Develop and Execute on Your Event Marketing Plan w/ These Steps

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If you’re developing an event marketing plan, the pressure is on to deliver attendees and an overall quality event. With a plan and thought out execution in place, you’ll be able to increase chances of putting on a great event. 

This discussion is going to walk you through:

  • How to create an outline for the event
    • Who your target audience is
    • What the value add is
    • How you’ll drive attendance
    • Structure for the event
    • Follow-up after
  • Tools that you’ll need
    • An effective landing page
    • Creative content 
    • Scripts for sales team
    • Technology
  • Alignment between sales and marketing
    • Emphasis on the value to customer
    • Who will reach out and when
      • Before event
      • After event
  • Measuring Success

Let’s get started.

How to Create an Outline for the Event 

The outline for planning your marketing event doesn’t have to be fancy. Use a Word Doc or an Excel sheet to capture the topics that we’re about to go over.

The doc will serve as a reference that’ll keep you honest as you begin building out and executing on your campaign to drive attendance. 

Here’s where to start. 

Who Your Target Audience Is

One of the biggest mistakes marketing and sales teams make is trying to hit too large of an audience. Not all audiences think the same, and without having a clearly defined target audience for your event it will be hard to determine what’s most important to them.

What’s important to a C-Level executive is usually not what’s most important to an administrator that is in the trenches of the day-to-day business operations. 

A clearly defined audience allows you to easily determine what value you can provide.

What the Value-Add Is

After you’ve determined who you’re targeting for the event, it’s time to determine what you’ll be targeting them with.

Sticking with the initial example, you can offer the C-Level demographic value by showing cost savings and productivity over a period of time, while the administrator demographic will care more about how your offering will make their day-to-day lives easier (not necessarily focused as much on cost). 

We’re in an era where brands are constantly competing for attention, so put yourself in your target audiences’ shoes to ensure that your value-add will benefit them. 

How You’ll Drive Attendance 

The next piece of your outline will be how you drive attendance to your event. Whether the event is physical or virtual, you won’t want to show up on the big day without an audience. 

It’s time to establish the marketing channels that you’ll use to drive attendance. 

Channels to Drive Attendance to Your Marketing Event

Some ideas include but aren’t limited to:

  • TeleSales: Have your sales team reach out directly to current and prospective customers to inform them on the upcoming event.
  • Email: Email marketing is a great tool that will allow you to leverage automation and track insights to see any engagement on your emails. Hint: this is also a great tool for reminders after sign-ups for the event. 
  • Social media: Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google are a great place to update your current following on news and upcoming events. 
  • Website: Your website is the first impression that you’ll leave on customers in the digital age. In addition to your event page (we’ll get to that later) you can broadcast upcoming event dates front and center with a link to the sign-up. 
  • Digital Ads: One of our favorite methods of driving attendance is by using digital advertising on Google and Social. These platforms allow you to granulary target your desired audience for better visibility. 

Structure for the Event 

Just like how you’ve mapped out an outline to drive attendance to your event, you’ll want to have a structure for the event itself. 

Some things to think about include:

  • Talk tracks around
    • Introductions
    • Main discussion
    • Breakout sessions
    • Questions
    • Closing out the event
  • Content for the event such as
    • Powerpoints
    • Scripts
    • Giveaways
    • 1-Pagers
    • Booths (if physical event)
  • Set a schedule with clear expectations so the audience knows
    • What will be covered and when
    • When there will be breaks
    • When to ask questions and how to do so

It’s important to remember that you’re asking for your target audiences’ precious time, and setting clear expectations as to how the event will run can mitigate some of the uncertainty before they even attend. 

Follow-up Plan 

Too often, marketing and sales teams fill an event with attendees and think the job is done once it’s over. 

After the event is when the real execution begins and the planning takes form. 

You should now have a large list of current and future customers that you can reach out to:

  • Gauge their interpretation of how the event went
  • Ask if everything was clear
  • See how you can fill in any knowledge gaps
  • Determine interest in making a purchase within X amount of time

The follow-up should be within one or two weeks (at the latest) of the event to ensure that the topic is still fresh in your target audiences’ mind. 

Lastly, take notes on all conversations that you’ve had after the follow-up. Even if they’re not buying now, you’ll be knowledgeable when you reach out and they’re actually ready to buy. 

Tools That Will Help You Execute On Your Event Marketing Plan 

Having the appropriate tools gives you the best chance at a successful marketing event. Although there are a number of ways to set up an effective campaign, we’re going to go through some foundational pillars that should give you everything that you need. 

An Effective Landing Page

A landing page will be one of the foundations of your event. As you’re reaching out to prospective attendees’, your landing page is where you’ll be able to direct them to:

  • Sign up for the event
    • Tell them when and where
  • Inform them further on the value-add
  • Show FAQs to alleviate any concerns 
  • Ultimately appeal to your target audience 

According to HubSpot, Landing pages are the least popular type of sign-up form, but they have the highest conversion rate (23%), and 62.6%. 

Here are 9 tips on how to create an effective landing page. 

Creative Content

Creative content will speak directly to your audience to inform them on the topic at hand, and immediately call out the value that you’re providing. 

Marketing content can take shape in the form of:

  • 1 pagers
  • Infographics
  • Blog posts
  • Videos 
  • Podcasts

HINT: Your creative content should be readily available on your landing page. It’s important not to inundate an audience with too much information, so be sure to take the most important pieces that clearly highlight the offering/value and broadcast them on your website for viewing. 

Scripts for Sales Team 

Once you have content and a landing page to direct customers to, you can start working with sales on messaging that helps drive customers to the event, discussion points throughout the event, & follow-ups for post-event. 

Having unified messaging ensures that your customers aren’t confused by an offering, and also lets them know that your team is on the same page. This can further build credibility. 

The scripts don’t have to be fancy, but can include:

  • Objection point handling
  • Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
  • Value-add to the audience (you’ll notice there’s a recurring theme when it comes to adding value)

Technology 

By using the right technology to complement your efforts, you’ll be able to enhance the customer experience and do so with the power of automation. 

There’s enough to do as it is, so automation can help you save time without compromising your brand’s personality from a customer perspective. 

Here are a few tools that can make your life a bit easier:

Zapier 

Zapier is a 3rd party platform that allows you to connect multiple platforms via an access point integration (API) without having to know how to code. 

For example, when someone signs up for your event on your landing page, their contact information can automatically be moved over to a Google Sheets document in order to accurately track all of your upcoming attendees. 

It can also help integrate with your social media and email marketing platforms which can be crucial as you look to drive attendance. 

Bonus: Here’s how to link Eventbrite with MailChimp using Zapier. 

Eventbrite

In addition to your landing page, Eventbrite is a great way to manage upcoming events. The tool allows you to give an overview of the event, set a number of tickets available, and even integrate with your websites’ landing page.

For example, you can create your ‘event’ on Eventbrite, and then use an API (access point integration) to incorporate all of the information on your landing page. This can all be done without you having to build out the technology for selling tickets and sign-ups as Eventbrite will take care of that for you.  

MailChimp

It doesn’t have to be MailChimp, but an email marketing tool that allows you to automatically send out emails based on a user action will offload the manual burden that goes with planning a marketing event.

The right email marketing tool will allow you to automatically perform tasks such as:

–   Invite customers to your event

–   Send out reminder emails

–   Execute thank you email after event sign-up

–   Send important information their way that’ll set the tone for the event

Website and Backend Tools

With your website being a pillar to your marketing event demand generation, having an interactive website for your target audience is important.

Rubicom focuses predominantly on WordPress websites due to their customization features and easy backend page builders like WPbakery and Elementor to help you create visually appealing pages for customers without compromising website performance. 

Lastly, your website should be able to integrate with all of the previously mentioned tools to provide a better workflow overall for your marketing event efforts.

Alignment between Sales and Marketing 

With sales and marketing being the driving forces behind driving demand for your marketing event, it’s important to ensure that goals and messaging are aligned to better serve customers.

Let’s go into a few ways to make sure Marketing and Sales teams are on the same page.

Emphasize The Value to The Customer 

  • What challenge is the customer experiencing?
  • How does your product or service mitigate that challenge for them? 
  • How do you stack up vs. competition?
  • Do you have success stories that show you’ve successfully helped people in their shoes?

Aligning messaging that clearly calls out all the above, in combination with targeting the right audience at the right time will set you up for success.

Who Will Reach out and When 

Sticking with the theme of marketing and sales being unified, part of your plan should include who will reach out to the attendees and when the outreach will occur.

To simplify the outreach efforts, here are some best practices. 

Before The Event

Before the event (virtual or in-person) occurs, the majority of the outreach can be handled by the marketing teams as they’re able to:

  • Send out email campaigns
  • Run paid ads
  • Put together creative content
  • Send data insights to sales

This is not to say that sales won’t play a role here, but rather marketing will lead the efforts before the event. 

Sales teams can still reach out to those that they have prior relationships and pass along the marketing material that was created for the event. 

After The Event 

After the event occurs, the sales team is now in the driver’s seat. Sales will lead the outreach efforts and report back to marketing to ensure:

  • Those that are no longer interested are removed from the appropriate mailing lists
  • Feedback is gathered on the attendees perception of the event
  • Attendees that sales weren’t able to get in touch with can be put back into the marketing campaigns, ensuring frequent touchpoints

Ultimately, Marketing drives the efforts initially before handing it over to Sales post-event. 

Throughout the process, both sales and marketing will complement each other’s skill sets. 

Measuring Success For your Event Marketing

We hinted at campaign measurement in the last section, but what does measuring the success of a campaign actually entail? 

Revenue

The big one that every Marketing and Sales team has to justify: Return on Investment (ROI). 

Significant time and often, money, are spent putting a marketing event together, so you have to be able to tie revenue to the campaigns for management teams.

By tying deals directly to the campaigns, the justification is there for your future marketing event planning efforts. 

Attendees 

Going into the day of the event, you should have a good number of sign-ups; Understand that not all of those sign-ups will attend the event. 

For example, one of our clients typically sees a 60% conversion rate for those that signed-up vs. actually attend. Alternatively, 40% of those that signed up didn’t actually attend the event. 

This highlights the importance of gaining a higher number of sign-ups, and striving to increase the conversion rates over time. 

Feedback and Notes

There are always improvement areas. You can gain direct feedback from the attendees on what they thought of the event.

  • Did they find it valuable?
  • Was there a clear and concise message/takeaway?
  • Were they the right audience for the event in the first place?
  • Is there a need within the next 6-12 months? 

The feedback and notes portion will allow you to improve your next event, increase conversion rates, and better serve your target audience overall. 

HINT: put the feedback and notes into your next event marketing plan for reference. 

Closing Out

Developing your event marketing plan and successfully executing it takes time, effort, and collaboration among your teams. However when planned out appropriately, the marketing events will greatly complement your existing sales and marketing efforts.

Marketing events can also help you continue to develop long-lasting relationships with your target audience so don’t be discouraged if you’re not generating as much revenue as you’d hoped for at first. 

Let us know how your event marketing plan is coming along, or if you need help mapping out your efforts.