Develop a list of potential people you’d like to
meet at the event, then reach out to introduce yourself. Use social media to learn
more about the individuals and make arrangements to connect prior to the event. If
you’re sponsoring an industry tradeshow or seminar, use common event hashtags,
repost articles and information about the event, and share your enthusiasm for
participating.
Figure-6
Channels and their impacts on event promotion
Which channel or tactic has been the most effective for promoting
in-person events?
Social media Display advertising or retargeting
Email marketing Company website
19.9%
17.9% Word of mouth Mobile app
Direct prospecting emails Blog
Number of responses
13.9% Direct mail Microsite
13.2%
11.3%
8.6%
6.0%
4.0%
2.6% 2.6%
Source: The Event Marketing Benchmark Report: Spring 201713
The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019 9At the event:
From deploying facial recognition for easy registration to creating an event app or
using virtual reality for life-like demonstrations, digital tech can help you deliver a
superior experience to the attendees.
Figure-7
o event technolo ies stac p hen it comes to
achievin siness o tcomes
Rank the following event-related technologies in order of importance to
achieving a successful outcome for your events
38
30 31 28 26 28 32 32
27 27 26 26
22 19 20
18
11 12
Event automation/management Registration management Lead capture
60
38 38
26 28 26 27 28 25
22 23 23 22
18
1 13
11 10
Event and session check-in Session polling and surveys Mobile app
1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th
AVERAGE RANKING (HIGHEST TO LOWEST)
Event automation/management - 3.05
Registration management - 3.23
Event and session check-in - 3.28
Lead capture - 3.43
Session polling and surveys - 3.83
Mobile app - 4.17
Source: The Event Marketing Benchmark Report: Spring 201714
Post-event:
While 88% of marketers are using social media to promote event awareness, only
54% use it for post-event engagement.15 Keep the discussion going by posting quotes
from featured speakers, stats, photos and key takeaways from the event, which
attendees would be interested in. Make it accessible across all devices.
10 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019Use gamification
Gamification helps increase engagement with the audience. Studies have shown
that gamified experiences educate faster than passive reading. Gamification ideas
implemented at a product launch, for instance, can accelerate the process of product
learning to a pace greater than that of a presentation.
To make the gamification process work, businesses need to personalize it in a way
that is meaningful to their audience. Building your game’s content, challenges and
flow around your objectives and audience profile will ensure your game feels like an
integrated part of the whole event experience.16
We can use event gamification to drive the behavior of participants, thereby helping
achieve the desired event outcome. Besides gamifying portions of the actual event,
marketers can also explore the possibility of introducing gamification into their
event apps.
Gamified activities can be sources of customer data that cannot be found anywhere
else. They can provide valuable insights about each customer, their intrinsic and
extrinsic motivators, passions, thought processes and more. Every time a customer
participates in a challenge, businesses learn a little more about them. These insights,
when combined, paint a better picture of the customer’s motivations, habits and
value systems. Personalized communication, offers and incentives are just a step
away from here.17
Measure success
Most events track the number of attendees, ticket sales, leads created and other
such metrics. However, as Stacey Danheiser, co-author of ‘Value-ology’ writes, if
there’s one question that adequately measures the success of an event, it is this —
“Were the event objectives met for the participants?”18 You should get in the habit of
looking at your events from this standpoint. Then, dive into whether the speakers
were effective, whether attendees found the event a good use of their time and
whether the message was on target.
Pursue leads
One area that often gets neglected in event marketing is the need to follow up on
leads. It’s important to design a robust follow-up program for post-event engagement,
which covers both marketing and sales priorities. Inside sales can also play a critical
role here to further qualify individuals who engaged with you at an event.
The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019 11Analytics
Big data and analytics have made it possible to merge multiple streams of data for
insights on speakers, attendees, sponsors and potential attendees. From CRM
systems, social media, publicly available information and website and email analytics,
businesses know much more about their target audiences than ever before. All of
this allows for personalized event experiences and messaging, which is reported to
increase engagement and satisfaction rates. Another way that analytics has
transformed the event industry is through its ability to listen to social chattering and
determine the concerns of audiences and what they most talk about. This helps
event organizers put together presentations and sessions on topics that currently
interest their audience.
Picture this:
Bournemouth 7s is the UK’s largest sports and music festival that attracts
over 30,000 people. In the past, the team would simply throw a couple of
ideas together and test them out to see which would stick. Today, the team
uses sophisticated technology that gives them the data they need to make
informed, strategic, sound decisions. For example, the organizers now have
access to data that tells them how many people have entered the venue, at
what time and when they leave. This helps in managing security and venue
facilities. They also have access to data that tells them how people found
out about the festival, which social media campaigns are producing results,
what methods people are using to purchase their tickets and what the peak
buying times and months are. This will help the team determine future
advertising and promotion spends.19
Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI has had a tremendous impact on every industry, and that includes events. Its most
significant contribution is streamlining operations and making businesses more
efficient. AI enables personalization at scale and provides customer service through
AI-enabled chatbots. AI’s matchmaking engine can parse through data from social
media profiles and provide recommendations to attendees regarding people they
should meet, conferences and workshop sessions they should attend and more. AI-
enabled intelligence systems also give businesses the ability to filter their contact
database by interest — based on email open rates, click through links, website pages
visited and more — so they can invite people to relevant events. Deep learning can
also analyze sensory data to measure footfall and develop patterns to make
predictions for logistical arrangements that are needed at venues.
12 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019Drones
Drones are extremely popular at live events. They are especially useful to get camera
angles and shots that are otherwise impossible or extremely expensive to get. Drones
are also being increasingly used to ensure event safety.
Live streaming
Live streaming is only getting better as technology advances. Event organizers are
immediately able to host thousands more attendees without straining budgets or
facilities. Many social media channels have introduced live streaming functionalities,
such as Facebook Live, which means guests can broadcast events themselves, adding
more opportunities for sharing.
Picture this:
In May 2016, Google I/O held a keynote presentation wherein the company
showcased its plans for the year. They provided a live stream of the opening
address on the Google I/O website and on YouTube; this included a 360°
video feed as well, which enabled remote viewers to feel as though they
were part of the audience.
Figure-8
Source: Image 7 – Google I/O 201620
The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019 13Augmented & Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
These technologies form the line at which our physical and virtual worlds collide.
While both AR and VR hold enormous potential, they are still in nascent stages and
have much that need to be ironed out. Both technologies are mostly mobile-focused
at the moment, as it provides a low-barrier entry to adoption; however, there are
other applications as well. In the event world, AR and VR provide businesses with the
ability to hold virtual events for remote spectators, providing an immersive
experience that is almost as good as being there. AR and VR can be used to project
remotely located presenters onto a stage, impressive designs onto a flat surface like
a building in projection mapping, and more. Event planners also use AR and VR to
visualize the venue and how it will work on the day of the event. AR can be used at
large conferences to provide attendees with maps, so that they can get to their next
session without getting lost.
Picture this:
The recently concluded Super Bowl LI is more than a sporting event; it’s an
event that defines the standards of immersive experiences. This year was
no different. For the first time, the Super Bowl included a VR broadcast. Fox
and VR partner, LiveLike, featured over 20 VR replays, using multiple
cameras that the viewer could switch between. This immersive experience,
along with 360° video, provided remote viewers with an experience that
was almost like they were right there, if not better.
5G and remote events
Smartphone company Ericsson predicts that 1.5 billion 5G subscriptions21 will be
active by the year 2025. This and other technologies are moving us toward a time
when businesses can plan virtual events that don’t require attendees to be physically
present. These virtual meetings are already taking place, but many of them feature
recorded videos in playback mode. With greater internet speeds and computing
power, live events in virtual mode are a certainty in our future.
Facial recognition
Increasing interest in biometric identification has changed authentication
mechanisms in our banking systems, mobile phones and even events. Facial
recognition technology has increased security at live events and also enabled faster
check-ins when entering the venue. Both paper tickets and e-tickets require the
user to perform an action in order to be authenticated, which doesn’t always go as
14 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019smoothly as expected. Facial recognition removes the need for user action entirely,
thereby making the process of authentication an effortless and seamless one. Event
organizers can even use facial recognition to run attendees against known criminal
databases to ensure that security is maintained.
Looking ahead
Events have been invaluable to businesses when it comes to forming in-person
connections. That is not likely to change in the future. However, as technology plays
catch up, the way we conduct live events will certainly evolve.
Organizations that use multiple event software solutions find it
twice as hard to demonstrate event ROI, compared to those with
a single integrated solution.22
The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019 15References:
1 https://www.sporttechie.com/super-bowl-lii-technology-patriots-eagles/
2 Bizzabo’s Event Marketing 2019 Benchmarks and Trends Report
3 https://blog.bizzabo.com/event-marketing-guide
4 https://www.marketo.com/event-marketing/
5 https://www.realbuzzregistrations.com/definitive-guide-gdpr-events-industry/
6 https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2019_B2B_Research_Final.pdf
7 https://www.gevme.com/blog/5-best-creative-examples-facebook-event-advertising-event-pro-
motion-strategy/
8 https://blog.bizzabo.com/event-marketing-guide
9 https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/event-email-examples-ds00/
10 https://welcome.bizzabo.com/event-marketing-2019
11 https://blogs.vmware.com/vmworld/
12 https://welcome.bizzabo.com/event-marketing-2019
13 https://img03.en25.com/Web/certain/%7B5a1ffe98-8027-43d4-814e-fdb0e9f5597f%7D_2017-
event-marketing-benchmark-report.pdf
14 https://img03.en25.com/Web/certain/%7B5a1ffe98-8027-43d4-814e-fdb0e9f5597f%7D_2017-
event-marketing-benchmark-report.pdf
15 https://blog.bizzabo.com/event-marketing-statistics
16 https://www.ibtmworld.com/__novadocuments/384118?v=636397063375500000
17 https://www.regalix.com/insights/using-gamification-to-drive-customer-engagement/
18 https://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/6-must-haves-b2b-event-marketing-suc-
cess-01876974
19 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/blog/case-studies/better-data-better-festivals-ds0d/
20 https://youtu.be/lFm4s50PnmY
21 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-smartphone-subscriptions-idUSKBN13A0SS
22 https://welcome.bizzabo.com/event-marketing-2019
16 The CMO Guide to Event Marketing 2019About Regalix
Regalix is a customer acquisition and customer success company that re-imagines
digital experiences across hi-tech, ad-tech and retail domains. The company
has partnered with some of the largest global B2B organizations in their efforts
at customer acquisition, growth and retention. Regalix works with businesses,
supporting their customers through the entire journey to deliver reliable products
and services in today’s subscription-based economy.
Regalix has a long history of creating award-winning ventures with enterprises
through co-innovation and idea-driven frameworks that inspire companies to
think different. Headquartered in Silicon Valley — Palo Alto, California — Regalix
has offices in Europe and Asia.
For more information
To find out how we can help you, 2200 Geng Road, (US): +1 631-230-2629
please contact us, or visit us at # 210 Palo Alto, (India): +91 80-49445010
www.regalix.com CA 94303 Email: research@regalix-inc.com
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