Late event bookings are very bad for business & are NOT ‘inevitable’

by Sue Stevens, on 31/10/2023

There has been a lot of talk lately about delegates, visitors, sponsors and exhibitors committing late to events. Contracts are being signed later, and registrations are being made later. This is not inevitable.

Blaming the pandemic for bookings and revenue coming later is an excuse, not a reason. This does not have to be the ‘new normal’! With the right approach to marketing an event, you’ll get your bookings and revenue in earlier, and have much healthier financials and business resiliency as a result.

 

Why late booking patterns are VERY BAD for event organisers

  • You may not hit your targets in terms of attendee numbers and profile, or you may have too many attendees to properly accommodate. Both risk creating a bad or unsatisfactory customer experience, no matter how well all the other event elements come together.
  • You will be carrying significant financial risk in the longer term. Who will put money into next year’s event if this year’s delivered a bad customer experience?
  • You will not be able to manage overall event budgets in the right way – risking spending too much on areas such as catering.
  • You may be spending too much money on marketing channels that don’t work, or not enough money on channels that are working very well. With a late booking pattern you won’t work this out until it’s too late to do something about it.
  • You won’t have enough time to create FOMO and excitement – nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd! With not enough time for advocacy marketing to kick in properly one of your most important marketing channels won’t work.
  • Ultimately, late event bookings mean less revenue, lower ROI and a serious risk to the longer term survival of the event itself!

 

7 Marketing actions that will bring forward your booking patterns

#1 Invest time (and money if needed) in a robust event marketing strategy. Do this early.

Make sure you have a good plan for your marketing at least 9 months before the event. Start pushing out your marketing activity at least 6 months out, using a range of channels – from email and advocacy, to social media and online advertising – to get all stages of the funnel working.

Ideally use 365 marketing – ensure your audience is kept up to date year-round and reminded of your unique offering.

Open registration as early as possible so that early interest can be converted to confirmed attendees. For paid events: firm up your pricing early, present it on the website and create urgency via early bird campaigns.

#2 Develop and deploy benefit-led messaging throughout all channels and campaigns. Do this early.

Is your messaging correctly focused on the benefits i.e. the reasons people will sponsor/exhibit at or attend your event? Ensure these benefits are ingrained in your messaging and repeated consistently across all channels.

Segment your database so you can send targeted, relevant messaging that specifically appeals to certain customer groups.

Your event will evolve, so make sure your messaging does too.

#3 Get your database in order: it needs to be well structured, big enough and give you strong coverage of your core markets. Do this early.

Tag your database so that you can target the right people with the most relevant, engaging comms that will get them to act early.

Based on average response rates, do you have enough of the right contacts to target visitors, delegates, exhibitors and sponsors? Conduct an audit to see which groups may be underrepresented, and put a plan in place to address any gaps as soon as possible.

Make sure you can identify those who are most engaged, and ensure that they are nurtured and followed up effectively for conversions.

#4 Make sure your website is fully optimised to maximise conversions to generate leads and registrations. Do this early, and then keep optimising.

Your website is your most important marketing channel – update it regularly – daily if needed, or at a minimum weekly.

At 9 months out and beyond, your goal will be collecting ‘register your interest’ leads, and ideally also registrations if you have been able to open reg early enough. At the 6 month mark, content downloads like brochures will drive more leads by offering something in return. Then, from 3 months out, shift the focus firmly onto bringing in registrations.

This 365 approach will ensure your website is always directing visitors to an action that gives you their data, and allows you to drive registrations with a pool of engaged contacts already eager to sign up.

#5 Get your agenda and speakers confirmed early, and publish this information early.

The earlier you can confirm your content programme, the better. Aim to have all speakers confirmed by 12 weeks out in order to get all customers to commit earlier – exhibitors, sponsors, delegates and visitors.

#6 Deploy advocacy marketing – early.

The sooner you can get advocates creating FOMO in your target audience, the better. Use testimonials on your website, in emails and on social media to put this social proof out in the open.

For automated advocacy tools, earlier is better too – even before you open registration / ticket sales. The more data you can collect, the better you can refine your approach.

#7 Create urgency and clearly communicate scarcity.

Early birds and VIP perks aren’t just for delegates. Sponsors can also be enticed by limited time offers that enhance the value they receive – and you benefit from invoices paid months before the event and early commitment, which in turn helps build the momentum.

If your event is free, then scarcity can still be created via event features – possibly by requiring registrants to book for certain aspects of your event which are limited in number. Reward those who back you early, your bottom line will thank you.

In summary, if you have the right marketing strategy and execution approach in place, your booking pattern will not be late. Late booking patterns are very bad for business – full stop. Don’t accept them!

 

Team MPG can help you bring your event booking patterns forward.

Get in touch for a ‘no obligation’ conversation about how we do this, and can be done to make your events business work better with a better approach to event marketing.

What our clients have said about working with Team MPG:

“Working closely with our internal team, MPG developed a strong marketing strategy focused on achieving revenue growth for a key product in our portfolio – including recommendations for a virtual offering. We were impressed by the science and rigour they put into the process. I would recommend MPG as a good strategic marketing partner for a B2B brand.”

Anna Knight, SVP, Licensing, Informa Markets

Continue Reading
Topics:

10 steps to take your B2B event social media marketing to the next level

by Sharise Wilkinson, on 02/08/2023

Marketing budgets have fallen again and, according to Gartner’s ‘State of Marketing Budget and Strategy in 2023’ report, 75% of CMOs are being asked to do more with less in 2023.

With a hyper-focus on making marketing budgets work harder, we are turning our eye to one of the most cost-effective channels for B2B events – social media. As a mostly free channel, with some spend required on tools to create efficiencies (more on that later), social media is a key driver for growing brand awareness, driving organic lead generation and conversions for attendees and spex, and keeping your community engaged year-round.

Successful use of social media can lead to exponential audience growth through earned media – i.e. people choosing to share your content with their own networks because they believe it to be of significant interest and value. It’s an opportunity to build a community of engaged followers that are more likely to convert and can be targeted with paid advertising, creating further opportunities to drive valuable actions like completing a form or registering.

Social media isn’t just a tactic to use in the lead-up to your event and then dial down once your event has happened. Your social media strategy should focus on all 3 stages of your event marketing cycle:

  • Pre-event is where the bulk of your social activity will be and the aim is to generate direct and influenced leads and registrations and build excitement ahead of the event. Event-specific posts typically focus on the upcoming event, but can also contain post-event content from previous years to provide a sample of what to expect.
  • During event activity that takes place while your event is live. It focuses on generating live discussion, providing real-time updates on sessions taking place and generating as much buzz and ‘FOMO’ as possible.
  • Post-event activity takes place immediately after your event, until pre-event activity begins for the next event. Focus this activity on wrapping up and sharing the content and discussion generated from the event. Encourage non-attendees to register their interest for the next event while the sense of ‘missing out’ is still present.

Team MPG has helped many clients efficiently and effectively accelerate the growth of their events by creating and executing multi-channel event marketing strategies, including social media. Here are the 10 steps MPG recommends you take to elevate your social media marketing:

#1 Know your target audience to create content that resonates

To effectively connect with your audience, it’s crucial to understand who they are and what they want. For every event, you should have a documented messaging strategy that outlines who your audience is, what their challenges/opportunities and jobs to be done are, and defines your event’s USPs and benefits.
Your social posts should either be so interesting that:

  • people want to click to find out more
  • they start a conversation i.e. get people talking/commenting/sharing

A robust messaging strategy helps you engage with your audience in a way that feels authentic. Read MPG’s 5 steps to building a winning messaging strategy to find out more about deploying strong, impactful messaging.

#2 Listen to your audience and meet them where they are

Monitor and analyse the conversations your audience is having on different social media platforms to gather valuable insights, identify trends, understand preferences, and recognise pain points. This is called ‘social listening’. Use this information to identify the right social platforms to use, improve your content, and better address their needs. You might already have this functionality in your tech stack – some CRMs e.g. HubSpot have social listening as part of their native social media management functionality. If you don’t already have this built-in, there are many tools that can be used as standalone products or can also integrate with your CRM e.g. Oktopost.

#3 Keep an eye on your competitors

Study what your competitors are doing on social media. If they are already implementing successful strategies, learn from them. See how they are positioning themselves in the market and how shared or overlapping audiences are engaging with their content. If your competitors don’t have a successful social media presence, take the opportunity to differentiate yourself and reach a user base they have yet to tap into.

#4 Harness the powers of influencers

Look for influencers, both individuals and brands, who have a large following and align with your brand values. Collaborating with influencers can greatly amplify your reach and credibility. This could be as simple as aligning your brand with well-known media outlets or associations via partnerships that include them posting your content, or by actively sharing third-party content from these key industry players.

#5 Leverage your brand advocates

Brand trust is more important now than ever, and the viewpoints and actions of trusted colleagues, peers and community thought leaders have a huge influence on purchasing decisions. Leveraging your brand loyalists (advisory boards, speakers, sponsors/exhibitors and attendees) is an important part of the puzzle when it comes to creating and executing your amplification strategy. This should be automated wherever possible e.g. with tools such as InGo, Gleanin or Snöball, allowing your marketing team to focus on other revenue-generating activities.

Don’t forget to include employee advocacy as part of your social strategy. All event stakeholders, e.g. salespeople and producers, will have strong networks of highly relevant contacts that can be leveraged. Linking personal accounts in social media management tools (e.g. adding personal accounts to HubSpot or using tools like Oktopost) helps you amplify your messages across social.

#6 Develop a comprehensive content strategy

A successful social media strategy requires a good mix of product promotion (e.g. speaker highlights and agenda session focus), informative content (e.g. industry reports, articles or white papers), and offer-led content (e.g. early-bird promotions). This content should be repackaged into multiple formats e.g. image + copy posts, PDFs or short and long-form videos to provide a variety so that your target audience can engage with a format that resonates well for them. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new formats – e.g. polls, questions, posts with images, posts without images etc.

Plan your content calendar in advance, ensuring you are posting regularly i.e. at least 1 post per week, per channel, increased to 2 per week from 12 weeks out and to 3-4 times per week in the final 3 weeks before the event.

#7 Create high-quality, on-brand creative assets

Consistency is key, not only in your posting schedule but also in your overall brand identity. It is important to maintain a consistent brand image across all marketing channels. If your brand’s messaging and identity keep changing, it can confuse consumers and make it difficult for them to connect with your brand.

Further enhance your social media presence by investing in creating visually appealing and engaging content using high-quality photos, videos, and graphics to capture your audience’s attention and increase engagement.

#8 Optimise your posts for discovery

Make it easy for new people to find your brand by using relevant event and industry keyword hashtags and tagging relevant accounts, e.g. speakers and their companies and sponsors and exhibitors. Use the event hashtag consistently – ‘owning’ a unique hashtag makes your social account more discoverable, and creates a library of relevant 1st and 3rd party content. Users who aren’t following you can click on the event hashtag and discover an active community, sharing content that they are interested in. Be sure not to include the event year in your hashtag so that users can see your full catalogue of content and you don’t need to ‘start from scratch’ each year.

#9 Track and measure your social media efforts

Regularly track and measure the performance of your social media posts and campaigns. Use analytics tools to gather data on engagement, reach, conversions, and other relevant metrics. This will help you understand what’s working and what needs improvement.

#10 Utilise social media management tools

Social media management tools like Oktopost can help you streamline your posting, monitoring, and tracking processes. When selecting a social media management tool, consider:

  • Content creation – does the tool have AI content-creating capabilities that will enable you to effectively create social media content at scale?
  • Integrations – does it integrate with your CRM and other marketing automation platforms to optimise workflow and data management?
  • Reporting – does it provide you with data on your social engagement and analytics dashboards that will enable you to extract actionable insights and make data-led decisions?

By following these 10 steps, you can elevate your social media presence and take your online engagement to the next level. Remember to continuously adapt and optimise your strategies based on audience feedback and industry trends.

Team MPG can help you accelerate the growth of your B2B events

We can help you attract and convert more of the right customers with a robust marketing strategy, practical operational roadmaps and rigorous execution. Get in touch with Team MPG today to see how we can help you unlock revenue growth in your business.

What our clients have said about working with Team MPG:

“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:

Growing event revenue fast: a tried and tested methodology

by Anna Stone, on 05/07/2023

In-person events have, without any shadow of a doubt, bounced back very strongly since the pandemic. We have seen ample evidence of many annual conferences and tradeshows – particularly those in market leadership positions – attracting large audiences. In many cases, we have seen events in the first half of 2023 attracting their largest number of attendees ever.

And with the rise of AI, we predict in-person events will become even more attractive to attendees, sponsors and exhibitors as people seek out real conversations with real people; as SEO becomes a less reliable source of web traffic and leads; and as companies look to build brand trust.

So, what are the key things leaders in events businesses should be focused on for a successful 2023 H2 and as we prepare for 2024?

Here are three things we think have always been strategically important for winning conferences and tradeshows, and going forward they’ll be more important than ever:

  1. How unique and valuable your event is to your targeted attendees.
  2. How well you do your marketing to attract attendees – to get the right message to the right people at the right time.
  3. How well you’re doing commercial marketing to grow sponsorship and exhibitions revenue.

The most important area for focus in terms of rapid revenue and profit growth is #3: commercial marketing to grow sponsorship and exhibitions revenue. Another term for commercial marketing is ‘spex marketing’ – we see these terms being used interchangeably in our client companies.

Sponsors and exhibitors are hungry for effective and relatively quick routes to market, and events are a channel they can rely on to achieve this goal.

So, acquiring new sponsors and exhibitors is probably the ‘quickest win’ for most event organisers who have never properly focused on this area.

Over the past 6 years, MPG has developed a successful methodology to help event organisers achieve strong YOY spex revenue growth, and build momentum into their sales team to continue this growth for years to come.

Here is how we do it:

If you’re going to invest in spex marketing we suggest you do it this way too!

When working with Team MPG on spex marketing, a range of our clients who run annual conferences and exhibitions have consistently achieved the following results:

  • Over 5x number of MQLs (relevant leads) for the spex sales team
  • Over 3x higher conversion rate from spex lead to sale
  • 25%+ growth in average order value
  • Over 2x revenue from new spex clients

The revenue is there for the taking – by the companies that make the smartest investments and manage their teams well to integrate marketing and spex sales for best results. So, whether doing this inhouse or with external support, we strongly recommend you invest in spex marketing, or your competitors may outgrow you in 2024.

If you need Team MPG’s help with spex marketing to grow your revenue fast, we can:

  • Create the strategy for you, and ensure you’re set up well to execute this strategy inhouse, OR
  • Create the strategy and do the execution for you, either in place of or alongside in-house marketers.

What our clients have said about working with Team MPG:

“Working closely with our internal team, MPG developed a strong marketing strategy focused on achieving revenue growth for a key product in our portfolio – including recommendations for better monetising our digital products. We were very impressed by the level of strategic thinking and valuable benchmarking they put into the process. I would recommend MPG as a good marketing partner for a B2B event brand.”

Managing Director of a £20m portfolio in a large global business focused on B2B exhibitions.

“MPG did a great job developing and then executing a marketing strategy to help us grow one of our 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’d achieve great things together. It has been a complete pleasure working with Team MPG!”

Managing Director of a medium sized, founder-led conference business.

Get in touch if you’d like to find how Team MPG can help accelerate growth of your events revenue.

Continue Reading
Topics:

Attribution modeling – the move to data-driven conversions

by Deena Hefford, on 21/06/2023

With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming a prominent part of digital marketing, the realm of attribution modeling has been revolutionised with advanced algorithms and predictive models that can significantly enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of attribution strategies. In this blog, we’ll explore how AI-driven attribution can help unlock new insights for businesses to optimise their marketing efforts and drive meaningful results.

What is attribution modeling?

Attribution modeling is a set of rules that determines how credit is given to marketing channels, providing deeper insights into how impactful each touchpoint on the customer’s journey is in driving conversions.

This enables marketers to take a holistic view of their marketing efforts, understand how customers move through the conversion path, identify the influence of each channel to maximise ROI, and optimise strategy to deliver tailored campaigns and content specific to each persona.

Attribution modeling types

Over time, multiple attribution models have been developed to address the complex nature of the sophisticated customer journeys audiences take nowadays. There is no one-size-fits-all model and what you choose to use depends on the product, length of the sales cycle, and what decisions businesses need to make. Different reporting tools may also use different methodologies for attribution (e.g. Pardot’s default is First click whilst Facebook Ads’ default is Last click).

This month, Google will be phasing out First click, Linear, Time decay, and Position-based attributions for Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads, leaving marketers with two attribution model options: Last touch (Last click) and Google’s recommended model – Data-driven. But what do these mean?

#1 Last Touch / Last Click Attribution

This once-popular method assigns 100% credit to the final touchpoint that the customer interacted with before converting, providing insights on the marketing channel that directly generates a conversion. For example, if a new customer clicks on a PPC ad, then later visits the website through a social post, then receives a marketing email and registers for your event from the email, 100% of the credit is assigned to email, even though PPC and social media was an important step in their customer journey.

Although this method is straightforward to implement and is recommended for shorter sales cycles, it holds some limitations of being a single-touch approach, meaning credit is not given to any other channel – no matter how impactful they might have been to the conversion. This fragments the customer journey and ignores the importance of the initial awareness and consideration stages of a conversion path.

As marketers aim to gather more data throughout the conversion funnel to inform marketing decisions, last touch will likely be replaced by more advanced models that utilise AI and machine learning to analyse and predict user behaviour, including data-driven attribution.

#2 Data-driven Attribution

Data-driven attribution, Google Analytics 4’s default attribution model, is a new, dynamic approach that uses algorithms to distribute credit for conversions based on each channel’s click interaction, taking into account all touchpoints throughout the customer journey. It considers multiple data points, from time between interactions, to ad format and more, whilst removing our own personal biases to calculate and calibrate the incremental value of each marketing channel. In our example (where a new customer clicks on a PPC ad, then later visits the website through a social post, then receives a marketing email and registers for your event from the email), data-driven attribution means a specific proportion of the credit is assigned to each marketing channel dependent on the influence that it likely had in the resulting conversion – so it could be that some of the conversion is attributed to email, some to social and some to PPC.

This method provides a holistic view of the whole marketing campaign, going beyond one single interaction and surfacing insights on the impacts of marketing channels on earlier stages of the conversion funnel. By evaluating both the converting and non-converting paths (comparing what happened and what could have happened), data-driven attribution enables insights into how much each marketing channel contributes to generating a conversion. As a result, marketers are also enabled to allocate marketing budgets and make data-driven decisions more effectively with a deeper understanding of customer behaviour.

Difference in results between Last click vs. Data-driven attribution on GA4 Conversion report

However, like any other attribution model, data-driven also has certain considerations that marketers need to be aware of. Since data-driven attribution fully relies on the algorithms for credit assignment, it is susceptible to:

#1 – Learning period and data requirements:

Data-driven attribution requires a sufficient amount of conversion data to accurately assign credit, as it needs to learn from multiple different scenarios and combinations of touchpoints to calibrate its values. With Universal Analytics sunsetting deadline coming, businesses who use Google Analytics for reporting need to make the switch quickly to gather enough data to feed into the algorithms, enabling them to provide accurate results early on (Google recommends at least 28 days of historical data for best results). Whilst the threshold is still unclear, GA4 may default the results in its reports back to last touch/click if there is not enough data.

#2 – Algorithmic biases:

Like any data-driven approach, the data-driven attribution model may have algorithmic biases from biased training data or limitations in the underlying algorithms. It is essential for businesses to set up GA4 accurately from the start to ensure traffic tracked is accurate and reflective of the true paths customers take towards a conversion, minimising any potential biases that may affect the accuracy or fairness of the attribution results.

If you don’t already have GA4 implemented, or GA4 has been put in place without consideration of your business goals and marketing objectives, you need to take action now. Our web analytics experts are here to make sure you don’t put a foot wrong in your GA4 journey! Get in touch today.

#3 – Lack of visibility:

As data-driven attribution is fully reliant on Google’s infrastructure and algorithms working in the background, there is no visibility of how exactly credits are being assigned.

Implications for businesses

As the customer journey becomes more complex and analytics continues to be developed, data-driven attribution and its algorithms will also be improved upon. Regular monitoring and evaluation of the attribution model’s outputs are necessary to identify and address any algorithmic biases or limitations. Businesses should also ensure they have access to comprehensive and reliable data that covers all touchpoints and channels in the customer journey to facilitate accurate algorithm learning.

The implementation of data-driven attribution will also result in more complex reporting, with Google introducing additional metrics to enable deeper analysis. Marketers need to stay on top of these data points, as well as cross-reference them with additional metrics across other tools and platforms to uncover valuable insights on high-performing marketing channels to inform overall marketing strategy.

Embracing data-driven attribution and leveraging AI technologies enables businesses to gain a competitive edge in the evolving digital landscape. With data-driven conversions, businesses can extract actionable insights from vast amounts of traffic data, optimise marketing strategies, and make data-driven decisions. This empowers businesses to stay agile, capitalise on market opportunities, and deliver targeted and personalised experiences to their audience, ultimately driving growth and success.

Do you need help putting GA4 in place or optimising it to capture the data you need to run your business well?

MPG’s web analytics experts are trained and experienced in GA4 set up and optimisation, so we’re a safe pair of hands to help you make this critical transition well.

Get in touch with Team MPG

“MPG developed some valuable analytics dashboards that give us constant visibility of how our website and other marketing channels are performing. This means our senior stakeholders can easily understand how various marketing initiatives are performing, and then make good decisions to get the most out of our marketing investments. We recommend working with MPG’s analytics and marketing experts!”

Jenny Fazakerley, Head of FT Board Director Programme UK, Financial Time

Continue Reading
Topics:

AI-Powered Event Marketing: The Opportunities and Challenges

by Lucy Peppercorn, on 08/06/2023

In our last blog post we looked at how AI could be making in-person B2B events more important than ever, and how a strong go-to-market strategy and marcomms plan is absolutely essential every year for a market-leading event.

Critical to success is analysing your target market well and defining your value proposition clearly with strong, relevant messaging.

Then your martech, website, data and analytics need to be well set up – especially if you want to use basic AI tools such as chatbots, programmatic advertising / automated ad bidding or optimised send features within your email marketing automation – and possibly more advanced, newer AI tools for even more effective, personalised and timely marketing.

And once all of this is done, you need to put in place a better event marcomms plan than your competitors.

Here are three areas you need to pay attention to, and a breakdown of how 4 key event marketing channels should be deployed as AI becomes more mainstream:

#1 Start marketing your event early! And by early we mean start promoting next year’s event at this year’s event, so you have the benefit of a full 12-month cycle. If you’re already on the back foot, a 6-month lead time from ‘soft launch’ is the minimum you should aim for. Don’t wait for a fuller programme or your pricing to be confirmed.

The sooner you can start building awareness about your event and positioning it as a better event than your competitors, the better! Start capturing data ASAP on those interested in attending, exhibiting or sponsoring – this is your gold dust!

Get in touch to find out how Team MPG build multi-channel event marketing timelines that drive strong YOY growth for flagship events.

#2 Optimise your event website ASAP & keep it optimised. Your website is your most important marketing channel. All your other channels drive people to your website, so if your event website is not optimised, the marketing across all your channels won’t work as well as it should.

Get GA4 set up well and ensure every page on your website has the best possible messaging and content (words, pictures, videos etc), all laid out in the optimal way to convert visitors to leads or customers with CTAs or forms – to attract visitors/delegates and exhibitors/sponsors.

For your event website, conversion rate optimisation is going to be much more important than SEO. Generative AI may wreak havoc on search engines within the coming 12 months as search results are replaced by answers created by tools like ChatGPT. This will have a significant impact on business models that rely on search engines to monetise their content.

You will probably get less organic traffic to your website, so you need to work harder at converting those who do land on your web pages into leads or customers. When you know who they are you can reach out to them more proactively via other channels.

Get in touch to find out how Team MPG can help you optimise your event website for conversions and that you are correctly tracking these conversions (including checking that your GA4 is set up correctly).

#3 Use inbound and outbound channels in an integrated way (don’t rely too much on any one channel), and set up automated comms where it makes sense to do so.

What will AI mean for various marketing channels?

  • Email marketing will be more important than ever. Many of the most accessible and already mainstream AI tools are those that help marketers create more engaging emails – with optimised subject lines, send times etc. Search engines won’t be sending as much traffic to your website, so your email marketing needs to fill most of the gap left. Make sure you have a large enough, high quality, relevant and well organised emailable database to make email work for you. This is where you could easily lose out to competitors if they do this bit better than you do. Get in touch to find out how Team MPG can help you get the most out of your email marketing.
  • Paid media (PPC) will continue to work well all the way down the funnel, but only if you:
    • Use a range of channels and campaigns, including social platforms and search engines, and ensure you continually use a ‘test and learn’ approach. It looks like generative AI may quickly disrupt search engines, so tread carefully with Google and Microsoft Ads (note that AI tools available in these platforms and a lack of competitive activity here may still deliver good returns – certainly in the short term).
    • Measure your paid media ROI continuously and carefully – at every stage of the customer journey. Don’t dismiss influenced conversions – they indicate an effective funnel overall.
    • Have a strong analysis and reporting methodology in place for your paid media – working in real time (a report you only get after a campaign has run is almost useless!). Make sure your paid media agency or inhouse paid media team delivers, at a minimum, a monthly report showing paid media ROI and trends across different channels and campaign types. AI could quickly disrupt some of the paid media channels you currently rely on, meaning you could lose money fast on media spend if you don’t have strong visibility of key data points to make good decisions about where to spend more and where to spend less.

    Get in touch to find out how Team MPG can help you create and execute winning paid media campaigns, ensuring you have constant visibility of results with our unique ROI reporting approach.

  • Advocacy via your customers and your employees will become more important than ever in the age of AI. The same goes for media and association partnerships. People will base more of their buying decisions on recommendations from those they recognise and trust. Gaining and leveraging advocacy successfully has always been a superpower of the most successful world-leading events and now, with the prevalence of tech that has entered the market, it’s even easier for marketers to harness this power. Marketers can automate and optimise this engagement with advocates for greater reach and better results. Get in touch with MPG for our latest research and findings on the best advocacy tools to use in your event marketing.
  • Social media success in event marketing will rely more than ever on advocacy by real, recognised and trusted people (see point above), and also brand trust – which is likely to come from trust in the people who represent and advocate for a brand. Assuming your advocacy efforts will generate engagement with social posts from real people about your event, it will also be important to keep posting regularly on the social media platforms where your target audience hangs out with a mix of content-led, product-led and offer-led posts. As search engines may be sending less traffic to your website soon, pushing people to your website via social channels will become more important.
  • The multi-faceted and rapid AI evolution will dominate our conversations for a long time. Live events enable these conversations within our communities. The way these events are marketed will make all the difference to how commercially successful community-led businesses will be in 2024.

    Team MPG can help you develop a high-growth event marketing strategy and plan that aligns with your business growth targets.

    Get in touch today to learn more about how we can help you take your event marketing to the next level.

    Get in touch

    “Working closely with our internal team, MPG developed a strong marketing strategy focused on achieving revenue growth for a key product in our portfolio – including recommendations for a virtual offering. We were impressed by the science and rigour they put into the process. I would recommend MPG as a good strategic marketing partner for a B2B brand.”

    Anna Knight, VP Licensing, Informa Markets

Continue Reading
Topics:

Questions B2B media/events business leaders should be asking about AI to win in 2024

by Anna Stone, on 23/05/2023

The hype around AI is ramping up, and most leaders and senior marketers in B2B media/events companies are still trying to work out how to react.

There is a palpable fear in some businesses that competitors and future disruptors will ‘eat the lunch’ of those who don’t adapt quickly, as well as great excitement in those who see embracing emerging tech fast as a means of gaining a competitive advantage.

Some of the most progressive businesses are seriously considering how they should disrupt themselves before someone else does.

From MPG’s perspective, we see the following as some of the most important questions B2B media/events businesses and those responsible for their marketing should be asking themselves:

  • What tools should our team start using straight away to increase efficiency and productivity?
  • How should AI tools be added to our existing tech stack to enhance what we already have in place?
  • Do the tools in our current tech stack offer AI functionality we’re not yet using? And for all tools in our tech stack, what is their roadmap to introduce more useful AI?
  • How should we manage the risk around ‘betting on’ AI tools? How do we mitigate this risk?
  • How can we get all our staff on board the AI journey, especially the most skeptical, and those who fear they will be replaced with AI?
  • How fast do we need to move to adopt AI? How much time do we have to figure out our AI strategy? How quickly will today’s best AI tools be replaced by the next generation of best AI tools?
  • How much is ‘getting AI’ going to cost us? How do we build an investment plan to pay for this, and build a strong business case for each investment to gain board approval?

And probably the most important question of all based on personal interest of senior executives, and how they can put themselves in a strong position to answer all the questions above:

  • Where do I find the most relevant information about what AI means for me and my business?
  • And how can I stay plugged into this valuable source of relevant information to help me stay up to date with AI developments?

It’s the last two questions that B2B media/events business leaders should be considering more laterally…

Your B2B media/events brand puts you in a great position to be the conduit of AI learning and information sharing for your community. You have probably already published reports and articles on AI for your audience, sold AI focused webinars to your clients, and incorporated AI into your event programmes.

But…have we considered yet how incredibly important live events are going to be in a world where AI becomes mainstream? In-person business meetings will be where professionals can be confident they will connect authentically with real, highly relevant people with whom they can build real relationships, and from whom they can learn in a trusted, ‘safe space’.

AI will certainly help enhance the in-person event experience, and smart event organisers are already using AI to engage and serve their event audiences more efficiently and ‘personally’, i.e. based on what each audience member finds most valuable – en masse (e.g. matchmaking tools). AI will also deliver even more valuable marketing solutions for sponsors and exhibitors as data and analytics can be used to deliver a better and more visible ROI for clients’ marketing spend.

But, as the early aftermath of the pandemic has shown us, people will always love attending a gathering of their ‘professional tribe’ – in real life. AI will not replace live events.

If anything, AI will make live events even more important for the B2B media/events businesses who want to ‘build a moat’ around the communities they serve. This will be especially important for brands that have built membership offerings where events are a key part of a membership package. As generative AI tools such as ChatGPT reduce the need for search engines, businesses that rely on search traffic to drive visitors to content-heavy sites may find digital engagement from web traffic falling off a cliff. Engagement with events will probably need to fill the gap.

Therefore, information brands with ‘flagship’ annual events they rely on to engage and serve their community members should recognise that the accelerated adoption of AI will make it more important than ever for their flagship events to take, and hold, a market leading position.

A strong, content-led, annual flagship event will always successfully drive community engagement, membership growth and overall revenue – as long as the marketing of the event is planned and executed well.

As we approach the halfway point of 2023, here are the two things event organisers should be putting in place now (if they have not done so already) to ensure their flagship events in 2024 will hold or take the market leading spot:

#1 A strong event product development strategy and team:

Your subject matter experts (i.e. editors, analysts, etc.) and event programming experts (i.e. conference producers) should already be doing the work needed to create a valuable programme for your 2024 flagship event.

The earlier a strong product is created (with strong speakers confirmed), the better chance you have of capturing the 2024 budget your customers will be putting towards sponsoring, exhibiting or attending events.

#2 A strong go-to-market strategy and marcomms plan:

  • Analyse your target market

    • Define your total addressable market, as well as the size and profile of key segments. Consider both your event audience buying tickets, as well as vendors who will buy your exhibition stands and sponsorships – both markets need to be defined and well understood.
    • Evaluate your current database in terms of data contained and how it is structured in relation to the size and shape of your overall target market and key market segments. Will your database give you the targeted reach you require to attract all the visitors/delegates and exhibitors/sponsors you need for commercial success and a market leading position?
    • Get in touch to find out how Team MPG can help you audit, structure, grow and maintain your database to create business value and ensure your database gives you a competitive advantage.
  • Define your value proposition i.e. unique selling points (USPs) and benefits. How will your event be differentiated from competitors in a way that makes customers choose yours?
  • Determine what key messages will resonate with different market segments. What tone, words and phrases need to be used in all your marcomms to attract, engage and convert customers so they not only register for your event, but also turn up on the day?
    Get in touch to find out how Team MPG can help you develop more relevant, compelling and engaging messages than your competitors.
  • Martech, data and analytics: evaluate your martech, salestech, database and analytics tools in terms of how well you can reach your target market in a scalable way.
    • Where are the gaps in your data?
    • Which tools need to be better set up and optimised to work as they need to?
    • What integrations are needed for real-time, efficient data flow and compliance are missing?
    • What tools are missing in your tech stack?

If your data, tech and analytics tools are not set up in the right way, you won’t have an efficient and scalable business so that your flagship event can get and keep the ‘top spot’.

It is also worth bearing in mind that to use marketing automation and other AI tools you need a good tech and data setup.

Get in touch to ask for case studies on how Team MPG have helped many B2B media/events businesses improve their martech and data to enable scalable growth (MPG are official partners to HubSpot, Marketo and various other leading martech platforms)

  • Create a better event marcomms plan than your competitors…
    The detail on how to do this will be in our next blog post! Sign up here to get an email notification every time MPG publishes a new Insights piece like this on.

 

Team MPG can help you accelerate the  growth of your B2B events

AI can only revolutionise your business if you have a clear marketing strategy, strong value proposition, growing database, integrated tech stack, and well-optimised website. Get in touch with Team MPG today to see how we can help you build a resilient marketing function that is well set up for future success.

“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

Take a look at this short video by MPG’s own Dominic Bird at a recent Gleanin event that explains how AI is being used to gather insights, understand customer behaviour, and personalize marketing strategies. Watch the full video here.

Continue Reading
Topics:

Unleashing the power of AI in B2B event marketing – a practical guide

by Alicia Drew, on 11/05/2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising digital marketing by providing insights, automating processes, and personalising customer experiences, leading to increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and better ROI.

  • Analysing customer data: AI algorithms can analyse large amounts of customer data, including their preferences, behaviour, and interaction history, to identify patterns and insights. These insights can help marketers understand their customers’ needs and preferences better and develop targeted strategies to engage with them more effectively.
  • Automating customer interactions: AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, and other interactive tools can automate customer interactions through various channels, such as social media, email, or messaging apps. These tools can handle basic queries, provide personalised recommendations, and offer real-time assistance, freeing your marketers to focus on more strategic or critical tasks that only humans can do.
  • Personalising customer experiences: AI can help marketers personalise customer experiences by using customer data to offer relevant product recommendations, content, and promotions, creating a more personalised and engaging experience.

But as AI becomes more accessible, many B2B media and events marketing leaders are still unsure about how to utilise the power of AI in a practical way. Below are just some examples of how AI can be leveraged for high-performance marketing.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising:

  • AI can optimise ad campaigns by analysing user behaviour, search queries, and other relevant data to target ideal consumers with personalised ads.
  • AI can also automate bidding strategies, reducing the workload for advertisers and ensuring that ads get the most clicks and conversions.
  • AI-powered tools can also use natural language processing and machine learning to generate ad copy for PPC ads that is more likely to be clicked on, taking into account factors like audience demographics and campaign objectives.
  • AI can be used to generate long-tail keywords that are more likely to convert. Long-tail keywords are more specific and less competitive than short-tail keywords, which means that they are more likely to result in clicks and conversions.

Email Marketing:

  • AI can analyse audience behaviour and preferences, which means you can create personalised email content that resonates with your audience and increases click-through rates.
  • AI copy tools can be used to help marketers create impactful subject line ideas that feel more personal and are likely to increase open rates.
  • AI newsletter automation tools can be used to create personalised newsletters with a custom curation of articles and adverts that are aggregated from multiple sources which will help you grow your relationships with your audience while executing mass personalisation.
  • AI can also be used for generating html code for emails, which can save marketers time and effort, and it can help to ensure that their emails are always professional and effective.

Social Media Marketing:

  • AI can recognise different social media platforms, enabling marketers to create channel-specific draft posts. These will be highly generalised though as AI will never fully understand your target audience in the meaningful way your marketers do, so you’ll still need some human intervention for increasing engagement and growth.
  • AI can also analyse social media conversations, providing insights into customer sentiment and engagement rates, enabling marketers to refine their campaigns and improve their social media presence.

Content Marketing:

  • AI can be used to repurpose existing content into new and engaging formats. This can help you to extend the reach of your content and to reach a wider audience. For example, you could use AI to create infographics, video scripts, or use transcription tools to transcribe video and webinar content making it much easier for marketers to repurpose the content for social posts, blogs etc.
  • AI can be used to track the performance of your content and to identify what is resonating with your target audience. This information can then be used to improve your future content marketing efforts so you can create more of that content to keep them engaged. It can also be used to personalise content for each individual user for example, to recommend articles to users based on their past reading history.
  • AI can be used to generate high-quality, relevant copy on a consistent basis. AI can also be used for proofing copy by placing your already written copy into the tool, it can be quickly scanned for errors, repetitive words and phrases and alternative copy can be recommended. It is important to remember however that AI is just a tool and cannot replace the human touch. A human copywriter will still need to review the AI-generated copy to ensure that it is on-brand and resonates with the target audience.

Websites:

  • AI chatbots can improve customer engagement and satisfaction by providing 24/7 support, answering common questions, and helping customers navigate your website’s content or products.
  • AI can analyse your audience’s web behaviour (pages viewed, content searches, forms completed) and purchase history to create personalised product, content and promotion recommendations.
  • AI can also help optimise website content and structure for search engines, by analysing keywords and other factors affecting SEO and make recommendations on how to improve rankings and visibility.

Marketing and sales automation:

  • AI can be used to automate tasks such as qualifying leads, and scheduling appointments. This can free up time for your salespeople to focus on more strategic and commercial tasks, such as building relationships with customers and closing deals.
  • AI can be used to personalise the sales and marketing process. For example, AI can be used to send personalised emails to leads or to create personalised landing pages. This can help to improve the customer experience and to increase conversion rates.
  • AI can be used to track and analyse data. This data can be used to identify trends, improve targeting, and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This information can then be used to improve future marketing efforts.

AI is evolving fast, with new tools being released daily which can make it difficult for marketers to stay up to date with the latest technologies and their practical applications. We recommend appointing a dedicated AI Champion (or even multiple champions), who can help your business stay on top of the latest tech, analysing the practical implications for your business and feeding this intelligence back into the team.

  • Copy and text solutions – for creating copy for ads, emails, blog frameworks, keyword generation etc:
  • Audio to text solutions – many video conferencing tools now have this as native functionality but if you do need additional tools for generating transcripts of webinars or podcast content for easy repurposing you could try:
  • Text to image solutions – e.g. for generating images to be used in blogs, social media, ad graphics etc.
  • Other solutions:
    • rasa.io – for personalised email newsletters with curated content
    • AdCreative.ai – for generating ad and social media creatives including images and AI generated copy

But remember, while AI has the power to revolutionise your marketing and your business, if you don’t have a clear marketing strategy that is aligned with your business objectives, a strong value proposition, a well-maintained and growing database, an integrated sales and marketing tech stack and a website that is well-optimised for lead generation and conversions, then you’re unlikely to realise the true benefits of AI.

 

Team MPG can help you develop a marketing strategy inline with your event and business growth strategy and then deliver best-in-class marketing execution.

Get in touch today to have a chat about how we can help you grow your revenues faster.

 

Continue Reading
Topics:

MPG Newsletter | Spring 2023

by Lucy Peppercorn, on 25/04/2023

Spring has finally sprung! And just as nature is experiencing a season of renewal and growth, we reflect on how B2B media and events businesses are taking advantage of new opportunities and accelerating growth with a focus on commercial revenues.

Commercial marketing is a vital component of any B2B media and events business looking to expand its reach and acquire new clients. With the right strategies in place, commercial marketing can lead to significant growth and flourishing revenues for businesses of all sizes.

Consider the following questions when contemplating how to invest in this area:

  • Is there a consistent flow of well-qualified, warm leads to support your sales team adequately?
  • Do you possess the necessary marketing skills and resources for effective commercial marketing?
  • Are your commercial marketing and sales functions seamlessly integrated with appropriate systems and processes?
  • Are your sales pipelines optimised with lead nurturing to boost conversion rates and sales?
  • How much visibility do you have regarding marketing and sales performance, including lead generation, lead conversations, average order value, and length of the sales cycle?

In this newsletter, we will explore how integrated marketing and sales, a good martech stack, paid media, web analytics (including GA4), and email marketing can help businesses maximise their potential. By incorporating these elements and consistently refining strategies based on data and insights, businesses can generate leads, increase conversions, and ultimately drive revenue growth.

#1 Why is commercial marketing the ‘goldmine’ for spex revenue growth?

Spex clients will drive revenue growth in most events businesses in the next couple of years but you need to ensure the value proposition for sponsors and exhibitors is positioned and communicated well to positively influence both returning and new spex clients.

In this article, we share MPG’s recommended step-by-step process to achieve a well-integrated spex sales and commercial marketing setup.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

#2 Integrated marketing and sales is essential for revenue growth

By aligning marketing and sales strategies, businesses can ensure that they are targeting the right audience with the right message, leading to increased conversions and revenue.

In this article, we provide you with a comprehensive guide that emphasises the importance of integrating marketing and sales in order to achieve sustainable growth for a business. The article highlights the three stages of the sales and marketing funnel, which are awareness, engagement, and conversion, and explains how marketing and sales can work together to optimise each stage. The article also discusses the challenges that businesses face when trying to integrate marketing and sales and provides practical solutions to overcome those challenges.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

GET MPG’S GUIDE TO SALES AND MARKETING INTEGRATION

#3 Investing in martech for sustainable growth

In today’s business landscape, investing in martech is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Cutting corners in your approach to martech can lead to technical debt that holds your business back.

A good martech stack is essential for effective commercial marketing. It allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, track customer interactions, and gain valuable insights into customer behaviour. This can help businesses optimise their marketing efforts and improve overall performance. User-friendly platforms, like HubSpot, allow businesses to have a single view of their customer and include marketing and sales automations without the need for internal technical teams. For larger businesses that have internal technical teams to support martech integrations and optimisations, enterprise-level platforms like Adobe/Marketo and Salesforce or MS Dynamics are potentially a good investment to enable integrated sales and marketing.

In this article, we discuss the top 5 investments business leaders should be making for long-term, sustainable growth.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

#4 Why you should use paid media to acquire new sponsors

Paid media (PPC) can be an effective way to support commercial marketing efforts. By targeting specific audiences with strategic messaging, businesses can increase brand awareness and generate leads.

Paid Media, alongside other channels can help you:

  • Reach beyond your existing database to new, relevant leads; expanding your dataset and pushing more, brand-new sponsor opportunities into your sales pipeline.
  • Support other marketing efforts such as email and social media, pushing your conference to ‘top of mind’ and making it more likely sponsorship leads will be driven towards you.
  • Via automation, reach, nurture, and convert more relevant contacts faster to become qualified sponsorship leads. Paid media allows you to quickly increase the volume of relevant contacts you can engage with to convert to warm leads – without needing to add much more in terms of a marketer’s time (you just need to put more money in your campaigns once you’ve got them well-targeted).

In this article, we share with you the dos and don’ts of paid media for attracting, nurturing, and converting leads.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

#5 Email marketing’s role in supporting the commercial marketing funnel

By nurturing leads with targeted messaging and personalised content, businesses can move potential customers closer to making a purchase. Email marketing can also be a great way to stay top-of-mind with current customers and encourage repeat business.

If your brand has both memberships and events, and you are sending lots of emails to the same data sets as the event product develops (e.g. new speakers are announced and new agenda sessions are added), you need sophisticated tools and a smart strategy that is well integrated with your membership product marketing.

In this recent article, we shared email marketing dos and don’ts for conference marketing. We focused on delegate acquisition, which is important to satisfy your sponsors, but these principles can also apply to your commercial marketing emails.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

#6 Measuring the results of the joined-up marketing and sales effort

Success is driven by strong visibility of campaign effectiveness, and also core KPIs supported by commercial marketing activity – i.e. # of marketing qualified leads (MQLs); # of sales made from these MQLs; conversion rate from MQL to sale; revenue from MQLs; average order value of sales from MQLs; and ideally also the length of the sales cycle.

Web analytics, including GA4, is crucial for understanding how users interact with a website. By tracking user behavior, businesses can gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t, leading to more effective marketing strategies. GA4 in particular offers more advanced tracking options and can help businesses better understand the customer journey and conversion funnels.

The needs of sponsors are also becoming more sophisticated and sponsors are demanding much deeper audience engagement. Without a well-optimised website, and robust measurement in place, you won’t be able to provide your sponsors with critical information to support them in investing with you in the future.

In this article, we share with you the 3 things you won’t be able to do without having GA4 implemented.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Commercial marketing is the key to great riches! However, it’s essential to get it right. By implementing these strategies, you can unlock your business’s potential and drive revenue growth.

We hope that the insights we’ve shared in this newsletter will help you achieve success in your commercial marketing efforts!

Continue Reading
Topics:

Commercial marketing: the ‘goldmine’ for spex revenue growth

by Sharise Wilkinson, on 13/04/2023

In-person events are back with a bang and with them the promise of rapidly growing sponsorship and exhibitions (spex) revenues – especially when the event organiser can also offer a strong digital audience linked to their events. 

So, how can a business with a portfolio of strong events and associated digital audiences make the most of this opportunity? The answer is commercial marketing – in other words, the marketing that drives awareness, interest, engagement, leads and commitment from companies that would benefit from spex opportunities available.

Based on what was traditionally called ‘exprom’ by the large trade show organisers, commercial marketing is emerging as a ‘next generation’ area of marketing in events businesses – specifically to support spex sales teams attract, retain and upsell clients on high-value packages. 

The ROI on a commercial marketing programme should be significant (600%+), but only if money is well spent on the right kind of marketing. And therein lies the challenge…which is this: the knowledge, tools and skills to do ‘the right kind of marketing’ to support spex sales teams to deliver strongly growing commercial revenues typically don’t sit within today’s events businesses.

Event marketers typically know how to deploy marketing approaches that are specifically suited to attracting delegates and show visitors – which, to keep things simple, we will call ‘event audience marketing’. Commercial marketing requires a very DIFFERENT methodology and set of performance metrics (KPIs) compared to event audience marketing. This also requires a different knowledge base, skillset and mindset in marketers.

Commercial marketers should be focused on ensuring the value proposition for sponsors and exhibitors is positioned and communicated well to positively influence both returning and new spex clients. This spex value proposition is very different for spex clients than it is for the audience – even though it is essentially focused on the same product. Two value propositions from one product; two sides of the same coin. Although this is what makes events a wonderful model – especially if you can directly monetise both ‘buyside’ (attendees) and ‘sell side’ (spex clients) – it also means you’re effectively marketing two different products to two different target markets, in two different ways.

Securing revenue from event audiences is more difficult than ever. This is not to say that a valuable event experience shouldn’t be paid for by a delegate. But it does mean growing delegate revenue fast is very challenging, especially if a key goal is to ensure the quality of the audience is ‘top notch’ and attractive to potential spex clients. 

In the next couple of years, our prediction is that spex clients will drive revenue growth in most events businesses. This will require very good event audience marketing as the right audience is what spex clients are effectively paying for. And it means commercial marketing is also needed to attract new spex clients while also supporting the retention of existing clients (who now have far more choice about where to spend their marketing budgets, and who may have therefore become a lot more price sensitive.

Never underestimate the importance of a steady stream of new spex clients. They can be retained and upsold in future years, and also provide helpful ‘competition’ for existing spex clients – giving your salespeople a stronger negotiating position. 

Also, don’t underestimate how helpful it can be to your sales team to have a strong commercial marketing programme running all year round to deliver a steady stream of new leads into their pipelines. 

Recently, 12-month programmes run by Team MPG have delivered full payback within 3 months (i.e. money committed to the full 12-month programme has been covered by resulting sales within 3 months), with the campaigns typically delivering an ROI of over 600%. This means for every £1 spent on commercial marketing, £6 is generated from spex clients who would not otherwise have heard of the event, let alone paid attention to the spex opportunities on offer and raised their hands via a web form to indicate their interest.  And that’s just the direct revenue generated for that period – not counting leads converted in future years or the lifetime value of new clients retained and upsold. 

Commercial marketing won’t work without sales and marketing integration

An integrated sales and marketing approach is essential for success! And it is important to automate as much of this process as you can – which with tools available like HubSpot*, is relatively straightforward.
(*MPG are HubSpot Partners – have a look here to see how we can help you get the best tech stack).

Here is MPG’s recommended step-by-step process to achieve a well-integrated spex sales and commercial marketing setup:

STEP #1 Build a market map –  identifying key people in your target market as a starting point for building your customer personas. Typically your market map would include information for each customer segment such as company type, job function/title/seniority and relevant geographical information e.g. countries or region. Develop personas that explore goals, pain points and motivators of your target spex customer.

STEP #2 Determine the size of your market. How many potential spex clients are out there? You may be surprised how large the potential pool of clients really is! And you may find you only have a very small percentage of these in your database, so commercial marketing activity will be needed to grow this list (see next point…)

STEP #3 Grow your database – from both inbound marketing efforts (e.g. PPC & social media) and targeted data research, ensure the list of potential spex clients on your database is both large enough and easily identified and targeted with relevant email comms.

STEP #4 Optimise your website so that potential new spex clients who hit your website are motivated to fill in forms so they become spex sales leads. You will need analytics well set up on your site for this to work (GA4 is almost upon us!)

STEP #5 Deploy well-optimised inbound marketing tactics e.g. content marketing, social media, advocacy marketing, SEO and PPC. All of these efforts are needed to give you a steady stream of well-qualified spex leads, and can work wonders in re-engaging lapsed spex clients and convincing annually returning clients to spend again, and ideally spend more!

STEP #6 Qualify and nurture leads, by using marketing and sales automations such as lead scoring and automated messages. Well-set-up automations can ensure spex leads are kept warm until a conversation is possible, and can also ensure they’re contacted at exactly the right time to have the best kind of sales conversation – most likely to lead to a sale. 

STEP #7 Measure, measure, measure. If you’re not measuring the results of the joined-up marketing and sales effort you won’t know what is and is not working. Success is driven by strong visibility of campaign effectiveness, and also core KPIs supported by commercial marketing activity – i.e. # of marketing qualified leads (MQLs); # of sales made from these MQLs; conversion rate from MQL to sale; revenue from MQLs; average order value of sales from MQLs; and ideally also the length of the sales cycle. You need an evidence-based, data-led approach to get an ROI of 600%+. Ask MPG about our Commercial Marketing Dashboards – as below:

Don’t miss the boat on this one! Commercial marketing really is the key to great riches – when you get it right. Hopefully the knowledge we have shared in this piece will help you achieve this!

Did you know that Team MPG delivers Commercial Marketing programmes for a number of leading events and membership brands.

Get in touch to find out how we deliver a 600%+ ROI, again and again.

 

Continue Reading
Topics:

Paid media: how to attract more sponsors to your conferences

by Lucy Peppercorn, on 30/03/2023

If you want to attract more sponsors for your conferences, paid media (PPC) should be in your marketing mix.

Sometimes referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) or digital advertising, paid media is a conference marketing tool that has seen increasing interest and investment.

Its popularity stems from its ability to cost-effectively drive more awareness, leads and revenue for B2B conferences. As a form of online advertising, it also affords marketers a high degree of control and visibility over performance, making it a safe investment when marketing ROI is under scrutiny.

How does paid media work?

The most popular paid media platforms for B2B events are  Google Ads, LinkedIn Advertising and Facebook Ads. In essence, paid media covers any online ad where advertisers pay for every click.

Marketers need to define how ads are targeted, using criteria such as job titles, industries, interests, behaviour (e.g. people who have visited your website before), and intent. The latter is how the popular Google Ads Paid Search functions – targeting users based on the relevant queries they are searching in Google, allowing them to be targeted at the time when they are researching solutions that conference sponsorship can provide.

Why should you use paid media (with other channels) to acquire new sponsors?

  • Reaches beyond your existing database to new, relevant leads; expanding your dataset and pushing more, brand new sponsor opportunities into your sales pipeline.
  • Supports other marketing efforts such as email and social media, pushing your conference to ‘top of mind’ and making it more likely sponsorship leads will be driven towards you.
  • Via automation, reach, nurture and convert more relevant contacts faster to become qualified sponsorship leads. Paid media allows you to quickly increase the volume of relevant contacts you can engage with to convert to warm leads – without needing to add much more in terms of a marketers’ time (you just need to put more money in your campaigns once you’ve got them well-targeted).

3 things you must get right when using paid media to generate new sponsor leads

  1. Create a solid plan before spending a penny
    1. Be clear on what you’re trying to achieve – define goals and success in specific terms
    2. Create objectives for each channel and each type of campaign/ad based on the stage in the funnel you’re aiming to influence
    3. Decide on a budget, and how that budget should be split across paid media channels and campaign types
    4. Ensure messaging in paid media ads is consistent with other channels and ties well into the full customer journey
  2. Get visibility of paid media performance and results
    1. Set up conversion tracking properly, using tracked links
    2. Focus on the metrics that matter – based on your objectives
    3. Use a data visualisation tool like Looker Studio (by Google) to pull together performance data and present it clearly and simply so it is easy to understand and act on
  3. Use specific and refined targeting
    1. Assuming you’re trying to reach a specific kind of person in a specific kind of company – most likely to be a lead for sponsorship – make sure your targeting is as narrow as possible. Then keep monitoring performance metrics and leads coming through so you know this targeting is hitting the right people. To stay on target, use the options given in paid media platforms like exact match keywords, uploaded data lists, job title and industry

3 things to avoid – or you will be wasting your money and not getting the leads you need!

  1. Don’t start investing – until you’ve worked out your ‘funnel’
    1. Paid media will drive traffic to your website, nurture existing contacts and generate more leads i.e. all the way down the funnel. Make sure you know how you are influencing each stage of the funnel
    2. Make sure your marketing and sales is fully integrated, or you won’t get good results! See MPG’s resource on how to integrate your marketing and sales well, and the relevant KPIs around this
  2. Don’t leave your paid media campaigns unattended
    1. Have a disciplined and robust process in place to regularly review campaign performance (minimum weekly)
    2. Keep optimising your paid media campaigns by adjusting your approach based on the performance data you see coming through in the reports you’ve set up. Keep tweaking your targeting options based on what is working best
  3. Don’t neglect your website
    1. ‘Cold’ leads coming from paid media will have low awareness and understanding of your event, so make sure the web pages you drive them to from your paid media (i.e. your landing pages) are well set up to explain what the event is all about and the benefits of becoming a sponsor. Also make sure this landing page has some clear calls-to-action (CTAs) so that your website visitor fills in a form to become a lead for your sponsorship sales funnel
    2. Paid media is a great way to grow your database, so use lead forms to identify leads and capture all their data

Using paid media well can make all the difference to how many good quality and well-qualified leads you can drive into your sponsorship sales funnel. When your strategy and execution here are solid, you have a great chance of attracting lots of great new sponsors to your event and growing your sponsorship revenue faster!

Want to find out more about how Team MPG can help you attract more sponsors to your event with best-in-class lead-gen marketing?

Get in touch today to have a chat about how we can help you grow your sponsorship revenue faster.

Continue Reading
Topics:

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
Topics:

5 areas of strategic importance for your marketing in 2023

by Team MPG, on 12/01/2023

Newsletter • Winter 2023

 

2022 was a year of recovery and return to growth for many B2B media and events businesses, achieved with a laser focus on future-proofing through building resilient marketing functions.

As we reflect on 2022, and optimistically look ahead to another year of growth and scale, we wanted to share the most popular MPG Insights from 2022 on the topics that we believe will continue to be important in 2023.

#1 GA4 – a new frontier in tracking and analytics

Enhanced analytics is coming! 10 years after the launch of Universal Analytics (UA), Google is retiring it for GA4 (Google Analytics 4). GA4 will provide marketers with better user journey mapping, engagement insights and enhanced data visualisations… but this will mean you can no longer track any new data via UA. Now is the time to be transitioning to GA4 to avoid gaps in data and insights!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

#2 1st party data – the gold standard in B2B data

More data means more opportunities, but this needs to be the right kind of data! A targeted and growing customer data set, that is compliant, well structured and well maintained, while being enriched by every engagement with an audience member, and fed into well-designed intelligence reports, is one of the most valuable assets a B2B media or events brand could own.

READ THE FULL ARTICLEFurther reading: A practical guide to database optimisation

#3 Integrated outbound marketing – an essential tool for event marketing

Event marketing relies on getting the right messages, to the right people, at the right time – with events taking place on a fixed date, this time sensitivity is a fairly unique challenge. Any successful event marketing strategy uses outbound marketing as a key area for driving these messages to potential delegates. Email marketing needs to be used all the way down the marketing funnel and email communications need to be fully integrated with delegate sales campaigns.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

#4 Investing in spex marketing – hyper focus on your most important revenue stream

For many B2B events businesses, growth in revenue from sponsors and exhibitors has been vital to their total growth strategy. However, specific marketing to drive well-qualified, new business leads for the sales team to convert into clients has been neglected. Business leaders who want a strong performance in 2023 need to invest in spex marketing to generate and nurture new business leads for shortened sales cycles and increased spex revenue.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

#5 Advocacy marketing – attracting and converting more of the right customers

Having an amplification strategy that enables you to accelerate growth by tapping into your strongest brand advocates and most loyal customers is a cost-effective and relatively easy way to attract more of the right kinds of customers. These brand loyalists could be customers that purchase from you time and time again, key contributors to your product such as speakers of advisory board members, and your own employees. In 2022, we saw some significant developments and good results from some tech tools that automate the advocacy process.

READ THE FULL ARTICLEFurther reading: Activating employee advocacy

Get in touch with Team MPG to find out how you can add more science to your marketing – so your campaigns always hit their mark!

Continue Reading
Topics:
Get In Touch All B2B Event Marketing Services
x

Receive MPG insights from MPG's team and community
STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX

Get email notifications from MPG about new blogs, webinars, training opportunities and other resources in B2B marketing focused on events, subscriptions, memberships.