Making Rain with Events: Engage Your Tribe, Create Raving Fans, and Deliver Bottom Line Results with Event Marketing

By Scott Ingram

“Every marketing executive who invests in events as part of their
marketing mix should do themselves a favor and read this book.”
—Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute,
and Host of Content Marketing World

Scott Ingram of Certain has brought together some of the top ideas,
and best practices from a team of modern marketing experts.
Learn how to create an integrated event marketing strategy where
the results look like 1+1+1=10

ALLISON SAGET, AUTHOR OF THE EVENT MARKETING HANDBOOK
Get beyond event logistics and get revenue results
MATT HEINZ, HEINZ MARKETING
Connect your content marketing and event marketing strategies
THOM SINGER, THE CONFERENCE CATALYST
Set the tone for connecting
MARK ORGAN, INFLUITIVE
Mobilize your advocates
TIM HAYDEN, TTH STRATEGY
Leverage events as “mobile moments”
FRANNIE DANZINGER, BIZO
Get more value from sponsors, and win when you’re the sponsor
SHAWN LACAGNINA, SKYLINE
Maximize your trade show investments
ANITA COVELLI (WEHNERT), READYTALK
Incorporate webinars into your event marketing mix
BRIAN KARDON, LATTICE ENGINES
Improve event results with predictive marketing
DEBBIE QAQISH, THE PEDOWITZ GROUP
Understand your event marketing maturity
and how to get to the next level

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Ingram
• Release date: Aug 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990605911

Scott Ingram

Scott Ingram is the host of the Sales Success Stories Podcast where he interviews #1 and top 1% quota carrying individual contributor sales professionals.

Book preview

MAKING RAIN with EVENTS

Engage Your Tribe, Create Raving Fans, and Deliver Bottom Line Results with Event Marketing

Scott Ingram

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Scott Ingram

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

ISBN:

Print: 978-0-9906059-0-4

E-Book: 978-0-9906059-1-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014945899

To my current clients, future clients, and amazing network of friends. We succeed together!

MAKING RAIN FOR GOOD

A portion of the proceeds from your purchase of this book will be contributed to water.org. If you find the content in these pages to be of exceptional value or feel otherwise compelled to contribute please join us in giving: makera.in/rain4good

Thank you!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Content, Connections, and the Customer Experience

3. Beyond Logistics and Planning

4. Content for Conversion

5. Setting the Tone for Connecting

6. Want a Bigger Return on Your Big Event? Mobilize Your Advocates

7. Leveraging Events as Mobile Moments to Drive Sales

8. Sponsors and Sponsoring

9. Trade Shows

10. Webinars

11. Improving Event Marketing with Predictive Marketing

12. The Revenue Marketing Journey™... As an Events Maturity Model

13. The End... Is a Beginning

Connecting with the Authors

Acknowledgments

1 INTRODUCTION

Events can and should be one of the most powerful tools a marketer has at their disposal. This book is an exploration of what's truly possible through event marketing. It's what brought me to Certain (makera.in/certain) after seeing their vision for a marketing-first approach to events that deliver both more engaging experiences and real bottom-line results.

Take a close look at the marketing budgets of your average technology companies and you will notice a commonality among them: a significant portion of almost every budget is dedicated to events. According to IDC's 2013 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study, events constitute about one fifth of tech marketing budgets, on average more than content, branding, marketing automation, social media, PR, and analyst relations combined.

While investments in other traditional forms of marketing and advertising are dwindling, in-person events are just as popular as ever. The majority of CMOs (89%) still consider them to be important and valuable to their organizations. Trade shows, conferences, user groups, and even parties continue to be viewed as critical revenue-driving opportunities, with two thirds of CMOs investing in them to source new prospects, gather and cultivate leads, and hold face-to-face meetings with clients and prospects.

Done correctly, events have the potential to be one of the most significant force multipliers for a modern marketing organization. They can serve as a catalyst to help align sales and marketing, other departments and executives, and even your own marketing team's efforts. Many marketers want to do a better job of marketing themselves internally. These events represent a great opportunity to demonstrate exactly how an integrated marketing approach works to the rest of the organization, the executive team, and the board.

So much of our marketing efforts are focused on trying to get, and keep the attention of someone for more than the eight seconds that represents the average attention span these days (makera.in/attn). (You're still with me, right? Supposedly, Goldfish have longer attention spans than we do, and we're just getting started.)

Bring that same audience to an event, and now we have their attention for hours and, potentially, even days. Are you doing everything you can to make the most of this face time? In the rest of this book, we'll explore ways to deeply engage your attendees, and make the most of this extended period of interaction.

I frequently work with demand generation-oriented marketers who are obsessed (in a good way) with leads and how to net new revenue. As a group, I think we're missing many of the opportunities that our existing clients bring to us, especially in the context of events. Not only is there significant upsell and cross-sell potential, but these clients are likely our most important influencers—those who can help us convince others of the value of our offerings. It's time we start thinking more in terms of the lifetime value of our customer and their overall client experience. When it comes to that experience, events are one of your most significant and important touch points.

Too much of the traditional event approach is focused on execution and logistics. Although these things are critically important and can't be ignored, it's time we have a more strategic conversation about the role of events and how they fit into our integrated marketing efforts. Events represent a powerful resource for the collection of customer stories and other amazing content that can be leveraged as the fuel for so many of our marketing efforts. They can ignite your influencer marketing programs, drive your social media efforts, and extend the value of your marketing technology investments, especially marketing automation.

While this book was written primarily for marketing executives, I don't want to lose sight of the event planners, organizers, and producers who will pick this book up. They have a crazy, stressful, and underappreciated role in making events a success. They don't get nearly the respect they deserve. My hope for them is that they take some of these concepts to the business and marketing leaders in their organization. Starting a conversation about how events can better drive business results is a great way for planners and organizers to gain more visibility internally. Getting a career boost and driving the changes necessary almost always requires executive sponsorship.

In this book, I've worked to bring together some of the best minds across the marketing ecosystem, those who can impact your event efforts using an integrated approach. We'll discuss many of the different event types you have likely already deployed and suggest ideas and best practices to help you increase the value they contribute to your most important goals (revenue and renewals anyone?). We'll also provide strategies you can use before, during, and after your events to make the time horizon of the value they deliver less of... well... an event.

If we've done our job well, you will come back to this book again and again for ideas. You'll want to share it with others on your team and with your peers in other organizations. If we haven't delivered any new concepts, and you think you have even better ideas, we REALLY want to hear those.

There are always ways to improve, and this book is simply the beginning of a conversation. We look forward to having an exchange with you and hearing about your successes and challenges. Together, we can raise the bar and generate better results.

Thank you for investing your time with us, and in your own improvement. We sincerely hope you appreciate the time, energy, and expertise we've invested in bringing you some of our best ideas.

Now, let's begin this journey together.

2 CONTENT, CONNECTIONS, AND THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customer Experience = Conversion

If you consider the reasons you or anyone else attends events, the motivations can basically be boiled down to two themes: content and connections. Those two factors will impact customer experience the most.

For most organizations, the content piece is pretty natural and generally well taken care of. You work hard to build a strong line-up of speakers and sessions to deliver relevant material that your audience cares about, and you have a great keynote speaker, right? What about the connections? What do you do to help facilitate networking opportunities? At smaller, more intimate events, it might be enough to get the right people into the same room together and add a bit of alcohol to the mix. Unfortunately, this model doesn't scale at all when you get to hundreds or thousands of attendees at your conference. You can do better, and if you can deliver on quality connections, your attendees will love you for helping them. All of these efforts add up to a great experience.

Content

Content marketing has become one of the hottest topics in marketing. It's the fuel for inbound marketing strategies, and it's the way that people want to engage with us as they do more and more of their own research online.

Events are essentially just another form of content marketing. You are, after all, creating and presenting a ton of content in the form of keynote speakers, breakout sessions, and other presentations.

Yet the biggest challenge most organizations have is creating enough fuel (content) for their content marketing programs. If we look at our events from that perspective, we quickly see that they are an absolute treasure trove of reusable content.

Those presentations can become webinars, whitepapers, social media fodder, videos and virtually any other form of multi-channel content. Perhaps, even more powerful is our customer content.

You have a ton of customers in attendance, and they all have their own stories of success. What better time and place to capture this content that we know converts. You are missing a huge opportunity if you don't setup multiple mechanisms to capture this compelling content. Setup a video room and schedule sessions with your top customers. Hire some writers with journalism backgrounds to help pull out the juicy details of customers' conquests.

Learn about their challenges as well. Knowing what your audience is struggling with will give you powerful topics for content development. That information is exactly what others are likely searching for in their efforts to solve their own problems.

Deliver great content and capture compelling content. That is the power of events in your content marketing program.

Connections

If all we wanted from events was the content,