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Events can feel like an enormous undertaking, but they can also reap enormous benefits for brands. Especially in the B2B space, events are well-known as a catalyst for impactful business outcomes, from acquiring new leads to strengthening customer connections to stretching brand awareness.
In studioID’s 2024 Content Marketing Predictions survey 45% of content marketers predicted in-person experience/events to be their most successful content format.
Yet finding the right speakers for your branded event or choosing which conferences to invest a sponsorship in is no easy task. With so many dots to connect between pre-event nurture campaigns, day-of activations, and post-event follow-ups, do yourself a favor and start from success stories rather than from scratch.
We’ve compiled a list of unmissable steps—from planning to execution—to optimize your B2B event strategy.
When Planning Your Event
Define Clear Goals and KPIs
Be clear about what results you want from your event, whether generating leads, increasing brand awareness, upselling clients, or generating media attention. When possible, make your objectives quantifiable and consider how you might use these metrics for benchmarking later on.
What can objectives look like for your event? Here’s an example of a B2B campaign for Microsoft driven by two major events in Poland.
Their objectives were to:
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Promote the Microsoft cloud region in Poland as the most trustful and secure one in central eastern europe (CEE).
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Raise the business discussion on innovation and engage clients.
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Strengthen the brand position in the area of innovation.
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Gain a minimum of 300 new business leads.
Spoiler alert, they achieved all of them. Watch their case study here.
↗️ Demystify marketing measurement and demonstrate ROI. Get the Brand-to-Demand Measurement Kit.
Engage With Your Audience
Promote your event (or your involvement in one) across varying media channels to meet people where they like to consume content. Be clear in your messaging about what business challenges participants could solve by attending, and don’t be afraid to play with early-bird discounts to ramp up registrations. Lean on your speakers, too. Provide all speakers and partners with event messaging to expand your reach.
🗺️ Related Reading: 2024 Demand Gen Field Guide: Everything Marketers Need to Know
Planning In Action
Engage your audience early. According to their case study, Cisco’s global marketing strategy fueled partner engagement five months before their 2023 Partner Summit. To draw attendees in and keep them engaged, Cisco’s B2B event marketing strategy took a multi-channel marketing approach, with targeted communications across email, social media, blogs, newsletters, and online promotions.
Get Added Value From Partnerships
If you plan to host an event, consider partnering with a comparable company or client to enhance its value. (See how a partnership between Forbes and Walmart is making waves.) Consider also developing sponsorship packages that offer sponsors visibility and engagement opportunities.
Planning In Action
Alternatively, consider sponsoring an event that aligns with your organization’s goals, like DHL, who joined as a headline sponsor for a supply chain innovation conference. DHL’s promotional content drove to a public-facing website, boosting awareness of the sponsorship, and their on-site media efforts led to being featured in 18 media outlets.
When Executing Your Event
Create an Engaging Presence
Design an in-person experience that encourages interaction (i.e., hands-on demos, digital installations, and spaces to network), a virtual event that promotes engagement (i.e., live polling), or a conference experience that surprises and delights (i.e., surprise gifts beneath seats).
Execution In Action
Lufthansa is a great example of creating a surprise-and-delight moment. Following the main show at their launch event for their fully customizable flight experience, Allegris, they lifted their LED screen to show off the wide seating variety of Allegris. Then, with the help of VR, attendees got to go 36,000 feet up into the air to experience how Allegris looks and feels while flying.
Foster Meaningful Connections
Actively engage and network, whether it’s your event or one you’re sponsoring or speaking at. Going back to the example above, as a headline sponsor, DHL used the conference attendee lists to identify customers and target companies. By the end of the event, DHL’s team had engaged with 240+ attendees on the show floor, including 59 individuals from identified leads.
Execution In Action
At the same time, you want to ensure attendees can form their own meaningful connections. At Blizzard Entertainment’s annual gaming conference, BlizzCon, attendees were more than spectators. To deepen fan’s relationships, Blizzard Entertainment invited attendees to be active participants in competitions, activations, games, niche meetups, flash mobs, merch trading, and installations.
Deliver Value-Driven Content
Ensure your programming is informative, engaging, and has actionable takeaway for your audience. To strategically develop your topics and themes, understand what people are talking about today and what they’ll be talking about tomorrow. Consider also how you can have an ownable conversation at the cross-section of your value proposition and what the zeitgeist is currently discussing.
Execution In Action
The organizers of Impact ’23, a prestigious economic and technological event, sought to use their content to stimulate a conversation about the future of the global economy and society. Impact ‘23 had over 70 hours of content with thematic tracks, from mobility to open banking and mental health and wellbeing to defense and cybersecurity, allowing participants to attend what they saw as valuable. (Of the 1,050+ companies that attended, 95% said they’d recommend the event.)
When Following-Up After Your Event
Follow-Up and Nurture Attendees
It’s not over when your event ends. And while that can sound exhausting, the good news is that, even after the event, there are still more leads on the table. Implement lead nurturing strategies to keep the conversation going and convert leads into customers.
📧 Related Reading: 2024 Best Practices for Email Marketing Campaigns: A Guide for Demand Generation Marketers
Follow-Up In Action
But at the very least, follow up with attendees after the event with thank-you emails, resources, or key takeaways. Cisco, for example, created a highlights video to promote their 2023 Partner Summit after the fact. While DHL’s post-event marketing strategy was to summarize key takeaways in an article and then promote it through emails and social media. (The article was the second most-viewed asset on their microsite in 2023.)
Evaluate and Learn
As great as your event activation was, your next one can be even better. Review your performance against your KPIs, gather attendee feedback, and identify key learnings for future events. Fun fact: for Cisco’s award-winning 2023 Partner Summit, all event solutions connected to past attendee feedback, prompting enhancements of Executive 1:1 meetings and networking with experts and peers.
Your event got the leads. Now what? View the infographic to give your sales team the best chance to seal the deal.
