There’s no denying how valuable event marketing can be for any B2B business. Studies have shown that 84% of B2B leaders believe events are critical components of business success. But not all event marketing strategies are created equal.
Without the right strategy, events can quickly become a waste of both time and money. Getting your strategy right is the key to driving real event marketing ROI.
That’s why we published our latest E-Book, Using Intent Data to Improve Event Marketing. It can show you how a strong foundation of intent data can improve every tactical step of your event marketing strategy.
4 Phases of Effective Event Marketing
We’ve seen B2B event marketers increase registrations by 75% and attendance rates by 25% by leveraging intent data. The key to seeing those results in your own event strategy is to take advantage of intent data during each phase of the process.
When you’re getting ready to execute an event strategy, intent data can maximize returns in each phase of the process:
- Pre-Event Planning: Before you even think about marketing your event, you need to determine both theme and location. Educational content is what really drives attendees to events, so you want your theme to revolve around the pain points of your ideal prospects. Choosing a relevant theme and picking a location with a large population of ideal prospects will put you on the path to event marketing success. In both cases, intent data can help you make more informed decisions that will improve ROI.
- Setting the Invitation List: You chose the right location, you have the right theme, and now you need to create a highly-targeted invitation list. When you prioritize which prospects to invite, you increase your chances of turning attendees into customers. Success in this phase is all about segmenting prospect lists by topic, by partner technology, and by location. Investing in intent data gives you insight into all three of these factors.
- Driving Prospects to the Event: Don’t just blast out emails to every prospect in your market. We’ve found that sending relevant emails to recently active prospects is 7x more successful than sending to general lists. Intent data can help you set your email cadence, retarget active prospects, prioritize sales rep outreach, and design custom email/call templates to increase registrations.
- Post-Event Follow-Up: Maximizing event marketing ROI comes down to how well you can stay connected to attendees once the event is over. This means personalizing follow-up messages, expanding outreach to colleagues of attendees you meet, and tracking the right KPIs to ensure you’re meeting your goals. Intent data keeps you up to date prospect behavior and helps you correlate attendees with their larger account profiles.
There’s a fine line between getting each of these phases right and simply going through the event marketing motions. Using intent data properly will put you on a path to success that ultimately helps you unlock the event marketing ROI potential.
But this high-level overview of intent data in event marketing is just the start. Download the full E-Book, Using Intent Data to Improve Event Marketing, to learn more about increasing registration and attendance rates.
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