Team MPG’s event marketing experts have helped many conference and exhibition organisers kick their star events into faster and more consistent growth - year after year.  We have also helped events leaders get complete visibility of:

✅ How event marketing is performing in the lead up to the event - high level and in granular detail.

✅ How the audience is shaping up in terms of numbers and profile, and where this is likely to ‘land’ in terms of final results.

✅ What marketing levers to pull week-by-week in the run up to the event to achieve growth goals.

The most effective combination of growth levers differ per event, and the right combination at any point in time will depend on:

• Business objectives
• Where the biggest growth opportunities lie
• Investment and resources available
• The starting point

Two of the growth levers we have found in common for every event we’ve ever worked on are: 

1️⃣ Getting lead times right - ensuring the product and marketing lands at exactly the right time for best impact.

2️⃣  Accurate and granular marketing and event performance measurement leading up to the event - ensuring all stakeholders are aligned on key data points around customer engagement and conversions, what the metrics are indicating and how to respond in the best way to optimise product, marketing, sales and operations for the best possible outcome.

Focusing on getting lead times right and understanding customer engagement in the lead up to your events will give you the best possible chance of success.

 

Case Study

Here’s an illustration of the above - based on a real example of an established, annual senior-level confex style event where Team MPG did the marketing for the first time in 2025. The delegate bookings were a mix of paid and unpaid tickets - depending on attendee profile.

Lead times:

• This year, the agenda was ready 13 weeks out from the event - 2 weeks earlier than last year.

• For this year’s campaign, more marketing activity happened earlier across all channels. 

• Marketing activity was synced across all channels to ensure key messages were amplified at the right times. 

Measurement: 

• Every aspect of event marketing performance was measured in the weeks leading up to the event, with levels of engagement and conversions given a score at every stage based on MPG’s benchmarks. 

• All relevant data points - high level and granular - were captured in MPG’s Dashboard in an easy-to-read way, with data feeding in from various systems via automated feeds. 

• MPG’s Dashboard formed the centre-piece for the weekly ‘all hands’ project meeting, where all stakeholders had full visibility of results and what was driving them. Good decisions could quickly be made on what to dial up, what to dial down and which key marketing activities needed focus in the coming week. 

• MPG’s channel experts could then dive in quickly to optimise all marketing activity.

Results: 

• Delegate revenue: 50%+ revenue growth YoY

• Further revenue growth opportunity in 2026 based on a larger venue which the event organiser confidently booked before this year’s event, knowing this was the right move based on high levels of engagement and bookings earlier in this year’s campaign.

By focusing on lead times and marketing measurement, we’ve seen excellent results time and time again over the last 11+ years working with many clients across a variety of sectors - before and after the pandemic. 

 

Top Tips

If you’re doing everything in-house, here are 3 top tips:
 

TOP TIP #1: Use simple graphs for data visualisation of your bookings & revenue - year on year and against growth targets

For every event, you should be monitoring week-by-week (based on weeks out from the event) the following:

• Number of bookings and amount of revenue generated over the past week and cumulative total.

• How this compares to previous years.

• How this compares to where you should be at any point in time based on your target.

Just being ahead of last year won’t get you to your growth goal. You need to track where you are in relation to where you should be with the growth built in. In the backend of MPG’s Dashboards, we use a booking pattern tool that maps out the required delegates and revenue week by week to achieve the goal. Your analysts should be able to develop something similar in-house.

It is important you present this data in a way that makes it quick and easy to understand i.e. in a line graph. Assuming you’re tracking both delegate numbers and revenue week-by-week, you need 2 line graphs, one for each. Each graph should have the following 3 lines in 3 different colours/styles so it's easy to instantly differentiate visually: 

• Line 1: required bookings/revenue for this year based on growth targets - week by week.
• Line 2: actual bookings/revenue last year - week by week.
• Line 3: actual bookings this year. This should be on or above Line 1. If it starts falling behind, you know your marketing is not working as it should and you should adjust your forecasts of where you will end up - a forecast is not the same as a target! If Line 3 starts tracking ahead of Line 1, you can assume you’re likely to beat your target!

Key point: every year brings different variables that can impact your campaign timeline. Exact event dates can shift and other key dates like early-birds and public holidays can fall into different places in the campaign timeline and create peaks and troughs that won’t be ‘like for like’. Make sure you take these into account.
 

TOP TIP #2:  Never (ever) compromise on lead times

Just because customers are booking for your event later, doesn't mean you should go to market later. Customers still need to be informed and engaged early so they can plan well to attend your event and you can convert their engagement into a firm booking in time for them to attend your event.

Whether you’re running a conference or a content-rich exhibition, your full agenda with at least 90% of your speakers must be published on your website and pushed out in your marketing at least 12 weeks before your event, ideally earlier. You can always make adjustments and additions to this agenda in the weeks leading up to the event, but without a complete product in the market early enough, you won’t get enough engagement early on and your bookings and revenue won’t hit the mark.

 

TOP TIP #3: Measure engagement leading up to the event, not just conversions

If you know how customers are engaging with your website, emails, paid advertising, advocacy and media partner channels you will know what impact your marketing is having. These engagement levels need to be benchmarked and monitored to give you an indication of how your booking and revenue pattern is likely to pan out.

To be truly data-driven, your event marketers should be measuring and analysing engagement and conversions across all your channels and campaigns and using this data to make good decisions about how to optimise marketing activities for best results.

In many organisations, event marketers are currently only able to track:

1️⃣ Simple and aggregated data on event website traffic - showing number of visits and broadly where the traffic has come from (e.g. organic vs direct vs email). 

2️⃣ Email open rates and click rates.

3️⃣ Impressions and clicks from PPC/Paid Media.

They’re often lacking benchmarks and can’t tie engagement and conversions to specific campaigns. This is not data-driven marketing.

If you have Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Tag Manager (GTM) set up correctly and your marketers know how to use these tools, you will be able to up your game when it comes to data-driven marketing. If you’re not confident GA4 and GTM are being used or used correctly by your marketing team, get in touch as we can help you fix this!

 

Events CEO checklist - important questions to ask about your event marketing:

Lead times: 

 Are draft agendas for our events - with at least 50% of our speakers - ready to be in the market at least 16 weeks each event?

 Are the final agendas - with all speakers and sessions confirmed - ready to be out in the market at least 12 weeks before each event?

Booking patterns:

 Do we have data we can trust to plot last year’s booking pattern on a graph?

 Have we agreed on our targeted growth for this year and plotted this on the graph?

 Have we planned a marketing campaign that aligns with the targeted booking pattern for this year?

Measuring marketing:

 Are GA4 and GTM set up correctly and producing accurate marketing performance reports showing both engagements and conversions by channel and campaign?

 How are our marketing performance reports being used to enable data-driven decision making for best results?

 Do we have a plan for all stakeholders to regularly review the results of the campaign as it progresses and take action when required?

 

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READ PART 2 HERE