How to get more ROI out of B2B Events

By selecting the right events and sponsorship package, you will significantly improve your chances to get a positive return on your investment. This sounds obvious but I’ve seen companies selecting events that are totally irrelevant to their market.

First, you need to know what your ideal target audience is. Let’s say you are working for a SaaS company; Most likely your ideal target audiences are CIOs and Senior IT Directors.

If you are sponsoring a trade show with only CMOs attending, then you are unlikely to get enough revenue out of that event.

Before signing any sponsorship agreement, ask the vendor for an attendee list. If you are like me, and you live in Europe and have to deal with GDPR, don’t worry.

I always ask my vendors for an attendee list and they can legally send you an attendee list that includes company names and job roles. This should give you enough information.

That brings me to my next point: company names. If you are looking at the attendee list and you see companies that are not relevant for you, don’t sponsor that event.

Enterprise organizations often have a named account or target account strategy. With every event that I sponsor, I make sure that our named accounts will be attending that event.

This way, I know for sure that the relevant companies are there. Even if we speak to the wrong people from that company, that person can still do introductions to the right people.

Next is the sponsorship package. I always make sure that I have at least one of two things at every event that I sponsor.

1. A keynote presentation or;
2. Guaranteed one-to-one meetings.

With a keynote, I can optimize our brand awareness and that makes it easier for our sales team to talk to people. With one-to-one meetings, I can make sure our sales team is meeting the right people at the event, guaranteed.

At the core of your event marketing plan should be your pre-event strategy. What are you going to do pre-event to ensure you will maximize ROI post-event?

B2B lead generation is tough and without a pre-event plan, I will ensure you that the event is either going to be a hit or miss. With a pre-event strategy, you will increase your chances significantly to have a favorable event ROI.

You need to have a growth marketing mindset. You should constantly be thinking of ways to maximize impact at your company.

Prior to the event, you should be working closely with your (inside) sales team to create a mutually agreed plan. The event marketing plan should include how your team will schedule one-to-one meetings with your target audience at the event. These meetings, that are not part of your sponsorship package, should be scheduled pre-event.

You also need to be including social media in your pre-event plan. Through social media, you will create awareness that your company is attending the event. Generally, event vendors have hashtags that you can use. Attendees will generally follow these hashtags and will see your posts.

Maybe you’ve sponsored an event before and you are going to sponsor the same event this year. This means that you already have an attendee list from the previous year. Often times, companies are attending the same event year-over-year. Use these attendee lists of the previous year to get in contact with your target companies.

There is a lot you can do pre-event to get more ROI out of B2B events. However, if you do nothing, you won’t get enough revenue.

I’ve mentioned one-to-one meetings a couple of times in this article, and for good reason. I do not sponsor trade shows if I don’t have guaranteed one-to-one meetings in my sponsorship package. The only exception is large analyst events such as Gartner IT Symposium, which I’ve mentioned before.

Why?

At trade shows, there are many keynote presentations that attendees want to see. Attendees come to these trade shows to learn and network. However, if you sponsor an event, there are many other solution providers that also sponsor that event. Even if they are not your organic competitors, at a trade show, they are your competitors.

Every solution provider at a tradeshow is trying to talk to people. The same people that you want to talk to. Therefore, the longer your prospects are talking with other solution providers, the less time you have to talk to them.

One-to-one meetings provide guaranteed time with the people you want to talk to the most. So, even if your target audience is talking to other solution providers, you will still have a chance to talk to them in your one-to-one meeting.

Another benefit of a one-to-one meeting is that you know who you are going to be talking with prior to the event.

Why is this important?

The answer is preparation. If you know exactly who you are going to be talking with, you can do research and prepare the conversation. This will ensure you will get the most out of a conversation. This is crucial as a one-to-one meeting is often no longer than 15 minutes.

When your sales team is in a one-to-one meeting, please tell them to not do a sales pitch. As mentioned, the one-to-one meetings are often very short. If your sales are going to waste the time pitching, then they are not able to listen to the prospects and identify their pain points. Let the prospects do the talking and your sales do the listening.

Your pre-event strategy must include ways to make sure that your prospects from the one-to-one meeting know your company prior to the event. This saves time during your one-to-one meeting and allows your sales team to get the most out of a meeting.

As mentioned in point 3, at trade shows you are in competition with other solution providers.

Every company wants to generate leads and are pulling out all the stops to do so.

How are you going to ensure that your on-site team is able to talk to as many relevant people as possible?

To ensure event lead generation, you need to maximize awareness at the event. People need to know that your company is there.

As I mentioned before, I always look at two things in an event sponsorship package.

1. One-to-one meetings;
2. A keynote presentation.

A keynote presentation will allow your company to stand on stage and do a presentation for a large number of people. My advice is to always let your customers do the talking. Presenting a relevant case study will speak much louder than when your employees are doing the talking.

You need to ensure your customer case study is relevant to the audience. So let’s say you are sponsoring an industry-specific event. Let’s say a finance event. It would make no sense at all to have a customer presenting a case study about the agricultural market. 

If you don’t have a customer that is able to present, do not worry. Your team can also do a presentation, but you need to ensure that your team is not doing a sales pitch. You need to be seen as a thought leader in the market. If you do a sales pitch, people will be bored and it will negatively impact your on-site awareness.

A growth hacking trick that I often do in a keynote presentation is to include a poll. At the end of the presentation, we ask people to get their phones and participate in a quick poll. We use Mentimeter for this.

What’s in it for them? Well, if they participate, they can win a nice prize such as Apple Airpods. What’s in it for us? We get contact details are the ability to ask qualification questions!

We often agree with event vendors that we can reveal the winner on the main stage of the event, at the end of the day. Guess what: almost free double exposure.

Combining events and digital marketing requires tools and process change. Marketing teams need to stop treating events and online marketing in siloes. To get more ROI out of B2B events, you need to treat an event and digital marketing as one campaign.

Often, an event is considered a campaign and digital marketing as another campaign channel.

However, if you merge those together, and treat it as one campaign, you will maximize results. By treating it as one campaign, you will improve customer experience and you create an omnichannel approach to get your target audience to engage with you.

Especially, in the follow-up stage of the event, it is crucial that you include digital marketing in your event marketing plan. Of course, you need to have an email marketing plan. Consider B2B demand generation strategies such as content binging.

A resource by Forrester, Increase B2B In-Person Event Payoff With Digital Immersion, explains this very well. 

What if the people that you spoke to at the event visit your website? Well, that’s great. You now have the opportunity to plant a cookie and remarket them on social media and the Google Display Network.

In addition, you can use a chatbot to drive them to relevant content on your website. There are many growth marketing tools that will help you with this.

If event attendees visit your website, use this opportunity and get the most out of it. If they don’t come to your website, apply digital marketing to get them to visit.

When I was working on a large event (sponsorship package over $200k) with mostly CIOs attending, I attended a briefing where CIOs stated what they expect from solution providers in terms of follow up.

Do you think CIOs want to be follow-up after they attended an event?

The answer is yes; And fast!

The CIOs at the briefing actually said that after they attend an event, they make time available in their busy agendas 1-2 days after the event to handle solution providers that are following up. The ideal follow-up time for the CIOs at the briefing was 1 or 2 days after the event.

The caveat is that they will only talk to solution providers that are able to talk in business value. So take this into consideration.

Similar to dating, when meeting new people, sometimes people feel that they shouldn’t call the person they just met because they don’t want to seem needy.

Well, when following up senior people, you need to take into consideration that they are extremely busy and if you don’t follow up fast enough, they will have moved on and started working on other things.

Reduce the time that your sales teams need to follow-up. Follow-up preferably primarily through phone calls, but of course, send emails too. It's also your job to make sure that sales follows-up. Therefore, don't forget to create an event dashboard.