Early in my career, a very successful senior executive I worked for said to me: ‘Being a strong strategic leader is not about having the answers. It’s about knowing what questions to ask, and when to ask them.’

Asking your event marketers the right questions - at the right time - is one of the most important things every events business leader should know how to do. Here are the first important questions you should be asking – at least 9 months ahead of your flagship/high growth events (and ideally 14 months ahead!):

THE BIG QUESTION: what marketing resources do we need to realise the growth potential of our events?

And here is how this breaks down…
 

✅ PEOPLE: “Do we have the right level of marketing knowledge, skills and manpower to grow our flagship/star events?”

There is a range of marketing experience and skills you need to ensure your events are a success, and you typically won’t find these all in one person. In terms of experience, you need a marketer with at least 5 years of experience working in B2B event marketing. This person should be confident in:

• creating and brand-led event marketing strategies and marcomms campaign plans
• managing internal and external stakeholders well as the strategy and comms plan are executed.

You also need to make sure that in this person, and/or others you can hire below them, and/or an agency - you have clear evidence that experience and skills in the following areas are present:

• martech setup, configuration, integration and optimisation
• use of AI tools for efficiency and enhanced effectiveness
• messaging and copywriting
• hands on basic design and design management where more advanced work is needed
• video editing and video asset creation
• customer journey mapping and optimisation
• website editing
• website optimisation for search engines and conversions
• website analytics (usually GA4)
• marketing measurement and reporting
• database analysis, segmentation and management
• email marketing
• social media marketing
• PPC/paid media
• advocacy marketing
• delegate sales management

A word about AI…

Don’t assume AI will allow you to ‘do more with less’ - especially if you’re looking for YoY growth for your key events, across multiple years. If you rely on AI too much to make you more efficient e.g. write copy, create social posts and run your digital advertising campaigns - then your campaigns will likely suffer in quality, relevance, and effectiveness.

If your focus for AI in marketing is mainly on driving efficiency, then you’re missing the point of how AI will be valuable to you - especially when you’re looking to grow your events. AI will amplify the efforts of your marketers - but only if your marketers switch their focus to deeper thinking, better strategising, more planning and good training of your AI tools.
 

✅ DESIGN: “Have we set the right budget for branding and design? What can be ‘rinsed and repeated’ or repurposed from last year, and what needs reworking or redoing?”

Strong design and branding are now more important than ever in the age of GenAI. Your audience is being inundated with marcomms, so you need to make sure your brand stands out and is instantly recognisable as a trusted platform for learning and networking.
 

✅ WEBSITE: “Are our event websites set up correctly to drive the level of engagement, leads and registrations we need?”

Your website is by far the most important marketing channel for your event. All other channels drive traffic to your website. If your website is not optimised for search engines and conversions, then not only will you not get enough web traffic - the performance of all your marketing channels will suffer.

There are some very good, cost-effective, ‘plug and play’ purpose-built event website platforms available now that will give you a high performance event website relatively quickly and painlessly. Get in touch for MPG’s recommendations on the best event website platform for your business - taking into account your portfolio and the tech stack you already have in place.
 

✅ DATABASE: 

• "Which contact records do we need to clean and/or tag to make sure we reach the right people with the right messages?"
• "Which data sets do we need to grow to make sure we have enough relevant contact records for our key audience groups on our key events?" 
• "Have we considered the marketing needed for both delegates/visitors and to attract new exhibitors/sponsors?"

Even if your inbound channels are well set up - and especially if they aren’t - your database needs attention on an ongoing basis.

For every 1 relevant person you want to attract to your event, you need 100 relevant names on your database. MPG’s metrics on many events across various sectors and markets have proved this to be true time and time again.

These contacts will come from converting inbound visitors to leads on your website (as long as your web pages and forms are optimised - see WEBSITE point above), as well as from proactive, systematic data acquisition - which is essential to do ‘volume work’ needed in terms of cleaning, tagging and addition of relevant contacts. 
 

✅ PPC/PAID MEDIA: “Have we set aside enough money for media spend and to pay PPC/Paid Media experts to run our campaigns well? And are we getting visible ROI from this channel?”

Don’t spend a single penny on PPC/Paid Media unless you are 100% sure you have conversion tracking correctly set up and that you will see reports from early on in the campaign to prove this is the case. The machine-learning algorithms and human-driven optimisations rely mostly on tracked conversions to work properly.

Your agency may only be reporting on impressions and clicks - but these are meaningless and possibly misleading metrics if presented on their own without accompanying conversion metrics. 

When MPG’s team of digital marketing experts runs PPC/Paid Media campaigns for events, we always track conversions and ensure there is a full suite of metrics to show you true ROI from your investment. We’ll show you the ‘true ROI’ reports we produce for clients so you can see what metrics are important and why. Contact us to set up a video call.
 

✅ ADVOCACY: “Have we invested in an automated ‘word of mouth’ tool?”

If you want to activate referral marketing and word of mouth - at scale - you need to buy a good digital tool that will do this for you. There are a number of good platforms on the market now that will give you exactly what you need here, giving your registrations a real boost. This is all about working smarter, not harder!
 

In the coming weeks we will publish further parts to this series covering the essential elements of event marketing that every events business CEO should find useful when it comes to asking the right questions of their event marketing. As the CEO you won’t know all the answers or remember the detail in each area (after all, that isn’t your job!), but you will know which questions to ask and how to evaluate the answers you get.

Make sure you’ve subscribed to MPG Insights to receive an email notification when we publish future instalments.

 

---

Do you need help getting your event marketing foundations in place? Get in touch with MPG to find out how we can help. 

GET IN TOUCH