We’ve been talking to event marketing leaders from some of the world’s leading event organisers about their hopes and fears as more investment comes into our industry - particularly from private equity.

Here is what we think every strategic event marketing leader should be thinking about now.

 

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1. Private equity investment is changing expectations of event marketing leaders

Private equity and other investors expect to see regular, current, and accurate reporting on marketing performance metrics driving growth KPIs and commercial impact. This pushes marketers beyond activity reporting. They now need to show what they’re doing to directly influence and support retention, pipeline, revenue and business value.

A big challenge marketing leaders currently face is that many boards and senior leaders still default to last-touch attribution - overlooking and undervaluing essential top-of-funnel marketing activities. Event marketers need to be prepared to defend the budget needed to build trusted brands via year-round content marketing and initiatives driving engagement - well before conversions become the focus. This can be done by demonstrating quantified reach and engagement early in customer journeys and event cycles, and showing how this leads to commercial outcomes needed.

Creating predictive analytics models based on benchmarking, reach, engagement and conversions; continually communicating progress and ROI in all its forms; demonstrating how budget is being invested to achieve commercial outcomes needed; and providing data-led evidence should all become part and parcel of an event marketing leader’s workflow.

For more on the measurement and attribution foundations behind this, see our practical guide to event marketing measurement and attribution for B2B conference and exhibition organisers.

 

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2. Senior decision-makers in B2B event organisers need to recognise the barriers preventing visibility of marketing performance

Related to the point above, the biggest barriers to boards getting the visibility they need are:

Firstly, the right technology and analytics setup is required to give marketers access to what they need, and then they need the benchmarks and analytical skills to turn the data into valuable marketing intelligence and board-friendly reporting. Not having these in place is hardly ever the fault of the marketers themselves - but more a product of senior decision makers funnelling investment into other areas as they prioritise immediate results over strategic impact via marketing.

The challenge event marketing leaders say they’re facing is that their CEO and CFO are pushing them to deliver better visibility of results, when this is physically impossible due to not having the analytics tools in place to get the metrics needed. If the CFO won’t endorse spending money on essential tools because they don’t understand the need, the only option a marketing leader has is to try and help them understand things better and change their minds on where money should be spent by presenting a more compelling business case for buying in the tools, skills and know-how to get the job done.

It is clear that many hundreds of hours of highly inefficient, error-prone and non-scalable manual work is currently being done by marketers to deliver the reporting needed - because they have no other choice. This is a perfect example of a false economy and an opportunity cost. If this time could be spent driving revenue - imagine how much better the commercial results coming through in the reports would be?

This connects directly to the RevOps mistakes we see most often, which we broke down in our blog on the 4 costly RevOps mistakes B2B event businesses make.

 

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3. Senior marketers responsible for the promotion of conferences and exhibitions need to be more ‘commercially confident’

Marketing leaders always want to be heard and taken seriously at the highest level in any organisation, but far too often they are not invited to the top table. Some might argue that this is because marketers don’t hold themselves accountable enough for commercial performance, and their contributions to senior level discussions often come across as very ‘operational’ rather than ‘strategic’. The truth is that marketers have a credibility and gravitas problem in many organisations.

Something else to consider is that most senior executives, especially investors, want to hear both the good news and the bad news about commercial results. They want to be told when it is unlikely that commercial targets will be achieved, and why. What they’re especially interested in is what needs to be done to drive better outcomes.

Clarity, visibility and predictability is what investors need and expect. Marketing leaders need to get better at delivering valuable intelligence, explaining risks, setting realistic expectations and building data-led and commercially focused business cases to give boards more confidence in their investment in marketing.

 

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