I’ll bet no one picks this as their first A-Z peruse. They are always too much of the marketing mix, always getting replaced by something new (direct, emktg, social…..) and all best practices are known and have been experienced first-hand too many times.
Yet events always seem to get a third or more of the budget and then systematically ignored by everyone until it’s too late and time to move on to ignoring the next event.
What a shame. Events are arguably the most important part of the mix. They are where you get customer, analyst, press, partner, employee and even vendor face-time. If there is anything more valuable in selling (which is part of marketing) or relationship building than face-time, then please correct me.
Events done right can also have symbolic value that provides cost-effective awareness and mindshare. Political leaders get this. If you study their rise to power, you will see the importance of well choreographed symbolic events. Existing events (think Mardi Gras, The Masters, and that old annual trade-show) have symbolism baked-in and are just begging for creative marketing to better use them.
At a recent event, w had our CEO stand out front of our tradeshow party and personally shake hands with 1,500 attendees. That sends a message that can’t be sent on-line by mail or through others.
Try this. Take your lead, awareness and sales enablement marketing goals for the year and create a strategy and a plan to accomplish all of them through the 30% of your budget that is events. This will force you to not to over delegate to your events manager while the rest of the team under-contributes. Who knows you might even stumble on the idea of having some fun as a way to get the goals accomplished. Better yet, you may realize that events are more than 30% of your content and maybe as much as 50% of your promotional strategy. Best of all, you may come to realize that people don’t even have to come to the event for you to use it effectively as content and promotions.
Bottom line = don’t ignore 30% of the mix or it will be ignored. This is where true creative and programs leadership is required. Make it a team sport.
I’ve had the hair stand up on the back of my neck (in a good way) five times in my career where you know your team just changed the industry. Three of those were events (one trade, one customer, one analyst/press).