Welcome to the new subscribers who have joined us over the past week!

You’re now part of a group of over 500 highly engaged B2B event professionals who read MPG Insights regularly in their quest to build the best possible event marketing practices in their organisations.

This ‘digest’ email gives you the highlights from 2025 so far, plus the most popular and talked about resources that we have published over the past couple of months:

• Poor email marketing performance under the spotlight: why is email such a worry for event marketers right now? And what can you do about declining email marketing performance?
   

• Marketing measurement essentials: of all participants in a recent GA4 webinar hosted by MPG - only 4% said they were confident their GA4 was set up correctly - even if it was set up by an expert. View the webinar recording to benchmark your own GA4 situation and to learn how to fix things if they’re broken.
   

• CEO’s priorities for event marketing success: don’t miss out on MPG’s blog series written for CEOs. 

I’d love to hear from you about your event marketing challenges and opportunities - plus new ideas and innovations you’re trying out. Please drop Helen a LinkedIn DM any time.  

And please share this email with your colleagues and people in your wider network who want event marketing to shine brightly as a driver of commercial results and value.
 

Why is email worrying event marketers so much?

Thank you Tamar at Gleanin for sparking another important conversation. Here’s our take: it’s time for B2B event marketers to move beyond email as the sole engine of their campaigns.

Email still matters - but on its own, it won’t work well and it just isn’t enough any more.

PPC/Paid Media is now a critical part of the mix, yet many event teams are either underusing it or wasting most of their media spend because the setup and management of their campaigns is poorly done inhouse (due to lack of time and expertise) or badly delivered by an agency (for various reasons...).

In Team MPG’s work on digital marketing campaigns, the #1 reason we see for PPC having poor or invisible ROI is that conversion tracking is not set up correctly - or at all. This means marketers are only seeing vanity metrics (impressions and clicks) that mean nothing without conversion metrics added. Based on inflated vanity metrics, they feel pressured to spend more on campaigns that are not working well. A tragic waste of precious marketing budget!

Alarm bells should start ringing very loudly if the person responsible for running and measuring your PPC campaigns says conversions aren’t being or can’t be tracked. In our experience, there is always a way to get conversion tracking working well enough to make true PPC ROI visible and give you the intelligence you need to make good decisions about how much and where to invest in this very important channel. 

Ignoring PPC is no longer an option. It’s driving as much traffic to websites as email these days, and in many cases we’re seeing PPC delivering more leads, registrations and revenue than email.

Don’t stop doing email marketing! But do start PPC - or at least pay more attention to this channel to make sure it’s performing well.

You should also see an uplift in email marketing performance if your PPC is being managed well - with attention on all stages of the funnel.

And if your campaigns are mostly AI-run without expert oversight, your budget is likely going up in smoke.

Why not share your thoughts on this subject! Have a look at our full LinkedIn post and add your comments here.

 

Kudos to the incredible team at Questex for being such great collaborators!

We love working with Kirsty McKenna and her team of event marketers. Together we are empowering Questex, a leading information and events company in the experience economy, to exponentially grow their reach and deliver uniquely valuable events for the communities they serve.

While Kirsty was the Marketing Director who brought us in to work on Questex PPC, it was Donna, the Marketing Manager at Questex who we’ve worked with most closely day-to-day. It’s been a great collaboration!

All members of Team MPG understand what a day in the life of an event marketer looks like - because we are event marketers and have worked closely with many event marketers in a wide range of event organisers globally. We’re very grateful to the event marketers we have worked with who have been generous and open in their approach to collaborating with MPG.

Our aim is to help event marketers do their strategising, planning and delivery in the most commercially impactful and efficient way possible.

When Team MPG takes on an event’s PPC campaigns, a key focus is to make sure the event marketers who have trusted us with their PPC budget have full visibility of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, the ROI they will achieve and how best to communicate this activity and ROI to their stakeholders.

This close collaboration means event marketers we work with are able to continually learn and stay up to date on key developments in PPC & Paid Media, as they relate to event marketing. Even though they’re not running the campaigns themselves (and most would never find the time!), they will gain and maintain the knowledge they need of this increasingly important marketing channel.

Find out about MPG’s PPC / Paid Media Services

 

How do you know when you’re ready to work with MPG?

Once you’ve decided to get some external help, why should you choose MPG as your trusted partner? What makes us different from freelancers and other agencies?

# 1: When you work with MPG, you get a team of event marketing and channel specialists plugged into your business.

With MPG, you get access to a full, flexible team covering all the specialist marketing skills you need - not just one person with a limited set of skills and also limited bandwidth.

This is because we’ve continually invested in the ongoing learning and development of our people over the past 12 years - building a permanent team of staff members who are fully engaged and committed to our clients’ success. This shines through in the consistently high quality of Team MPG’s work, as well as the stellar commercial results we achieve for clients. 

When you have Team MPG on board as an extension of your inhouse team - we don’t only fill resource gaps. Working with MPG means you will benefit from the deep expertise of channel specialists who understand events inside out within a well managed team of ‘plug and play’ marketers fully geared up to deliver exactly what you need, when you need it!

# 2: MPG has an extensive track record you can trust

When you hire a new inhouse member or a freelancer - how can you be confident they’ll perform well and deliver what you need? This can only come from knowing a lot about their experience and track record based on trusted references.

MPG exists because our clients choose to keep us on board and they also refer us to their networks. This has resulted in us being able to steadily grow our team and build long-term relationships with clients who keep coming back for more - and telling the world we’re a safe bet!

# 3: MPG leads with substance (not just style)

A flashy pitch might look good, but it doesn’t mean actual delivery will be good. At MPG, we focus on what actually matters - substance, then we add style.

Too many businesses get burned by agencies that over-promise with enticingly presented pitches, and then underdeliver.

MPG’s track record and the quality of our work speaks for itself. Our focus is on getting the work done well - and on time. This is what keeps clients coming back again and again.

READ: 10 Reasons to Work with MPG

Why is GA4 in focus now?

In a recent GA4 webinar, only 4% of participants said they were confident their GA4 was implemented correctly. The vast majority said they were either unsure, suspected gaps, or knew something wasn’t quite right.

If you think your GA4 might be collecting some data - but you're not sure if it’s the right data, accurate data, or how to interpret it - you’re not the only one!

Because GA4 was not a straightforward 'upgrade' to the previous version of Google Analytics, we see most companies still grappling with it. Almost everyone we speak to needs a GA4 audit and revamp to ensure their tracking is set up correctly and that ROI on marketing investment is showing accurately. This is the case even when ‘specialists’ have done the set up!

Don’t let a poor GA4 setup sabotage your marketing efforts. Drop Helen a DM on LinkedIn if you’d like a chat with one of our GA4 specialists to work out if yours is doing what it needs to do.

 

EVENT MARKETING SERIES for Events CEOs

We’re thrilled to launch this new series of MPG Insights articles. They’re designed to give you the tools to ensure your event marketing engine is driving commercial success and sustainable, scalable revenue growth.

And this is not just for CEOs! It’s for anyone in an events business who cares about marketing performance - marketing leaders, commercial leaders and all ambitious events executives.

If you’re strategically minded and want to make sure the event marketing efforts in your business are doing the job they need to - this is a series you’ll want to keep reading!

The following two parts have been published thus far:
PART 1: Essential questions to ask about your investment in event marketing
PART 2: Measuring your marketing to unlock growth

 

What can Team MPG do for you?

• Conference delegate acquisition: boost your numbers, revenue and attendee quality.
  Turbo-charge your flagship events! Don’t let gaps in marketing skills and resources stop your most important conferences from reaching their full potential. Bring Team MPG on board to compliment your inhouse team.
   

• Sponsor marketing for conferences: attract new sponsors & grow AOV.
  MPG has the proven, winning formula for supporting sponsorship sales people in finding new sponsors, growing AOV and shortening sales cycles - helping make sponsorship sales more efficient and effective, especially when hunting for new sponsors.
   

• Visprom for tradeshows: get a bigger, better profile audience.
  Do you need a larger and/or better quality event audience? MPG is your ideal partner! We can help you to attract, engage and convert your ideal attendees.
   

• Exprom for tradeshows: attract more of the right exhibitors, likely to come back in future years.
  Team MPG can boost your exhibition sales pipeline for consistent annual revenue growth and higher recurring revenues from the right exhibitors.
   

• PPC/Paid Media: get event expertise into your digital advertising campaigns.
  Our dedicated team of PPC/Paid Media specialists understands how event marketing must work for best results. We also stand apart from other agencies with our highly transparent and collaborative approach. Learn more.
   

• Database improvements: clean, organise and grow your event marketing data.
  Get your database into good shape faster with Team MPG! We can help you achieve more effective and efficient marketing and sales with better data going into your campaigns. Enquire about our data services.
   

• Analytics & metrics that matter: get visibility of how your marketing campaigns, channels and tactics are working in easy-to-digest, benchmarked reports.
  Making marketing measurable is essential for growth. We can help you track, benchmark and analyse your event marketing - systematically and efficiently. Request a demo of MPG’s marketing performance dashboards.

Learn more about our delprom, spexprom, visprom and exprom services

 

Thanks for reading. We’re glad to have you with us. Keep an eye out for the next edition, where we’ll continue sharing practical insights, expert perspectives, and stand out examples from across the events industry.

Until then, happy marketing!