As the event landscape becomes more competitive, every event organiser should be asking themselves:

“Am I investing in the right areas of marketing to drive commercial success and growth?”

The only way to know if your event marketing budget is being well spent is by analysing your marketing to answer the following critical questions:

• What marketing is being done?

• How is the marketing we’re doing working? What are the metrics telling us?

• How do our marketing metrics compare to previous years, and to industry benchmarks?
  And very importantly…

• What marketing is not being done?

• What is missing from the mix of channels and tactics we should be deploying?

• Where is our marketing being deployed ineffectively? Why is this happening?

You need to know where the key gaps are in what you’re doing now, as these show you where your opportunity lies for driving better performance.

Finding time to do a strategic and comprehensive gap analysis can be challenging for event marketers elbow-deep in urgent daily campaign work.

To help you break things down and focus on one key area at a time, in this month’s EVENT MARKETING STRATEGIES, we recommend 4 areas to focus on: email deliverability, messaging, attribution (GA4) and paid media/PPC.

 

EVENT MARKETING STRATEGIES

4 Targeted audits to help you spot and close critical gaps quickly

#1 EMAIL DELIVERABILITY

Email campaigns were previously a stalwart for event marketing. They’ve now become a headache for many - especially those relying too heavily on this channel (see our recent blog: If you’re relying on email to promote your event, you’re in trouble).

BUT…email is still a very important way to reach your customers. You need to know if your email sends are reaching inboxes.

Some clear sign that your emails are not landing in inboxes are:
(1) Sudden low/dropping open/click rates.
(2) Sudden high/increased open/click rates.
(3) Reports from recipients that emails landed in their spam.
(4) High/increased bounce rate on even one email (more than 5% bounce rate should raise flags).

A good email deliverability audit will tell you what is going wrong and what to do to fix it. This should include analysis of your infrastructure (e.g. DKIM & DMARC), your list hygiene (e.g. # of hard bounces), the formatting of your emails (e.g. text to image ratio), and whether one-click unsubscribe is present or not. 

Due to high demand for MPG’s expertise in this area, we have just launched a stand-alone Email Deliverability Audit service. Request a quote here.

#2 MESSAGING

Is your USP defined, clear and well articulated in your marketing? 

Are the benefits of getting involved in your event obvious to speakers, attendees, sponsors and exhibitors when they visit your website, see your paid ads, spot social posts about your event and read your emails? 

A key gap may well be your lack of a strategic messaging framework that feeds into all of your event marketing. 

Without a messaging framework in place, you can’t:

- Be confident in your segmentation for targeted, personalised marketing
- Know your sales and marketing will be aligned and impactful
- Be sure all marcomms tactics will reinforce one another in a multi-touch approach.

Your documented messaging framework should be the single reference point that everyone in the business - content, sales, marketing - has fed into and consistently uses in all their comms with speakers, attendees and clients.  We’d be happy to show you what an MPG generated messaging framework looks like - drop us a line here to request a screen sharing call.

#3 CONVERSION TRACKING & ATTRIBUTION (GA4)

In MPG’s recent research with event marketers, only 4% said they were confident their Google Analytics (GA4) had been implemented correctly.

With accurate, event-specific data-driven attribution (DDA) and conversion tracking, you can properly measure your event marketing performance, prove ROI, and make confident investment decisions. This prevents money being wasted and avoids significant opportunity costs. 

Whenever MPG’s attribution specialists are asked to look at a client's GA4 setup, they almost always find critical gaps - usually due to marketers lacking access to the required experts. 

Every event marketer we speak to knows how important it is for GA4 to be set up correctly, but it seems they often lack support from the senior stakeholders they rely on to approve the money they need to access the expertise required.

Not having attribution set up properly prevents marketers from making a strong, measurable commercial impact and often damages the credibility of the marketing department. Doing a focused audit in this area should be an urgent priority for every marketer.

You probably need a conversion tracking and attribution audit if:

- Your Google Analytics setup hasn’t been reviewed by a GA4 expert in the last 12 months.
- Your GA4 was put in place by someone who has very little event marketing expertise.
- Your digital agency has only focused on how well GA4 is tracking metrics for paid ads.
- Your event marketers do not have confidence in the accuracy of the data coming out of your analytics setup, or they can’t get the data points they need when they need them.

Read about MPG’s conversion tracking audit service to see what you need.

#4 PAID MEDIA/PPC

If you’ve approved spend on paid media/PPC, how do you know if it is delivering the strongest possible ROI?

MPG’s digital marketing specialists recently audited campaigns for three large, established event organisers spending significant sums on paid ads and agency fees. We found worrying evidence that media budget was being wasted due to:

(1) Branded keywords being over-used
(2) Targeting being too wide 
(3) Targeting being too narrow
(4) Impressions being presented as performance metrics
(5) Incomplete or incorrect conversion tracking 
(6) Poor AI-generated creative being used

And the list goes on…

These digital campaigns were being run by ‘expert agencies’. The event marketers knew they were not being run well - but lacked the time or deep digital expertise to ask the agencies the best questions to interrogate the value they were getting for their money. So, they appointed MPG as a trusted strategic partner to conduct a thorough audit of how these paid media/PPC campaigns were being run. Get more information on MPG’s PPC/paid media audit service to see what you need. 

This is an audit that can save you a LOT of money where the budget is being wasted, while putting your paid ads on track to make your business a lot more money than they currently are. 

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A note on timing: whatever audit(s) you decide to run, it’s best to start the process at least three months before your budgeting cycle. You can't develop a strategy for where to invest if you don't yet know where your gaps are.

If you don’t know where your gaps are - or you don't have the time, resource, or internal capability to identify which areas will make the biggest difference - MPG can help. Contact us to find out how we can help you identify your key gaps and make the right investments for maximum impact.

 

WHERE ARE MARKETING BUDGETS BEING SPENT?

As a full-service agency for conference and exhibition marketing, it’s always interesting to see where event organisers are placing their bets when it comes to marketing spend. We expect that listing MPG’s most popular services provides a useful reference for event organisers - so they can see where their peers and competitors are spending money.

Here are the three services where demand has grown in the past 12 months:

(1) Outsourced multi-channel marketing for flagship events - to reliably grow revenue without growing overheads
About 40% of MPG’s resources are currently focused on delivering fully outsourced, multi-channel marketing for flagship events. We think this reflects a better understood need for a range of marketing specialists to work on an event marketing campaign, as well as a desire to keep overheads to a minimum while growth is pursued.

(2) PPC/paid media campaigns - approached more strategically
Over the past year, the number of companies signing on as MPG clients has doubled, and over 80% of our new clients have come to us to deliver the PPC/paid media campaigns for their events - covering mainly Google, LinkedIn, Meta and Microsoft. Event marketers have become more knowledgeable about digital marketing and intent on finding a trusted partner who will help them approach this channel more strategically and with more consistency in strong, well measured ROI.

(3) HubSpot optimisations - for best ROI 
As an established HubSpot partner for over 5 years, MPG has implemented HubSpot for many event organisers. Our HubSpot experts also spend a lot of time helping companies get more out of this tool when they’ve already implemented it with another partner. Interestingly, requests for ‘HubSpot optimisation’ have surged in the past 12 months. We’re seeing many event organisers focused on getting more value from their annual spend on HubSpot. They know they can segment, target and automate better with HubSpot, and they want to get their marketers and salespeople using the tool to best effect. 

GET IN TOUCH FOR MORE INFO 

 

MPG DIARY

Upcoming MPG hosted gathering:
MPG Event Marketing Leaders Roundtable (INPERSON - for senior executives only) - 21 May, London: In an AI-driven world, as email performance declines, what is the new winning approach to event marketing? Request an invitation. 

All MPG events are designed as learning, training and development opportunities for event marketers at every level. The full MPG events schedule for the rest of 2026 is currently being finalised. Get in touch to request the finalised info.

REQUEST INVITATION TO MPG EVENTS 

Past MPG events - materials are available upon request:

• Event marketing in 2026 and beyond: what are our strategic and tactical priorities?

• Getting spex marketing right to boost revenue - what is the best approach for my business?

• AI in PPC for B2B Events

• Winning visibility in an AI-driven search world: what every B2B event marketer should know about AI optimisation, data and search

• Effective PPC for B2B events: getting the right creative into your ads

• Sponsor marketing: what does a sponsor marketing campaign look like? How does this differ from and intersect with delegate marketing?

REQUEST PAST MPG EVENT MATERIALS 

Upcoming Events we’re attending:

Brighton SEO - 30 April & 1 May, Brighton
Monetising B2B Information & Events by Flashes & Flames - 13 May 2026, London

 

TOP 3 MPG BLOGS FROM THE PAST 3 MONTHS

• If you’re relying on email to promote your event, you’re in trouble - read here

• Why event website optimisation is now a commercial priority for B2B event marketers - read here

• AI in event marketing: your practical 4-step guide - read here

 

MPG CAN HELP YOU ACHIEVE STRONGER, MORE SUSTAINABLE GROWTH FOR YOUR FLAGSHIP EVENTS OR PORTFOLIO. 

We have a range of services focused on optimising inbound and outbound marketing, incorporating the foundations of success and the latest, proven automation and AI tools.

GET IN TOUCH

And that’s a wrap for April.

If you’d like to talk about how you can get more out of your investment in event marketing, please drop me a line.

Kind regards,
Helen Coetzee

Director, Strategic Advisor, Co-Founder - MPG

 

E: helen@mpg.biz
W: www.mpg.biz