‘The Big Switch Off’ – Are you GA4 ready? by Sharise Wilkinson, on 10/03/2023 There’s not much time left until Google sunsets Universal Analytics and will only process new data via GA4 (Google Analytics 4). If you haven’t already implemented GA4, you need to do so as soon as possible, as there are 3 important things you won’t be able to do without it! #1 You’ll need GA4 to…track your website analytics Put quite simply, if you do not switch to using GA4 before the 1st of July 2023, you will lose the ability to track your website analytics via Google Analytics. The current version, Universal Analytics (also known as GA3), will be ‘sunsetted’ in July 2023, meaning that you will no longer be able to collect data in any analytics properties using this version, so you will have no visibility of your website visitors and other stats. It will also not be possible to import any historical data from your existing UA properties to new GA4 ones – so if you have not done so already, set up GA4 asap to capture the data you need before the ‘big switch off’. #2 You’ll need GA4 to…accurately track user engagement One of the most crucial updates in GA4 is how user engagement will be tracked. Instead of cookie-based session tracking (as is with Universal Analytics), GA4 tracks ‘hits’ called events. This means that all user interactions on a website, such as clicks, form submissions, and video views, are recorded as events, allowing for a more detailed analysis of user behaviour. Using these events, GA4 is then able to build a timeline of engagement for each of your website visitors, thus determining an accurate picture of each session. The engagement time is recorded from the first event to the last, and it’s much easier to determine the number of engaged sessions, against your overall website traffic. Being able to more accurately understand how long your visitors are engaging with your website for, and what they’re engaging with, will give you the insights you need to optimise your on-site content. #3 You’ll need GA4 to…use the latest AI in marketing Another significant difference between GA4 event tracking and Universal Analytics is the use of machine learning algorithms. GA4 uses advanced algorithms to analyse user behaviour and predict their next move, allowing businesses to personalise the user experience and optimise marketing strategies. This feature is not available in Universal Analytics, which relies on basic tracking methods and reports – meaning if you haven’t already switched to GA4 – you’re missing out! MPG can help you install GA4 on your website. Contact us to start today! Continue Reading Topics: Analytics and intelligenceWebsite optimisation
Marketing Leaders in B2B Events: it’s time to do things differently! by Sharise Wilkinson, on 09/03/2023 In early 2023, I hosted a Marketing Leaders Roundtable on behalf of MPG, bringing together heads of marketing from B2B events businesses to share insights about their current challenges and opportunities. Participants found the discussion very valuable as they could share their experiences and brainstorm ideas to drive their marketing functions, and businesses, forward. The key discussion points were: 1. Common challenges facing leaders in B2B Media/Events 2. B2B marketing resources/skills: building a resilient marketing function From the in-depth round-table discussion, it was clear that event marketing leaders are facing many of the same challenges, outlined below. Attracting and retaining experienced event marketers has become even more costly and time-consuming Marketers with conference and exhibition marketing experience have always been difficult to find. And the pandemic has made that even harder as so many marketers left the events industry. Retaining experienced event marketers and replacing those who leave has become a much more costly and time-consuming exercise. Salary expectations have risen (for marketers with and without event marketing experience), it is taking a long time to hire new marketers at all levels, and all staff now need and expect more ongoing training than previously. Marketing leaders are having to think differently, finding new ways to ensure they have all the resources and skills they need for a strong and resilient marketing function. What needs to change? Many businesses are now giving more consideration to how they use external partners to inject all the skills and resources into their event marketing as needed to achieve their commercial goals. This smart use of external partners also helps to motivate and retain valued internal marketers. The best marketing talent demands ongoing learning and development As marketing changes so fast, smart marketers know they need to be learning constantly in order to maintain a skill set that is valuable for any employer. Marketing leaders are recognising the importance of building learning and development programmes for their teams, and delivering these carefully and consistently in order to attract and retain good people. It is, however, not always possible or sensible to have in-house marketers trained on all aspects of marketing – especially the more advanced technical areas of marketing such as martech, data, and analytics where ‘special projects’ are often better delivered by external partners. What needs to change? The most progressive marketing leaders are always thinking about how they can enhance the knowledge of their marketers while providing the inspiration and support to enable and motivate them to deliver the best commercial results – and stay with the business. This requires marketing leaders to step out of the ‘hamster wheel’ of spending all their time scrambling to find stop-gap resources, while also hiring and training new marketers. To break this vicious cycle, they need to apply some ‘out of the box’ thinking and solutions, asking themselves the following important questions: 1. How can I strategically bring in external help as a long-term solution to my ongoing event marketing skills and resource problem? 2. How can I build the business case to gain senior stakeholder support to do this? Can external partners help build this business case? Event marketers are facing unrealistic expectations and unreasonable demands No single marketer can have the full set of strategic, tactical, creative, and technical skills now needed to promote a leading conference or exhibition. Event marketers are often expected to do the impossible and are spread very thinly across multiple products and channels. This is especially damaging when it comes to flagship or high-growth events which then don’t get the attention they need. Marketers who are not enabled to do their jobs well are never going to be able to deliver the best results for these events. Leaders in B2B events businesses need to recognise how complex and demanding marketing campaigns have become, and the negative impact that a poorly resourced marketing function can have on business performance. The marketing skill and resourcing levels of previous years are no longer sufficient to succeed as a leading events business. What needs to change? The most successful, fast-growing conferences and exhibitions have strong marketing functions driving great results. These are resourced with all the required marketing skills and manpower needed – usually a combination of internal and external experts – organised well strategically and tactically into high-performance event marketing teams. Relying only on internal resources is not the smart way to grow an events business. Having the ‘best of both’: generalist and specialist marketers More marketing specialists with focused skill sets are now needed – so one event would need at least three different marketers with different areas of expertise to work together to deliver good results. Typically, a marketing generalist is needed to bring together a multi-skilled event marketing team – organising, managing, supporting and focusing all team members on clear goals. Some marketing leaders are keeping generalist marketing skillsets inhouse and outsourcing for specialist and technical skills. This gives them the scope to be flexible and dial-up and dial down their investment as required by the business or as dictated by the event life cycle. What needs to change? The most progressive event business leaders are looking at how they can bring in additional, external marketing resources to deliver the marketing for a specific event that has high growth potential, sometimes an important launch within a high growth portfolio. This kind of focused project and investment means these ‘star products’ are given a boost in terms of their marketing leadership position. When this process is managed well, with the right external partners and internal organisation, the ‘extra’ investment should more than pay for itself – becoming a ‘no brainer’ for any growth focused organisation. MPG helps Marketing Leaders achieve best results. If you would like to join one of our future round-tables, or find out about the services MPG offers to help Marketing Leaders drive the best results for their businesses, please get in touch. Continue Reading
Email marketing do’s and don’t’s when promoting your conference by Sharise Wilkinson, on 10/02/2023 With the rise of paid media and web 3.0, is email still an important channel? The answer is simply “Yes”. Strong email marketing is essential to the success of any conference. Why is email a critical marketing channel? Email marketing is still ranked as the most utilised marketing channel, with 93% of B2B leverage email marketing in their campaigns*. It is one of the quickest and most effective ways to personalise your messages and segment your audience accordingly. For conference marketing, it allows you to consistently engage with your audience throughout an event cycle, in a dynamic, engaging and user-friendly way. Here are some of team MPG’s ‘conference email marketing do’s and don’ts’ to get you started for your next campaign. DO’S #1 DO get your data right with a well-structured database – your contacts need to be appropriately tagged (i.e. sector, seniority level, job title). Segmenting by behaviour ensures that prospective attendees are pushed down the marketing funnel and nurtured in the right way. #2 DO automate some of your emails to generate the best results – registration confirmations, abandoned basket follow-up emails, and downloadable content confirmation emails are all valuable touch points that are quite straightforward to automate. #3 DO lead with content – have a well-thought-out content marketing strategy, with a good balance of promotion and content-led communications to position you as a thought leader. #4 DO have a clearly mapped-out email marketing plan – to prevent email fatigue, marketers must carefully plan their email campaigns to ensure that periods of high communication (early birds, registration deadlines etc.) are followed by a period of engaging, content-led emails. #5 DO work to a long lead time – to attend your conference, prospects need to have enough information, time, and conviction to commit to paying for a delegate ticket, transport and accommodation, and time away from their day-to-day work. #6 DO get personal – use the information you hold about your audience (like first name and company) to grab their attention. Use their behaviour and previous engagements with your brand to give them more of what they are most interested in. #7 DO make your emails short, snappy, and visually appealing – think about the marketing emails you receive, you probably skim and pick out the most important info before deciding whether to read the paragraph copy, right? Email design is important; make your key information stand out. #8 DO experiment – with sender names to see which ones get the best open rates and A/B test elements of your emails such as preview text, CTAs and imagery to see which messages perform best. #9 DO always include basic event information – like conference dates and location. Don’t expect your audience to remember this information from previous emails or have to click through to your website to find out. #10 DO have a clear call to action – your emails need to be informative and engaging, but they also need to inspire action – whether it’s downloading a piece of content, exploring the agenda, or buying a pass for your event. DON’T’S #1 DON’T only send email campaigns in the few months leading up to your event – this is a huge missed opportunity by far too many conference organisers. Keep past attendees and leads informed all year round. #2 DON’T send out emails with too many messages – for every email campaign, identify one key focus e.g. exciting updates to the agenda; the latest speakers; or an early bird deadline. Make it clear to the recipient what you need them to do with obvious CTAs. #3 DON’T flood your audience’s inbox – sending multiple emails every week makes it more likely that your target audience will unsubscribe. Plus, using words like “free”, “buy”, or “urgent” in your subject lines can mean your emails are flagged as spam. #4 DON’T focus only on promotions, or communicate the price straight away – especially at the beginning of the campaign when prospects are not ready to commit/buy. First, convince them of the value, benefits, and business case for spending their time and money on your conference before communicating prices and promotions. #5 DON’T neglect your website – potential buyers will make their decision about whether to attend an event based on what they see on your event website. They will want to explore the agenda and speakers, and see who they can meet. Your website must be optimised to engage and convert website visitors or your email marketing won’t work. #6 DON’T send the same message to everyone on your database all the time – split your database into key groups based on demographics or behaviour to ensure your messages are targeted at the most relevant people. #7 DON’T forget mobile optimisation – with the majority of senior execs now opening emails on mobile, if you’re not optimising for mobile, you’re likely missing engagement opportunities. #8 DON’T forget to measure your email results – monitoring and regularly analysing deliverability, open rates, and click through rates is essential for making good decisions about your email marketing. #9 DON’T email data that hasn’t been contacted in over 12 months – old email addresses are often recycled as spam traps in a bid to weed out companies with questionable data practices. Make sure you “clean” old, unengaged data first before emailing or it could lead to your domain being blacklisted. #10 DON’T forget about your registrants once they are signed up – keep them informed about their event experience – changes to the agenda, new speakers confirmed etc. For free-to-attend events, these emails are vital to ensure registrants attend the event. For paid-for events, this is a great opportunity to encourage them to invite their team or upgrade their pass. There is a lot to think about and get right when it comes to email marketing to promote conferences. And we strongly recommend you invest in strong strategising, planning, campaign management and execution of your email marketing – as this is a critically important communications channel connecting every conference organiser with their target audience. * https://bestwriting.com/blog/b2b-email-marketing-stats Do you need help improving the performance of your email marketing? Team MPG has a wealth of knowledge and experience in email marketing to ensure a successful conference. Get in touch to find out more. Continue Reading Topics: Email marketingEvent marketingMarketing Skills
Build a resilient marketing function: start with your most important marketing channel by Sharise Wilkinson, on 13/01/2022 As the pandemic rages on, challenges and opportunities continue to emerge for B2B media and events businesses. From Team MPG’s vantage point, it is clear that the most resilient businesses, and those that have started growing again, have certain characteristics – including: a belief in the strategic importance of marketing – shared by the whole senior leadership team; a strong understanding of what good marketing looks like and should be expected to achieve; and a commitment to invest well in marketing for sustainable growth. This was the focus of Helen Coetzee’s blog published on 1st January: In 2022, the most resilient organisations will have relevant and resilient marketing. In this article, Helen highlights specific areas that require focus and investment for building relevance and resilience into your marketing – and therefore into your whole organisation. One of these specific areas is your website, or more specifically, the website or web pages that serve the purpose of marketing your brand, value proposition and products. The companies that have invested heavily in building high performance marketing websites, are standing out as resilient and winning organisations at this time. And by ‘high performance websites’, we’re not just referring to a beautifully designed ‘look and feel’ for your site – which is usually the calling card of slick creative and digital agencies very good at selling their sizzle (and making things look nice). A well designed, nice-to-look at website is an absolute must, but far too many organisations we talk to have fallen in to the trap of spending a fortune with a ‘shiny’ agency (confusing style with substance…) on a website that just looks lovely, but doesn’t actually work in terms of: (1) Optimised customer journeys in the front end – to acquire more customers and generate more revenue, and (2) Back-end/CMS functionality that makes the website practical and efficient (and viable!) for marketers to manage in the manner required for the website to work well within a content-led, integrated marcomms approach. There is a very specific, specialised set of functionality requirements that B2B media/events businesses need built into their marketing websites that can be very poorly understood by many business leaders (and often their marketers too), and by the too many agencies trusted with this kind of work. These specific functionality requirements are focused on the extremely important role your website serves as the hub of all your marketing efforts. If you want to be a resilient and growing business, your website needs to do all the following – really well: Positioning: host impactful messaging – in words, pictures and sometimes video and/or audio – that positions your brand and value you deliver in exactly the right way. For this you need a strong messaging strategy. See: Build a winning messaging strategy: a step-by-step guide Conversion rate optimisation (CRO): have well structured navigation and CTAs that draw customers through your marketing funnel – getting them to share their data, become a customer, and also share your content. See: 4 Things you should do for a high performance website SEO: use relevant messaging, content and good UX to organically attract relevant people from search engines – to then become exposed to your positioning and converted to engaged prospects, customers and advocates. A well-optimised site attracts the right visitors, in required and sustainable volumes, and clearly communicates your value proposition – which is more important now than ever to cut through all the noise on digital channels. Remember that your website is the hub of all your marketing activity. Every time you post on social media, run a PPC campaign, or send an email campaign – you should be pushing relevant people to your website so that they become visitors, engaged audience members prospects, and customers. If your website is not in the best shape possible, all of your other marketing channels will be much less effective than they should be. There is almost no point deploying any other marketing channels (especially PPC!) until you have a website in place that looks great, and works exactly as it should in terms of functionality needed to deliver customers and revenue to your business. Next week we will share a practical guide to building a high performance website. Subscribe to MPG Insights to get notified when the next article is published. And in the meantime, if you’d like to speak to an MPG website expert about how to optimise the site you have, or build a brand new, high performance website – please get in touch. Team MPG includes website designers, developers and website project managers who have a deep understanding of B2B media/events business models and marketing. We know how your website needs to work to grow your customer base and your revenues. Read more about MPG’s website design and development services. MPG provided excellent design and functionality recommendations for our website – helping us immediately put into action initiatives that would help us gain more customers and move forward as a business. Alex Ayad, Founder & CEO, Outsmart Insight FIND OUT MORE Continue Reading Topics: Community marketingDatabase developmentEvent marketingMarketing strategyMarketing technologyWebsite optimisation
In 2022, the most resilient organisations will have relevant and resilient marketing by Sharise Wilkinson, on 01/01/2022 Along with the exciting opportunities for innovation and digital transformation that many leaders have successfully embraced, the pandemic continues to throw new challenges at B2B media and event businesses. Once again, event organisers face issues around live events. Even those who have been able to very successfully grow their digital revenue streams over the past 18 months are immensely frustrated they cannot bring their customers together in-person. Those brave souls who have proceeded to safely host some face-to-face gatherings for their valued community members, in the midst of a pandemic, have found these ‘in real life’ experiences to be most powerful and energising. To keep moving forward positively, senior executives should focus on building resilience into every part of their organisation. From a marketing perspective, organisational resilience can be further strengthened by more relevance. Marketing is all about getting close to your customers and successfully communicating to them the relevance of your value proposition. In the B2B world, this is about focusing – with precision – on the specific individuals within specific organisations who will find your value proposition highly relevant (This is of course assuming you have already achieved a strong enough product-market fit to make what you’re offering worth your target customers’ attention, time, and money. If you don’t have the product-market fit right yet, this should be your focus to strengthen organisational resilience – regardless of pandemics! No amount of marketing can successfully monetise the wrong product…). Getting close to customers is first and foremost about listening. Listening to what they care about, what their pain points are, what motivates them, and what they need in order to get their jobs done well – right now, and in the near future. If you are listening properly to your customers, and responding to their needs with the most relevant products and the most relevant marketing, your organisation will be more resilient. Why? Because your customers will give you their attention and their time, again and again – no matter whether you are delivering your products online or in-person. When you have your customers’ attention over an extended period of time – regardless of format – they should be engaged enough with your brand for you to monetise them well. And, if you can prove you can monetise your customers consistently, profitably and with economies of scale, you have a very good reason to pursue scale. Hence MPG’s mantra since the start of the pandemic: engage, monetise, scale. Building brands as community platforms is only possible if you follow this Engage – Monetise – Scale model. A marketing strategy that focuses on engagement – anchored in relevance – will make your marketing more resilient. This, in turn, will make your whole organisation more resilient. Here are four things we believe are fundamental to building relevance and resilience into your marketing – and therefore into your whole organisation: #1: Investment in customer insight: ongoing analysis on what your customers say and do. Via a set of dashboards, make sure your marketers are constantly monitoring how customers are engaging with your products and your marketing campaigns. Ask your marketers to look for and highlight trends in the data to spark questions to ask your customers about the content, networking opportunities, formats and experiences they find most relevant and valuable, and why. Data your marketers should be able to interrogate should also validate and enhance the answers your customers give you. If your marketers are focused on customer insight, your marketing – and your whole organisation – will be more relevant and more resilient. #2: Specific, clearly defined marketing objectives – fully lined up behind your business goals. Using evidence-based insight on your customers to guide you, insist on marketing objectives that are realistic, achievable, and – most importantly – focused on achieving your commercial goals. Make sure the decisions you make about marketing investments are based on these objectives, and that your marketers are tracking and sharing results and progress with your stakeholders, along with insights and plans to improve performance over time. If you keep your marketers focused on what is most important, your marketing – and your whole organisation – will be more relevant and more resilient. #3: Smart, focused investment in your marketing website and your marketing database. The website you use to attract and communicate with customers is by far your most important marketing tool. And the data you hold on your customers is by far your most important marketing asset. Sadly, these very often receive low levels of investment, or a great deal of money and time is wasted if they are mismanaged. Decisions you make and actions you take to invest in your marketing website and your marketing database should be focused on achieving your marketing objectives (see #2 above) and your commercial goals (see #1 above). Far too often, websites and databases are high-jacked or poorly led by a (usually well-meaning) senior executive with very little knowledge of marketing, or a mostly tactical inhouse marketing team, or – the worst scenario of all – a smooth talking agency with good sales people who are good at ‘selling the sizzle’, but who have no real regard for the success of your organisation, and therefore the ‘sizzle’ fails to deliver. Your organisation will be more resilient if you have both a strong marketing website and good marketing database – led and managed by people who know what they’re doing, care about your organisation’s goals, and understand your marketing objectives. #4: A flexible and agile marketing function with the right skills, strong leadership, good management, and the motivation to contribute to the success of your organisation. With virtual working now the norm, the world is your oyster when it comes to finding the best marketing skills to form a resilient, flexible and agile marketing function. This can be achieved with a combination of inhouse resources, complimented with specialist, expert consultants and agencies – all well managed to collaborate, create powerful synergies and deliver great results. Marketing requires a vast array of skills that can be brought together to deliver quite outstanding outcomes, as long as you’re willing to treat marketing as an investment and not a cost – and step away from a traditional and inflexible inhouse team, and/or a ‘known’ agency that may be consistently underperforming. A resilient and relevant marketing function can be built if you are prepared to think differently, consider all your options, invest well, and set up, manage and continually support a highly collaborative, hybrid marketing team. If you have highly skilled marketers working for you, no matter where they are based, and whether in-house or external (ideally a combination of both) – your marketing and your organisation will be more relevant and more resilient. To achieve more resilience, keep an eye on MPG Insights over the coming weeks. We will be publishing a series of helpful guides on how to build a more relevant and resilient marketing function (and therefore a more resilient organisation!). So, if you have not already signed up to MPG Insights – now is a good time! Subscribe here to get an email every time we publish a new blog or resource like this one. MPG did a great job assessing our digital marketing and marketing operations requirements – considering our business goals. They developed a robust strategy, followed by a practical operational roadmap to help us further improve how we use technology to support marketing and sales performance. It has been a pleasure working with the MPG team! Jonathan Perry, Global Marketing Director, PEI – Alternative Insight Do you need a more resilient marketing function? Get in touch to find out how MPG can help you build a more resilient marketing function, and therefore a more resilient business. Continue Reading Topics: Community marketingDatabase developmentEvent marketingMarketing strategyMarketing technology
The future of B2B events: what does this mean for marketers? by Sharise Wilkinson, on 18/11/2021 In our most recent article on the future of B2B events, we shared insights from a strategy-focused roundtable organised by Renewd, combined with MPG’s insights from the work we do with our clients. As B2B events leaders assess their future risks and opportunities, we have considered what the changes to the product and revenue mix mean for marketers. Whether your events are delivered virtually, in-person or in a hybrid format, marketers should keep in mind the following 7 things when working to grow event revenues: #1: Exceptional customer experiences – starting with personalised marketing With the rise of digital events and the emergence of many new products and brands, the noise in the marketing channels your competitors are also using can be deafening. Crowded email inboxes and social feeds are being ruthlessly filtered at best, and ignored at worst. To win the battle for the precious commodities of your target customers’ attention and time, not only do your products need to deliver more value, but your marketing messaging needs to be highly relevant, reaching the right person at the right time with exactly the right message. Adopting personalisation is only possible when marketers have defined their customer segments and ensured their databases are well managed and set up in the right way for targeting via segmentation. Marketers also need access to analytics via a foundation of a solid and well-integrated marketing tech stack. To achieve the right level of personalisation, the marketing data and tech ‘space race’ is on! #2: Marketing strategy aligned with business objectives As business leaders are becoming more confident in defining their medium-long term business strategies, marketing strategies are needed that support business objectives. Marketers will need to set commercially focused, measurable marketing objectives, with supporting KPIs, to ensure that the tactics they deploy are positively and visibly impacting business performance. #3: Measuring and analysing marketing performance It is a marketer’s responsibility to provide ongoing visibility of marketing performance and ROI (the good, the bad and the ugly!). This enables business leaders to confidently make informed decisions on how to continue with their marketing investments. Marketers themselves also need this visibility to understand their audience engagement and how their target customers are interacting with their brands and products. Knowing what is and is not working is the only way to optimise marketing tactics. #4: Audience-first, content-led approach Marketers need to have a deep understanding of their audience – their demographics, personas, motivators, challenges, ‘jobs to be done’ – to ensure their marketing messages are relevant enough. They need to work closely with content and sales teams to ensure alignment, create feedback loops and ensure that audiences’ needs are prioritised. If the audience is going to pay with their time, attention, and money, the content on offer needs to be highly valuable, and a content-first, benefit-led approach to marketing messages and communications is key to capturing and maintaining interest over time. #5: Highly targeted, account-based marketing There is an expectation from customers that marketing messages are highly targeted, personalised, and super relevant to them as individuals. A well executed ABM strategy should deliver strong ROI through higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles and higher average order values by creating highly personalised messaging and customer experiences for key individuals within targeted accounts. #6: Marketing training and development Marketing is always changing, and marketers should always be learning. Businesses that build agile capabilities in their marketing function by supporting and investing in training and developing their marketers are likely to get better results from their marketing, as well as achieve better staff retention. Many of the best marketers value continuous learning and progression opportunities more than a punchy salary. #7: Marketing and sales alignment Marketers need to play a bigger role in how businesses offer and execute marketing initiatives for their commercial clients. They need to work more closely with the sales teams who are selling marketing services in order to create marketing campaigns and initiatives that are more engaging (ideally content-led), effective, and can demonstrate ROI. In summary, the key to success for B2B media and event marketing over the coming years will be about high-value, engaging and unique content delivered via a highly personalised, multi-channel approach that is executed, measured, and optimised with a rigorous approach. There are no shortcuts. But there are definite market-leadership opportunities to be grabbed when the right kind of marketing approach receives a good level of investment and executive support. “MPG has a deep understanding of the pain points in marketing within our industry, and they can deliver a strong base of best practice, having been through this process with so many community-focused events businesses. Their rigour and structured process really gives us confidence.” Phoebe Kimble-Wilde, Marketing Director at MarketforceLive Do you need help defining a marketing strategy that is aligned with your business objectives? High performance marketing that drives revenue growth and consistently delivers against business objectives can only be achieved when based on a robust marketing strategy. MPG’s Marketing strategists have a wealth of experience and expertise in developing high impact marketing strategies for B2B brands. Get in touch to find out how we can help you get ahead. Find out more Continue Reading Topics: Event marketingMarketing skills Account based marketingMarketing strategy
The future of B2B events: 5 insights from MPG by Sharise Wilkinson, on 05/11/2021 I recently had the opportunity to participate in an excellent strategy-focused roundtable organised by Renewd, the global, open network of specialised subscription, membership and event professionals. More than half of participants were business owners, and all participants were senior executives responsible for long term strategy development, with events being a key part in their product mix and revenue growth plans. From the discussions, it was clear that events-focused organisations are still in – and will continue to face – a great deal of uncertainty. Transformational, rapid change has occurred in almost every market, and therefore the ‘extreme and ongoing change’ paradigm we find ourselves in could well be the ‘new normal’ for some time. Based on the observations of MPG’s senior leadership team, and what came out of the Renewd round-table discussions, five specific areas have surfaced that, at this time, present particular risk – and in some cases significant opportunity – for organisations where events play an important role: (Note: when referring to ‘events’ below, we’re referring collectively to all events that are being run in virtual, hybrid and digital formats) #1: Competition is more intense than ever. Nearly every market has a great range of events for customers to choose from, especially in digital formats. Barriers to entry have been lowered for new event organisers, while ‘legacy’ event organisers are also running more events, and plan to continue to do so. So there is a huge amount of noise out there, with inboxes and social feeds buzzing constantly with numerous ‘must attend’ events and ‘last chances to book’. This won’t die down any time soon, if ever. #2: Event audience expectations have changed – for good. They expect value, and are still willing to pay for it with their time, attention and money. Event participants want better value for money from events of all formats. They are expecting high quality production, as well as highly relevant, valuable and unique content and networking. Targeted event attendees don’t mind giving their time, attention and money to event organisers who deliver what they most value. They also don’t mind being ‘sold to’ by sponsors and exhibitors, as long as they are the right vendors worth meeting, and all vendors respect a ‘content-led, value-first’ approach. #3: An audience-first, data-led and research-informed approach to product development, content creation and marketing is essential. A deep understanding of your audience is essential for any B2B event organiser’s survival, and this understanding should be based on robust data and research practices. If you don’t understand your audience – at all times – you cannot create or deliver what they most value. If you don’t serve up what they most value, they won’t give you their time and attention. And if you don’t have their time and attention, you can’t monetise them via ticket sales or via sponsors/exhibitors. #4: Commercial clients want more data, better qualified leads, and strong visibility of event performance. Event organisers are being interrogated more by sponsors and exhibitors to prove ROI. They are asking for data and proof points focused on relevance of the audience and quality of leads delivered. They are now comparing events to the other digital alternatives they relied on for lead generation when Covid first came along. In the time it took for events organisers to postpone, and then pivot their events to digital, many sponsors and exhibitors did their own ‘testing and learning’ – trying out content-led ABM campaigns, digital advertising and even their own events. A lot of this will stick – especially because the data around how these deliver ROI is generally quite strong, and most importantly, visible. Events organisers, by and large, are still playing catch up on the ‘data-led insights’ front. In the near future they will have to match what their clients can get elsewhere. #5: Hybrid working and the ‘great resignation’ have meant that good leadership, strong people and team management, good team culture and investing in employees are now top priorities. Event organisers are having to work very hard to retain the talent they have, and they are having to work even harder to find and attract new talent. Flexible working and well thought-out, carefully planned ‘facetime’ with team mates, managers and subordinates is now expected. Organisational and brand purpose, positive culture, attention to employees’ wellbeing, CSR initiatives and investment in professional training and development have all become important in attracting, keeping and motivating staff. These are no longer ‘nice to haves’ – they really matter to current and potential new employees. If you have more insights to share, or particular view on the insights above, please do get in touch. And make sure you subscribe to MPG Insights to receive the follow up article to this blog – which will explore what this all means for marketing, and marketers, in B2B media and events businesses. Subscribe to MPG Insights MPG did a great job developing a marketing strategy to help us grow one of our flagship communities and largest US events. They added a level of science, rigour and new thinking to our approach that our internal marketers are excited about, giving me confidence we’ll achieve great things together. It is a pleasure working with Team MPG! Philip Doyle, Director, MarketforceLive Do you need help defining a marketing strategy that is aligned with your business objectives? High performance marketing that drives revenue growth and consistently delivers against business objectives can only be achieved when based on a robust marketing strategy. MPG’s Marketing strategists have a wealth of experience and expertise in developing high impact marketing strategies for B2B brands. Get in touch to find out how we can help you get ahead. Find out more Continue Reading Topics: Event marketingMarketing strategy
What’s going on with email marketing? by Sharise Wilkinson, on 14/10/2021 Email is a challenging area for B2B media and events businesses right now. Several companies have recently told us they are struggling to maintain strong levels of engagement and good enough results from their email campaigns – especially where email marketing had been a strong channel for them until relatively recently. When investigating this email marketing challenge for a range of clients, we are finding that declining email performance is due to a similar set of issues, all of which have similar solutions, regardless of the market or product in focus. In this post, we share MPG’s five key recommendations for fixing an email marketing performance problem: #1 Database development There are 4 things to get right with your database to achieve strong engagement and conversions: (1) relevance (2) currency (3) size/number of contacts you can email (4) how your contacts are tagged, or organised. Simply put, you need a database of enough of the right kinds of contacts (those who will find your value proposition relevant and valuable), that are up to date and correct, in order to achieve engagement and conversions at the required level. To understand how much room there is for growth in your database, you must understand your total addressable market (TAM). Lead generation tactics such as downloadable content pieces, powered by inbound marketing, are a very important way to constantly and reliably grow your database with relevant, interested, and engaged contacts, all year-round. Additionally, dedicated, targeted database research is a very effective way of filling key gaps with relevant (high quality) contacts. Get in touch with MPG to find out how we can help you invest well in this kind of research – to achieve a strong return on investment, short term and longer term. Find out more about MPG’s Database Development & Optimisation services #2 Segment and target Segmentation and targeting well have always proved – in MPG’s projects – to almost instantly improve email performance. The main purpose of segmentation and targeting is to make sure the content of the email as relevant as possible to the person receiving it. Firmographic, behaviour-based, and demographic segmentation are the three methods we recommend – often to be used concurrently. The exact segmentation method chosen should always be based on the desired outcome of improving relevance to the audience. More relevance = more engagement, which usually = more conversions, which usually = more revenue. To enable segmentation, ensure your lead generation (data capture) and data research efforts include the categorisation needed to organise your contacts well to enable segmentation and targeting. Emails targeted as specific segments should be used to present the most valuable and compelling benefits and features from the perspective of the email recipient. As with all marketing, measure to understand results and improve as you go along. #3 Get and use a messaging strategy To make sure your email copy is highly relevant, and to ensure the relevant messaging is consistent and reinforced at every stage of the customer journey, you need a dedicated messaging strategy. As part of this, it is important to consider which stage your customer is currently navigating in their journey in purchasing from you. Using progressively more product-focused, persuasive language as customers become more engaged will support your conversions. #4 Make your website work well As the end destination of all your emails, your website is a key component in the success of email marketing as a channel. Your website is where customers should end up when they click on an email, so it is essential the journey from email to landing page is logical and seamless. For example, if an email recipient clicks on a Download Brochure CTA, they should be directed straight to a page where this is possible – not a website homepage where they then need to hunt for the thing they’re looking for. As the purpose of email marketing is to drive traffic to your website, it is essential your website is easy to navigate and presents the most relevant information to the email recipient. Your website is also essential for strong lead generation, so having your website properly optimised will both increase your pool of contacts for future email campaigns, and improve the lead conversion you get from existing contacts. Find out about MPG’s Optimised Website Services #5 Get a good mix of content-led, product-led, and offer-led emails Having a variety of content-led, product-led, and offer-led emails ensures dynamic and engaging messaging and CTAs, which in turn improves email performance. Avoid fatigue and messaging stagnation by using a good mix of email content. For event marketing in particular, plan well ahead with a marketing timeline where emails tell a story well based on how your product is developing. For subscriptions and membership marketing, map dynamic and relevant content in to an automated workflow. This will keep your content fresh and engaging for your audience. And of course, before drafting an email, you should have a good idea of what your objective(s) are, e.g. pushing downloads of a new brochure, or registering interest. This will ensure focus on a core message, and make measurement of success more valid and viable. There is a lot more to be said about how to make email marketing work well – it is a formidable topic! Considering the above 5 recommendations as a first step will ensure you have are covering all your bases. A comprehensive guide on email content best practices could populate several blogs! For now, here are the key points to keep in mind: 1) Test & learn When it comes to email, small changes can make a big difference, so it’s important to test and learn from your emails about what drives the best engagement. Areas for testing include: Subject lines – your subject line will indicate straight away whether your email is relevant and interesting to the recipient. Using an open ended question is a great way to capture people’s attention, and you can then go on to answer the question within the body of the email. The best way to to approach this will depend on the email content and audience. Try different approaches and measure results to identify the optimal one. Sender names – in the same way that you A/B test your subject lines, monitor your open rates to see which “from” name leads to the best results. Depending on the focus of the email, you may find your recipients prefer to open emails from your event director or sales reps/account managers (e.g. for offer led emails, or spex campaigns). We usually find with B2B emails that include the sender’s full name alongside the company’s name work well, e.g. “Full name @ MPG” Call-to-action variations – test a variety of CTAs to see what makes your audience click e.g. ‘View full agenda’ vs ‘Discover key themes’. See more on CTAs below. Format – experiment with different combinations of plain text/designed, brand sender/personal sender info, and short/long content. Run A/B split tests constantly and track results (focus on click through rate) to identify the content style the audience prefers for the different types of comms. Don’t forget: when doing email tests, you should always only test one variable at a time. 2) Clear call-to-actions (CTAs) Limit yourself to two, max. three, CTAs in each email, thinking about the action you want your audience to take, and prioritising that. Your CTAs should always contain a verb and it’s a good idea to vary the terms you use. For example, rather than saying ‘Book now’ for every purchase CTA, you could use ‘Secure your place’, or ‘Register today to claim your discount’. Ensure that the landing pages you are driving traffic to are optimised for a smooth and consistent user journey between channels. Start and finish with the primary action you want the reader to take so that there is an obvious next step when reading (or skimming!) the email. 3) Use personalisation Short, plain-text emails from a personal sender name tend to work best for ‘personal’ reminders to leads and other warm contacts, e.g ‘I want to make sure you don’t miss the early bird’ or ‘I’m the Sponsorship Manager at x, I thought you’d find this useful…’ Combine personal sender names with personal subjects lines, e.g. ‘Will I see you there?’ 4) Sender email Email marketing requires trust between the sender and the recipient. Using ‘noreply’ email addresses can erode this trust, and can harm your deliverability if noreply email addresses are automatically filtered to spam folders. Using a reply email that appears to be a personal email will build trust and will provide an open channel of communication between your organisation and your customers. The email can direct people to a shared inbox which can be monitored for genuine responses from your customers. In this article we have presented a set of strategic and holistic suggestions, alongside practical and actionable tips. This holistic approach is important because all elements of your marketing are interrelated. You cannot view a particular marketing challenge or opportunity in a simplistic, one-dimensional way. All digital marketing channels are dynamic and connected, so a dynamic and connected view and solution is also needed for your email marketing! Do you need to improve the performance of your email marketing? Team MPG includes email marketing experts who can help you create, refine, and execute on an Email Marketing Strategy. Or we can create an Email Marketing Playbook for your team, with a set of guidelines, examples, and templates that will drive stronger engagement, and growth-driving results. Please get in touch to find out more. The work MPG has done with my team has been really valuable. Their strong strategic and operational marketing expertise, and the way they have shared it with us, has been highly relevant for our business – helping us address multiple challenges and opportunities we face. David Laird, President & CEO, Strategy Institute Continue Reading Topics: Database developmentEmail marketingMarketing automationMessaging
5 things I’ve learnt from event CEOs this year by Sharise Wilkinson, on 07/10/2021 This article has been written by The Share Theory, a content agency that work with many of the same businesses as MPG’s team of marketing specialists. Key points in this post: Stop asking – it’s ruining your engagement Don’t get distracted by your new business model You see opportunity, your team sees more tasks You might be undervaluing your digital product – don’t guess what your market will pay Grow your non-event inventory In Q1 2021, The Share Theory published a series of reports on the future of events based on in-depth interviews with around 20 event CEOs and founders. They share their experiences of pivoting their businesses during the first year of the Coronavirus pandemic. Three key areas which event organisers needed to tackle were identified: ‘product’, ‘content and community’ and ‘skillsets and mindsets’. Over the last six months, The Share Theory team has been working with industry leaders and founders to help them deliver on these key areas through market research, consulting, training, and content development. It’s been interesting to see how the ideals, plans, and opportunities identified during 2020 have been coming to fruition, and which obstacles have been thrown up for event leaders keen to pivot to a more ‘shock-proof’ business model. Here are some of the things we’ve learned: #1: Stop asking – it’s ruining your engagement Regular event communications have been disrupted by a switch to digital: a proliferation of smaller, more frequent digital offerings, and increasing push communication. Paired with global inclination to Zoom and email fatigue, databases are getting tired, and engagement is dropping through the floor. Push marketing isn’t working any more. You need to ask yourself what your communication gives back to your community, and what two-way conversations you’re having with your audience. #2: Don’t get distracted by your new business model As an industry, our conversations have focussed recently on the key pillars of content, community, and events, but we need to remember these are tools for delivering value, not where the value lies. Communication with clients must deliver on their needs, and not on your planned offering – they’re not looking for formats, they’re looking for interaction, support, and expertise. Prior to 2020, your event business was focused on on-site customer experience over two, three, or four days and all other communications were auxiliary to that. If you want a 360 relationship with your customers, you need to ingrain an understanding of (and passion for) customer needs in every interaction your team has with them. #3: You see opportunity, your team sees more tasks We are usually engaged by senior management to support strategic transition, content projects, or training for event businesses. The owners and CEOs we speak to are driven and excited by pursuing opportunities in the market. The bigger challenge we face is in winning over middle management – heads of function or portfolio managers – who don’t see opportunity, they see an increasing list of tasks and new KPIs to manage their teams to. For a team that has just survived the hardest 18 months of their careers, you need to make the outcomes feel real, and tie the processes to career development opportunities bolstered by training and support to get their full buy-in. #4: You might be undervaluing your digital product The shift to digital has lowered barriers to entry, and flooded the market with digital event offerings and online content. There’s no denying that huge amounts of free content mean that charging for digital events is getting harder and harder. But, don’t assume your market won’t pay, and don’t devalue your work by giving it away with no clear return in mind. I’ve been helping several clients with research projects to test pricing, and the evidence points to the fact that customers will still pay for content driving a clear benefit for them. If your content adds value, it should generate a return and if it doesn’t – why are you doing it? #5: Grow your non-event inventory Some businesses have been able to pivot quickly to non-event inventory if they have strong sponsor relationships in place. I’ve worked on some interesting sponsored reports in particular – surveys build engagement, interviews with advocates build trust, and the reports themselves provide both provide credible market intel, and build brand capital for you and your sponsor. Making non-event inventory work starts with your sales team: get them bought into the value, build them a solid inventory, and make the benefits clear before they get on the phone. You can still access the reports in full here. The Share Theory is a content and research agency which specialises in supporting event businesses pivot to a more communicative, content based business model through consulting, strategic support, training and content delivery. If you’d like to find out more (or for a chat about any of the points made in the report) visit www.thesharetheory.com or email hello@thesharetheory.com. Continue Reading Topics: Event marketingMarketing strategy
Conference marketing: brand, community, data, technology and skills by Sharise Wilkinson, on 09/09/2021 The pandemic rages on, but we keep moving forward. Since the start of last year, conference organisers have been severely challenged and many have risen to this challenge with great courage and aplomb. Some conference-focused businesses are now even more profitable, and certainly stronger and more sustainable, than before Covid-19 entered our world. Team MPG has been looking hard at what has differentiated the pandemic ‘winners’ from the ‘losers’ in the conference world, especially when it comes to the marketing to attract an engaged, high-quality audience, and the right kinds of sponsors. We have found the following five key success factors: #1: Brand From the day the pandemic struck, there was a flight to safety. Conferences with well known, well-positioned brands, and a strong reputation for delivering something uniquely valuable and important, found their audiences following them online as they pivoted to virtual. These well-branded and smartly positioned conferences also found that: They attracted a vast number of new customers who were delighted to be able to access content and networking opportunities that were previously inaccessible to them. A brand-new group of sponsors cropped up who were very keen to invest in new, digital offerings. New products spun out in the digital space gained good traction quite fast. #2: Community The ‘family and friends’ of valuable conferences recognised very quickly that what was going to be offered online by the brands that had relied on and trusted to that point, was going to be incredibly important as they navigated the stormy seas of Covid-19. Conference organisers that had already invested in their brands, and building meaningful relationships with their communities, had the upper hand when moving online. However, there was one caveat – what they delivered online had to be tailored to the needs of their audience, and not to the needs of their sponsors. The Zoom calls, webinars and conferences that went online became an important place for humans in lockdown to find solace, friendship, safety, and a way forward – as part of a community that became even stronger with online interaction at a time when in-person meetings were just not possible. #3: Data Data is a vast and daunting topic, but the most successful conference organisers always utilise it fully. Those who had strong marketing databases that are well-structured and surrounded with good processes, have generally found their transformation to becoming more digitally-led businesses much easier and more rewarding than those running their email campaigns out of spreadsheets… And, conference organisers who know how to use analytics to track audience engagement and user behaviour were in a great place to test and learn, fast. They have been able to observe, in real time, how and where their audiences are engaging, and act fast to make the most of the best opportunities to scale their digital offerings. The conference organisers that continue to invest in their database and analytics going forward will be the definite winners in the race ahead. #4: Technology It seems almost unnecessary to mention technology as an important success factor in the response to Covid. Of course, tech has played a huge and central role. What we have observed is that the companies that have been smart at investing in implementing and optimising the right marketing tech, integrated with their virtual event platforms, have a distinct advantage. We expect they will reap the rewards from these smart tech manoeuvres for years to come. #5: Skills All the above relies on the right marketing skills applied to your brand, community, data, and technology. What has the pandemic meant for conference marketing people and skills? Marketers are now being tasked with marketing a whole array of products and delivering much larger, engaged audiences. To do this, they must ensure that: The value and user-friendliness of their digital and in-person offerings are well communicated with compelling, relevant messages delivered via multiple digital channels, many of which needed to be automated (more on that later in this blog). They have well-structured and large enough database of relevant contacts for impactful email marketing. They are using inbound tactics and channels effectively to reach out to much larger audiences, extending well beyond the relevant people on their database. Content marketing, social media, PPC, advocacy marketing, conversion rate optimisation, and SEO have all become incredibly important. They are automating a large part of their marketing, especially for digital events where audiences need highly responsive, highly personalised messages landing in their inboxes at exactly the right time. A large volume of data-led, digitally enabled, compelling and engaging marketing of new products has had to be delivered in a very short space of time. At the same time, marketers have also been given many ‘product’ and ‘logistics’ areas to look after. Being the most digitally savvy function in a conference business meant that conference marketers have been put under tremendous pressure, while also being given the opportunity to make a huge difference to ‘surviving and thriving’ in response to Covid. It’s a shame that so many conference organisers saw marketing as the place to cut costs as the pandemic took hold. It appears that the conference organisers that decided to increase their marketing investment instead, and deploy their marketing assets in the right way, not only did better in their pivots, but are now also in a stronger position to bounce back faster as live events return and the world economy starts recovering. MPG predicted this would be the case at the start of the pandemic. We warned businesses not to let their marketers go, to double down on their marketing investment and take their branding, communities, messaging, data, and tech very seriously. This is of course not surprising we are, after all, a team of devoted and zealous career marketers! But, I think we’re right. We will watch with great interest and excitement as live events start to return, and the reborn and brand-new conference businesses emerge from their ‘Covid-era states’. We firmly believe the winners will be those who have made strong and smart marketing investments to deal with the challenges and grab the opportunities presented by Covid and will continue to do so. “I cannot recommend MPG highly enough. Their commitment and unique expertise in data-driven, digital, and integrated marketing has been very valuable to Social Media Week. They’ve been instrumental in helping us build our brand and community online and offline, and their product marketing performance has also been very strong. We’re delighted MPG has been on our team!” Toby Daniels, Founder, Social Media Week (Acquired by Adweek) Do you need some marketing muscle to grow your conferences? MPG has a team of experienced and highly skilled conference marketers who can give your events a boost. Get in touch to find out how MPG can help you get ahead. Find out more Continue Reading Topics: Brand strategyDigital marketingEvent marketingMarketing technologySkills training
Building a winning B2B membership model: where your marketing should start by Sharise Wilkinson, on 16/06/2021 When the B2B media and events world was first plunged into the unknown at the start of the global pandemic, many ‘pivots to digital’ focused on creating or strengthening a membership proposition, typically something ‘high value’ (£500+ per user per annum). This was a perfectly logical move to make considering the more stable, predictable, recurring revenues that memberships promise. And we all know that this is the holy grail of business valuations: 3+ years of healthy, consistently growing membership revenues – fed by both retention (and ideally annual upsell in volume of users and average order value), and a steady stream of newly acquired, good quality members. This is what gets the investors lining up and paying handsomely. At this moment in time, we believe it’s important to take a very sober look at what has really happened over the last 18 months or so. Since January/February 2020, business owners faced the catastrophe of live event revenues falling away – knowing full well that digital alternatives were likely to generate a fraction of the revenue. Generally speaking, those with relatively established membership products and/or digital subscriptions already in the market saw higher demand for these services. As live events weren’t running (and it took a while for digital events to emerge as reasonable alternatives), their members/subscribers started looking to these offerings to meet their knowledge and networking needs. And many that did not already have a membership proposition started working hard and fast to create one. But, as organisations in both of these situations will know, creating and establishing a successful membership model requires significant investment and takes time. A reasonable payoff is often only realised 5+ years after the first version of the membership offering was launched. And what most successful, profitable membership service owners will know, is that a smart, strategic marketing effort, fully integrated with leading and supporting the sales function, is essential. In the early stages, many put most of their marketing dollars into a shiny new piece of martech, seeing this as a ‘silver bullet’ solution to make their membership marketing somehow magically work well with limited marketing resources. This is one of the biggest, most costly mistakes we see made – again, and again. What should come first is a robust and well thought through marketing strategy. This should be aligned with and built to fully support your business, product development and sales strategies. So, where should the marketing strategy start? It should always start with the ‘Control’ part of the SOSTACⓇ model that MPG recommends marketing leaders follow when building a marketing strategy. SOSTACⓇ stands for: S = Situational Analysis O = Objectives S = Strategy T = Tactics A = Action (operational plan) C = Control Even though C is the last letter in the SOSTAC acronym, it should come first in your process when developing and implementing a winning membership marketing strategy. Why? Because you need to know how you’re going to measure success, and how your marketing investments are going to help you achieve this success. If you don’t have the right KPIs, people, systems and processes in place to measure your growth – and where this growth is coming from – how will you be able to prove to your potential investors that you have a strong, predictable and growing membership revenue stream? Put this measurement system in place at the start of your membership journey, and you will have all the analytics you need to tell your growth story for investors in 3 years time. This data is what gives you strong visibility of how your membership is actually performing, what is holding you back, and what is driving growth. It’s essential for making good decisions that will enable you to make the right investments and build that ‘holy grail’ membership proposition that will make your business so attractive to investors. Focusing on measuring membership marketing success from the very beginning will also ensure your marketing and sales are integrated from the start. Marketing and sales KPIs need to be completely joined up. MPG has been working with B2B membership-focused organisations since we launched in 2014, and in all that time the following KPIs have proven to be invaluable in how businesses build a strong marketing and sales function, and how this translates into business value. Member acquisition – strategic KPIs for membership marketing & sales Your key metrics should be focused around: Database Sales & Marketing Qualified Leads Sales & Sales Cycle Revenue Yield DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY OF THE FULL STRATEGIC KPIS Member retention – strategic KPIs for membership marketing & sales Your key metrics should be focused around: Onboarding Engagement Scoring Sales Renewal cycle DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY OF THE FULL STRATEGIC KPIS If you already have a membership model in play, it’s not too late to add these KPIs to your existing workflow and business reporting! Nailing down KPIs and knowing how you will measure and analyse these regularly for good decision making is just the starting point. In the coming weeks, we will be publishing a series of blogs about: The ideal member retention process: how to retain members before you start acquiring them – your retention efforts must start the day they sign up for membership. The ideal member acquisition process: how to build a marketing and sales funnel that becomes a powerful feeder of new business to achieve strong membership growth over an extended period of time. The best way to build events (in all forms) into your membership offering: to achieve strong member retention rates and to act as a growth engine for membership acquisitions. If you’re aiming to build a strong membership offering and you have not already signed up to MPG Insights – now is a good time! Subscribe here to get an email in your inbox every time we publish a new blog like this one, or create another resource (e.g. webinar or report) that you will benefit from. Is growing membership revenue a strategic focus for your business? Team MPG creates and executes on robust membership marketing strategies that support both acquisition and retention growth. Find out more about our approach – get in touch. “MPG delivered a great series of tailored marketing workshops for the team at China Britain Business Council. This training helped us formulate our membership growth strategy and gave us some very useful, practical guidance on improving our digital marketing and sales tactics.” Claire Urry, Executive Director, China-Britain Business Council Continue Reading Topics: Analytics and intelligenceMarketing strategyMembership marketing
The ‘always-on’ future of events: what this means for event marketing… by Sharise Wilkinson, on 08/06/2021 In December 2020, to less fanfare than one would expect, a ‘must read’ book for events professionals was published – particularly those working in senior roles within commercial events businesses. Reinventing Live: The Always-on Future of Events, co-authored by Denzil Rankine and Marco Giberti, takes a look at the ever evolving role of events in facilitating business, connections and advocacy – and how the ‘Covid accelerator’ effect has come into play. “The event organizer should no longer be an event organizer, they should be the community catalyst.” Denzil Rankine, founder and executive chairman of AMR International, co-author of Reinventing Live: The Always-on Future of Events In this excellent article by Michelle Russell, editor in chief of the PCMA’s Convene, she shares her interview with Denzil Rankine where key themes from the book are dissected. The overarching sentiment of the article is something that is very much aligned with MPG’s ethos – that building digital-first, community-led, hybrid brands is the way forward! “Hybrid” is the big word of the moment and in a number of years, it will disappear. It will just be completely normal for a conference to have a digital journey beforehand, to have an in-person experience, and connection supported by more digital tools with remote attendance, and then more follow-up. That’s just going to be a “conference” and no one’s going to call it a “hybrid conference.” It’s like, you don’t go into someone’s house now and say, “Whoa, you’ve got electricity.” It’s just there. So we will get to that point — the sooner the better.” Michelle’s article got me thinking: what does this mean for event marketing leaders and other senior leaders focused on marketing strategies for B2B conference businesses? How is this rapid evolution of events already impacting the event marketing approach? How will this continue to change as we move forward and hopefully start accelerating away from the pandemic soon? Here are the 4 things that Team MPG believes you should have ‘front of mind’ right now: #1 Marketing strategy A key point of discussion in both the book and the article is the general lack of an event strategy in some organisations and how detrimental this is to the health of a particular event and the viability of the events business as whole. Having a robust event marketing strategy is a part of this. When we ran our event marketing strategy webinar back in March, only 65% of the attendees said they had a strong marketing strategy in place. This is worrying for the future of events! B2B event organisers should habitually invest in developing marketing strategies for their events. This is a key investment area to support sustainable event growth. #2 Marketing data Data is an integral cog in any well-oiled marketing machine. This is the case now more than ever, as we move to a hybrid – or as described in the article, the ‘online, offline, online’ approach to events. When we talk about data for your event marketing, there are 3 distinct data variants you should be looking at: Your event/community database – online events and communities need a much larger, global database to achieve the audience volume and online engagement your brands need to thrive Customer data – a deep understanding of your audiences behaviour and engagement will help you to continue to offer best in class products that meet, and exceed, your customers needs Performance data – measuring the impact of all your marketing across all channels, in a granular way, will provide you with relevant insights to inform your marketing going forward #3 Marketing tech Tech has been a cornerstone in the ‘pivot to digital’ that just about every events organiser in the world had to do – on a hairpin. But it’s not just the ‘new’ virtual event platforms that has enabled the move to online. The event organisers that most successfully navigated the pivot to digital had their marketing tech well integrated with their event tech. A well set up ‘product + marketing’ tech stack is essential as we move forward into our ‘new normal’ for events. Data needs to flow well between systems – with most, if not all, data flows automated. For event organisers to emerge well from the pandemic, it is likely they will need to spend more time and money on martech than they would have done without the ‘Covid accelerator’ in play… Strategic and impactful investments in martech and data mean that marketing processes can be automated, enabling deeper engagement with more customers, resulting in more opportunities for monetisation and scalable events. #4 Marketing skills It would be a tragic misjudgement – with quite severe consequences – to undervalue marketing skills as we emerge from the pandemic. Your event marketing function needs to include strong strategic thinkers and excellent doers – across all areas of creative, copy, data, martech, analytics and campaign management. Building a sustainable marketing function with the right mind-set and skills is critical. But as with most valuable things, require a strategic approach and investment. When considering how you build the necessary capabilities in your marketing department , a strategic, hybrid approach should be considered as a cost-effective way and impactful approach. The right hybrid approach will build agility, flexibility and strong skill sets into your marketing team and should be considered for the short, medium and long term. Marketing strategy, marketing data, marketing tech and marketing skills. Take a good hard look at these if you want to ensure your re-invented events thrive and grow in the new world. MPG has supported the growth of B2B conferences and exhibitions across a wide range of sectors and regions of the world. We can help you successfully develop and execute your event marketing strategies, build and optimise your database and martech stacks, and future proof your marketing function by helping you upskill your team.. Get in touch today to see how we can help your marketing achieve a stronger ROI as the ‘future of events’ becomes a reality. “I was very impressed with the marketing strategy MPG developed for Environment Analyst. The level of thinking that went into this strategy and how it was delivered has created great value for our business. My marketing manager and I now look forward to working with MPG to execute great marketing together.” Julian Rose, Director & Co-Founder, Environment Analyst Continue Reading Topics: Database developmentEvent marketingMarketing strategyMarketing technologySkills training
