Marketing to grow sponsorship revenue: why it’s important and how to get it right

by Sue Stevens, on 07/03/2024

Many conference organisers are currently having an internal debate focused on the following questions:

  • How much should event marketers be supporting sponsorship sales? 
  • How can event marketers cover both delegate marketing and sponsorship marketing effectively?
  • If event marketers are focused on sponsorship marketing, how will they still be able to bring in the audience needed – to keep sponsors happy?

This is because wise senior executives know they should not leave sponsorship marketing unmanned. Why? 3 simple reasons…

  1. Most of the revenue from a conference will come from sponsors – typically around 70% or more.
  2. This revenue is in many cases more reliable than delegate revenue i.e. it can be secured earlier and is likely to renew at a higher rate.
  3. Sponsorship sales people will perform better if marketing can help them position the sponsorship value proposition well, feed them with leads for new biz sales, and in the process also support renewals.

A key challenge is that sponsorship marketing methods and processes are very different to those used in delegate marketing. The two types of marketing require two different sets of marketing knowledge, skills, frameworks, tools, templates and performance metrics.

Here are just 2 examples of what is important in sponsorship marketing that is not relevant to delegate marketing:

  • For sponsorship marketing, we need to consider the SAOP framework created by MPG. This framework focuses on what sponsors are actually buying, and therefore how marketing messaging on relevant web pages and campaigns should be formulated. Here is a summary:
MPG Marketing
  • For sponsorship marketing, a key outcome we’re looking for is a batch of relevant new leads for sponsorship sales people to help them generate new business revenue. The conversion rate of these leads to sales should be between 8% and 15%, and it is incredibly important this conversion rate is measured – at a high level and also at a more granular level based on how the lead was generated (e.g. from an enquiry form vs a sponsor pack download).

It is important to consider how your event marketing resources should be organised to ensure sponsorship marketing is effective alongside delegate marketing.  And it is also important to ensure that sponsorship marketing is set up for success with the right level of investment, the right skills and the right KPIs.

Not investing well in sponsorship marketing will be the biggest opportunity cost for many conference organisers right now.

MPG can help you achieve a strong sponsorship marketing performance with:

  • Sponsorship marketing training – see latest course information
  • Sponsorship marketing strategy development
  • Outsourced sponsorship marketing – by experienced experts with a solid track record in this type of marketing
  • Database development focused on new sponsor acquisition 
  • Analytics to measure sponsorship marketing ROI
  • Tech stack upgrades – for a single customer view across marketing and sales
Get in touch to find out more

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 Licencing, Informa Markets

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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.

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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!

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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.

 

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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.

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The importance of investing in spex marketing

by Team MPG, on 12/12/2022

As sponsors and exhibitors come back to live events, growing spex (sponsorship & exhibitions) revenue has become an important focus for many B2B event organisers. Without strong growth of this important revenue stream, events businesses may find they don’t have the funds to invest well in the customer experience for event attendees. This in turn will compromise an event’s ability to maintain or gain a market leading position – something that will be very important as we move forward in to 2023 and beyond.

So, how should B2B event organisers go about proactively growing their spex revenue?

Consideration needs to be given to the following two realities:

  1. Spex sales people generally (and understandably!) prefer to focus on retaining and upselling returning clients, rather than trying to find new ones. And when it comes to targeting ‘new business’, spex sales people will often leave approaching potential new spex clients until it’s too late to bring them on board..
  2. In a challenging economic environment, it may not be viable for event companies to hire more spex sales people so that ‘new business’ gets more sales focus.

Therefore, the smart way to grow spex revenue may well be to do more spex marketing.

Why is it important to invest in a dedicated SPEX marketing campaign – separate from your delegate marketing campaign?

It is important to attract new sponsors so that an event can have a strong year-on year performance, and ideally grow in revenue and attendance. And to attract the new sponsors, spex marketing needs to:

#1 Start earlier than delegate marketing, due to:

  • A longer sales cycle, due to the significant investment that sponsors will be making in the event of both time and money. It is important to consider all of the stakeholders typically involved in a sponsor company, the preparation needed, and the cost – not only of the sponsorship fee but also all the other related costs of travel and accommodation of multiple attendees and shipping exhibition stands, materials etc. This longer sales cycle is especially important for new sponsors who will take longer to convince and get to commit..
  • The need for sponsors to commit early to get a good ROI from their sponsorship – so their branding, thought leadership and lead generation activities can be activated across a longer time period leading up to the event. This increases the value of the sponsorship and therefore should enable a higher average order value.
  • A higher conversion rate needed and expected for ‘lead to sale’ for sponsors, due to the effort that needs to go into a more consultative sales process compared to delegate sales.

#2 Focus messaging about a different value proposition than what is put forward for delegate marketing.

#3 Focus on lead generation – rather than closing a sale online.

#4 Include some lead nurturing activities specifically focused on further warming up and qualifying – before a spex sales person can call or speak to the lead. During the early phases of generating spex leads, marketing activity such as PPC, advocacy marketing and content marketing help to engage potential leads and “warm them up” to be ready to speak to a sales person.

#5 Be measured differently – with KPIs focused on number of leads, conversion rates, average order values, and length of sales cycle.

It will be difficult to grow event revenue and profit without attracting new sponsors and exhibitors. But, at the same time, it is important sales teams are very focused on retention and upsell of spex customers who are already familiar with the event and are already established clients. So investing in spex marketing, by using inhouse resources or an external agency, should be a high priority for any ambitious events business!

Do you need help with growing your spex revenue?

Team MPG can help you attract new sponsors and exhibitors with targeted lead generation marketing campaigns. We can also help you nurture existing opportunities to increase conversion rates, increase average order values, and shorten sales cycles.

Please get in touch with Team MPG to see how we could help you.

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Commercial marketing to grow sponsorship revenue: opportunities and challenges

by Team MPG, on 11/05/2022

At a recent Marketing Leaders dinner hosted by MPG, I had the privilege of chairing a great discussion about something that has become a big deal for many B2B media/events organisations: commercial marketing.

What do we mean by ‘commercial marketing’? This is a broad term we use to describe the marketing that supports the generation and growth of commercial revenue i.e. revenue from sponsors, exhibitors and advertisers. Sometimes these types of customers are called ‘clients’ or ‘partners’.

The type of marketing that applies here is very different to marketing we use to attract ‘audience’ i.e. conference delegates, exhibition visitors, magazine readers or website visitors. Marketing to attract new audience members tends to be more transactional, requiring a very high volume of activity executed across multiple channels simultaneously – some manual, some automated.

The methodology needed for commercial marketing, on the other hand, is very similar to what is needed for high-value subscription or membership product marketing, which is akin also to SaaS product marketing. The main difference between commercial marketing for events and the SaaS businesses is that events have a hard deadline. Therefore, commercial marketing to attract event sponsors is much more time-bound, with a great sense of urgency required in marketing processes and execution, as well as marketing messages.

Why do we believe commercial marketing has become so much more important recently? We believe there are three reasons:

  1. As we emerge from Covid, there is a huge amount of opportunity, with large numbers of sponsors looking to invest significant sums again in live events. When automation is applied to commercial marketing, this opportunity can be fully exploited via automated lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead management techniques that can be deployed at scale.
  2. Sponsors have fallen out of the habit of sponsoring the same event every year. In other words, they are less loyal. Event organisers therefore need to use commercial marketing to convince sponsors that their events are the best investments of sponsorship budgets – with strong messaging and well-executed campaigns.
  3. Many event organisers are concerned that delegate revenues won’t reach pre-Covid levels. With many digital alternatives now on offer, and travel becoming more expensive, delegates may be more price-sensitive than they were. So, sponsors need to make up the shortfall. (It remains to be seen if delegate revenues will recover well or not – the jury is still out on that one, and we expect it will be for some time to come).

The above is based on MPG’s perspective from working with a variety of event organisers globally – mostly focused on conference-style events for senior executives. To get the perspective of these companies more directly, here are the ‘key takeaways’ from the Marketing Leaders discussion about commercial marketing:

 

Opportunities:

  • In the short-to-medium term, conference organisers are expecting sponsorship revenues to recover and grow much faster than delegate revenues.
  • ABM techniques can be used to great effect when targeting specific companies, to attract them as sponsors for events.
  • When approached at ‘brand level’ (i.e. sponsorship opportunities promoted across a range of products in a portfolio), commercial marketing can work very well in terms of economies of scale and synergies.
  • Commercial marketing tactics can be built into existing delegate customer journeys e.g. by adding a tick box to ‘agenda downloads’ for the downloader to indicate if they are interested in sponsorship.
  • Applying automation to commercial marketing can deliver great results. Automation should be built into lead generation, lead nurturing, lead management, and lead scoring – all to help the sponsorship sales people be more efficient by giving them better quality, warmer leads.
  • Building a dedicated, benefit-led messaging strategy for commercial marketing can significantly improve results. Strong collaboration between the sales people and marketers is essential to develop the most compelling and impactful messaging.
  • Building data-led performance reports for commercial marketing gives all stakeholders strong visibility of how investment in commercial marketing grows sponsorship revenue, increases conversion rates from lead to sale, increases average order value, and reduces length of sales cycles (i.e. making sponsorship sales more efficient).
  • Having a strong marketing and sales alignment – through commercial marketing and sponsorship sales working closely together towards the same goal – can turbo-charge revenue growth from sponsors.

 

Challenges:

  • Senior executives, including sales leaders, are often not aware of, or have limited knowledge of, the concept and workings of commercial marketing.
  • Sales people can often be quite skeptical about the value of marketing, and sometimes don’t pay attention to the leads generated by marketing – preferring to rather leverage existing relationships or source their own leads.
  • It is very difficult for marketers to work on both delegate marketing and commercial marketing as they are two very different types of marketing, with different methodologies and cadences. Also, marketers who are experienced in delegate marketing are typically not trained in, or able to do, commercial marketing very well. It may be necessary to separate out delegate marketing and commercial marketing, in terms of the allocation of marketing skills and resources.
  • Marketing databases are not set up well for commercial marketing campaigns. Often the data is missing from the database, so email campaigns to attract new sponsors to events are difficult to deploy.
  • A substandard marketing tech stack can stand in the way of effective commercial marketing, as automation is not possible and data doesn’t flow in the way it needs to for marketing and sales processes to be aligned, efficient and effective.
  • In order to build marketing performance reports, data has to be managed well. All sales people need to be logging in the CRM when leads are followed up and closed. This does not always happen, which means that it is not possible to accurately track, analyse, and report on the performance of commercial marketing or sponsorship sales.

Clearly there is a lot of opportunity to grow revenue fast via sponsors – as long as the right amount of attention and investment is given to building and maintaining commercial marketing capabilities. It is important to bear in mind that not all of these capabilities need be built inhouse – some external expertise and resources can be plugged into an events business to deliver great results in a scalable and repeatable manner.

As with all marketing initiatives, having a strong strategy and operational plan in place is essential for success – with good execution absolutely critical. It’s easy to talk about commercial marketing over a networking dinner, but it is quite another thing to do it well!

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B2B Community Marketing:
MPG’s Strategic Approach

by Sharise Wilkinson, on 11/02/2021

Strategy-led organisations will usually have a chosen set of models or frameworks to guide their thinking and execution. For those of us focused on marketing strategy, MPG has created some straightforward frameworks to contextualise the marketing that goes in to engaging, monetising and scaling B2B communities – specifically for B2B media brands and event organisers.

And here they are!

 

MPG’s Engage, Monetise, Scale Model

Engage is the first and most important step. This is where marketing works its magic by identifying, attracting and keeping the attention of the most relevant people to your community. There are many channels and techniques for achieving this, but the end goal is always to grow your engaged community, as well as the level of that engagement.

Monetisation relies on engagement to be effective – or even possible at all. You cannot progress to this stage until you have a sufficiently good quality, engaged audience.

The engage phase is essential for identifying what your community members most value and are therefore willing to pay for. Knowing what your audience finds most valuable creates opportunities to monetise existing and future content, events, research and other solutions you deliver for your community – via payments by the readers/audience/participants.

Another key way to monetise your community could be via sponsorship – depending on your business strategy and model. This relies on having an engaged community of the right size and profile so that your sponsors can hit their mark when paying to advertise via your channels.

Scale is the final stage of the model. As with monetisation, the preceding phases are important to consider first. You only want to scale an audience you’re confident you understand and can engage with, and you want to be scaling a monetisation model that you believe has sustainable, long-term potential.

Once you have these in place, you can begin investing in the processes, automations and resources that will increase your profit margin.

Hyperscale is an extension of scale and occurs when your scaling efforts reach a point of exponential growth. At this point, your community model becomes effectively self-sustaining in its growth. The more effectively the prior three steps are implemented, the more likely it is that ‘hyperscale’ will kick in.

 

MPG’s Community Development Model

This model provides a simple method of categorising your community members by both their level of engagement, and their monetary value to you and your sponsors. You can use it to understand how your community is spread across these levels, with your objective being to move as many people as far up the levels as possible.

To make full use of this framework, overlay other segmentation such as company type, job function and seniority – to get a full picture of your community.

Level 1 – Lurkers: consumers of free content (blogs, social media) via website and social channels. At this stage, you do not have the user’s data.

Level 2 – Contacts: known contacts in your database. This allows you to track engagement more accurately and also target with email and other direct marketing comms to increase engagement.

Level 3 – Freemium: committed contacts in a free capacity – e.g. signing up to a free newsletter or attending a webinar. Again, your goal here is to increase levels of engagement. And here you want to start paying close attention to what they are consuming, and value the most, in the free content you are pushing out. 

Level 4 – Transactionals: paying customers who have made one-off, relatively low value purchases e.g. a training course or a report. You really want to pay close attention now to what content people are willing to pay for – and how much. 

Level 5 – Loyalists: paying customers who make larger purchases of renewing products. This is the group you want to focus on growing fastest, retaining and upselling. This relies on marketing and sales automation and integration. 

Level 6 – Leaders: enterprise-level customers who make purchases for whole teams/departments/businesses to access renewing products. The nirvana of B2B media! If you’ve cracked this level, you’re well in to scale, with hyperscale on the horizon…

 

Where Does Sponsorship Fit In?

This model demonstrates a simple concept: sponsors are likely to be willing to pay more to reach your more engaged community members (assuming they are of the right profile).

Viewing sponsorship opportunities via this model will also allow you to consider the different companies that will likely be interested in each audience. A SaaS tool provider may be more interested in reaching a high volume of your community to generate awareness and leads – so levels 3, 4 and 5 in your community (e.g via newsletters adverts or sponsored webinars or reports) may be their best ‘hunting grounds’. An advisory firm on the other hand may value more the intimate conversations in smaller groups with level 6 Leaders – where round-table-style events (online or offline) seem to have an evergreen attraction. 

You ideally want to grow every level to ensure a healthy, growing community and sustain a steady and growing volume of relevant audience members. This is the best way to guarantee strong YOY growth of sponsorship revenue.

Patience and Time

The great Leo Tolstoy famously wrote “Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

2021 – or certainly the first part of the year – will most certainly require an awful lot of patience from companies and individuals as we wait for the pandemic to ease off (which we are confident it will!). And this may take longer than we hope or expect. But now is not the time to lose hope or sit back and wait. Now is the time to get stuck into your community marketing strategy. Don’t wait any longer – but also be patient. Play the long game. Focus on community quality and engagement first and foremost – even if it means you lose money in the short term. Try out different monetisation models and work out what your community is willing to pay for and what you can profitably deliver. When summer eventually arrives (literally or figuratively!), if you’ve done a good job of engaging your community at a time when they probably need you most – you will be in a great place to benefit from more profitable monetisation, with scale just around the corner!

 

Get trained on community marketing strategies and tactics

As part of the MPG Academy Masterclass programmes, we run a dedicated B2B Community Marketing Masterclass. This course covers everything from what a community is, how to apply strategic frameworks to your marketing, as well as the tactical channel-specific approaches you should take.

FIND OUT MORE

Toby DanielsI 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, Co-founder & CEO, Crowdcentric Media (Social Media Week, acquired by Adweek)

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10 tips for growing revenue from sponsors and clients

by Helen Coetzee, on 25/09/2020

Digitised events are here to stay. For all the challenges this year has brought event organisers, virtual events do provide some unique opportunities in terms of sponsorship revenue generation in the coming months. Sponsorships that are overall lower in cost for sponsors, coupled with global audiences, have expanded many events’ potential sponsor pools significantly. The challenge now is working out how best to capitalise on this opportunity to achieve strong event sponsorship revenues going forward.

In our recent webinar, Marketing to Grow Revenue from Sponsors and Clients: MPG’s Top 10 Tips, I outlined the 10 simple marketing moves event organisers should make to maximise the generation, nurturing and conversion of sponsorship leads.

GET WEBINAR REPLAY & INSIGHTS

Here is a summary of the top 10 tips shared, to hear and read more – including attendee poll responses and our Q&A answers – access the full content package.

Tip 1 – Know your market of potential sponsors

Analyse your target market of potential sponsors. As we enter a season of digital events, re-consider who that market is. The potential pool of sponsors may now be more global and may contain a larger pool of smaller companies.

Tip 2 – Set KPIs for lead generation, conversion rate and value of conversions

You need to know what you’re aiming to achieve. Create specific and measurable indicators of success, such as a number of sponsor leads generated or the average yield from converted leads.

Tip 3 – Measure and analyse results regularly to improve

Put in place a marketing measurement dashboard before any activity starts – to measure the performance of different marketing channels and tactics used. Review the full dashboard on a weekly basis to understand where improvements can be made.

Tip 4 – Grow your database so you can reach more potential sponsors

If you want to reach more potential sponsors, you need more potential sponsors in your database. Conduct data research either in-house or via a 3rd party to grow your database quickly in a short space of time (ensuring you comply with data protection and direct marketing regulations, depending on country). You can also grow your database daily and compliantly by having lead generation forms on your website and doing inbound marketing to push potential sponsors to these forms.

Tip 5 – Manage and nurture leads well to achieve a strong conversion rate

Your job doesn’t end when someone fills in a form on your website to become a lead. Properly managing your leads means continuing to engage with them and move them down the funnel, warming them up via targeting comms and making sure they don’t get forgotten!

Tip 6 – Define the USP & benefits of your sponsorship value proposition

Articulate your event’s unique selling point and key benefits for potential sponsors. Why should a company choose to sponsor your event rather than a competitor’s event, or choose a different channel for investing their marketing budget? What justifies the investment they will make?

Tip 7 – Make sure you have a ‘become a sponsor’ page on your event website

Your website is your most important marketing channel – both to attract your core audience and potential sponsors. You need a ‘become a sponsor’ page on your website and dedicated ‘enquire about sponsorship’ lead generation forms, plus ideally also a downloadable piece of collateral like a sponsorship brochure (behind a lead generation form).

Tip 8 – Run dedicated email campaigns to attract new sponsors

Still the champion of outbound B2B; email can be used in several ways to effectively engage, nurture and convert potential sponsors. Create autoresponders that are triggered by web form completions to provide an instant opportunity for interested potential sponsors to further engage.

Schedule in dedicated sponsorship campaigns that outline your USP and key benefits for sponsors and encourage them to visit your website complete forms.

You can also feed in sponsorship messaging to your delegate emails – perhaps by including a dedicated sponsorship banner ad. Many B2B communities have a degree of cross-over between the buy and sell side, so there’s no harm in pitching your sponsorship opportunities to your potential delegates.

Tip 9 – Use social media to attract sponsors

As with your website, weaving in sponsorship messaging to your social media will provide extra opportunities to reach interested parties. These posts should be focused on pushing potential sponsors to relevant information on the website (ideally on a dedicated ‘become a sponsor’ page).

Your salespeople should also be constantly connecting with potential sponsors on LinkedIn, so make sure they share the relevant, sponsorship specific posts with their network.

Tip 10 – Make interested potential sponsors get in touch to find out more

While marketing can play an influential role in generating more sponsorship interest (leads) – as well as keeping them ‘warm’ (nurtured) – it’s your sales teams who are ultimately responsible for selling the opportunity and closing the deal. Marketing must not steal sales’ thunder by giving too much away, or having potential sponsors make up their mind before a salesperson has even had a chance to speak to them.

Key examples of this are package pricing details. A ‘value based’ sales process, rather than price-based, should result in higher average order values.

Want to know more?

Commercial Marketing Masterclass – get practical training on using marketing to convert new clients or retain and upsell existing clients

Send your team to a masterclass in commercial acquisition, nurturing and conversion, delivered by MPG’s team of expert marketing practitioners. In this interactive session you will learn how to:

    • Analyse your commercial opportunity
    • Create a commercial marketing strategy
    • Execute impactful commercial marketing communications
    • Measure ROI & improve your lead generation performance – to drive a stronger sales performance and grow revenue

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Get a team of B2B commercial marketing experts on your side

From comprehensive marketing strategies to campaign management and delivery, MPG is a full-service consultancy and agency with a strong track record in helping B2B organisations grow their commercial revenue.

To find out more about our work and how we can support you, get in touch:

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The Marketing Mix | Summer Newsletter

by Helen Coetzee, on 06/08/2020

Newsletter • Summer 2020

Virtual Event Marketing • Website Optimisation Guide • Marketing Training

The pace is intense.

In our last newsletter we shared the story of MPG’s work with Social Media Week – a remarkable eight week pivot to create and successfully deliver #SMWONE. The pioneering spirit and ability to think fast, act fast and deliver a great, innovative virtual event experience inspired many. We thank Toby Daniels and Brian Leddy for their vision and leadership in a very challenging time.

Since #SMWONE’s successful delivery, the MPG team of marketing strategists, martech specialists, data specialists and digital marketers have been working with Toby and Brian on the launch of their new SMW+ live and on-demand streaming service. This rapid product and marketing strategy development to deliver a digital subscriptions service for SMW’s community has once again been an exciting and inspiring journey. And the important work of strong execution and ongoing improvements to the approach for ongoing improvements to outcomes is only just beginning!

More MPG clients and community members have been moving rapidly through ‘test and learn’ cycles. The analytics and data collected over the past months on how professionals are engaging with digital offerings – and the marketing of these – has surfaced some interesting benchmarks. We shared some of our key learnings in our latest webinar.

MPG’s Summer newsletter focuses on four important areas that present great opportunity for every organisation focused on growing, engaging and monetizing their communities:

  1. Attracting new sponsors for digital content packages, including virtual events
  2. Attracting a great, engaged audience to your virtual events
  3. Ensuring you have the best combination of ‘must have’ marketing knowledge and skills to successfully take to market your digital events, subscriptions and memberships
  4. Optimising your website to do a great job at engaging and serving your community, while also delivering conversions to customers and revenue

So, take a break from your desk, step out into the August sunshine – and have a good read!

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INSIGHTS

How to use marketing to get new sponsors for your digital events
Helen Coetzee | 16/07/2020

How to use marketing to get new sponsors for your digital events

Growing digital revenue by sourcing new sponsors is a great opportunity for many organisations. Marketing has a key role to play here in generating marketing qualified leads for your sponsorship team. Our recent blog gives you a step-by-step approach to acquiring new sponsors via marketing. Read more here >

How to use marketing to get new sponsors for your digital events

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Creating a robust, sustainable marketing function: a strategic, hybrid approach
Helen Coetzee | 19/06/2020

Creating a robust, sustainable marketing function: a strategic, hybrid approach

In these financially stressed times, the question should not be ‘should we use internal or outsourced marketing’, but rather ‘what does the most effective and cost-efficient marketing function look like for us?’. Read more here >

Creating a robust, sustainable marketing function: a strategic, hybrid approach

Read More

READ MORE INSIGHTS

VIRTUAL B2B EVENTS WEBINAR

Marketing Virtual B2B Events: 9 Key Success Factors

Marketing Virtual B2B Events: 9 Key Success Factors

In our latest webinar, which took place on Thursday 6th August, MPG’s Founder & CEO, Helen Coetzee, uncovered the ‘secrets of success’ in developing the right marketing approach to attract the audience of the size and profile you need to your virtual B2B events.

You can now download the comprehensive content package including:

  • Presentation slides – including additional detail on 9 success factors
  • Full webinar video replay
  • All Q&A responses
  • All poll results

ACCESS CONTENT PACKAGE

 

SPOTLIGHT

How to optimise your website

How to optimise your website

Your website has always been your most important marketing channel. As the end destination that all other marketing activity pushes to, the hub for your content and the place where your target audience converts to leads or registrants; getting your website right can mean the difference between success and failure.

But how can you improve your website, generate more traffic and, most importantly, get more leads and revenue?

  1. Know your user: As with all marketing, the key to success is understanding your audience. Put yourself in the shoes of a new visitor to your website. Does the site load quickly and look professional at first impression? Is it immediately clear who you are and what you do? Are there obvious and compelling CTAs that will pull them further into the site? A user will be considering all these points within seconds of landing, and if they encounter any friction with their journey they may leave, so first impressions really matter.
  2. Create great website content: Once you’ve hooked them, it’s time for your website content to do the heavy lifting. Write copy that communicates the value of your product, focusing on benefit-led copy. How does your offering address a particular challenge your target audience faces? Avoid focusing too much on the ‘what’ and instead focus on the ‘why’.
  3. Understand the rules of design: Design is crucial, and not just because it makes your website look attractive; it’s fundamental to the quality of the user experience. Avoid overly-cluttered pages. Use size, position and colours to emphasise important elements and create a structure. Visitors won’t read line-by-line, they’ll skim read to the parts they’re interested in. Keep it simple!
  4. Create a seamless journey: Effective navigation is what ties it all together. You are taking your visitors on a journey, so make sure you never leave them at a dead end. Link content together naturally, provide CTAs to related pages and push them to a lead gen form or booking page when you think they may convert. Users visit your website to achieve a goal, whether that’s to find out more information, submit an enquiry or make a purchase – make it easy for them to move through your content and present them with things they can’t help but click. The smoother the experience, the more conversions you’ll get.

These are just some of the points you should have in mind when upgrading an existing website or creating a new one.

The MPG team has been designing and building high impact websites for 6+ years. To find out how we can build a great website for you, get in touch.

MPG Newsletter Summer 2020
MPG Newsletter Summer 2020

VOICES

“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

CBBC

The world is presenting every organisation with significant challenges and great opportunities in our quest to innovate and transform to become more resilient and sustainable. The global economy is relying on each of us playing our part. As dramatic as that may sound – it’s true!

The MPG team is grateful to be working with the fantastic people that make up our community. We sincerely hope to help you find the best way to push forward – with strength and confidence!

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How to use marketing to get new sponsors for your digital events

by Helen Coetzee, on 16/07/2020

As companies finalise their 2020 H2 digital event schedules and begin planning for 2021 – a year which will undoubtedly also feature a significant digital element – the question of how best to generate sponsorship revenue via this new format now takes centre stage.

Within this issue lies several challenges. First, existing sponsors will generally be reluctant to pay the same to sponsor a virtual event as an in-person one, and secondly, some will simply not want to sponsor a digital event at all.

Event organisers now face a pressing challenge to find a large number of new sponsors for their virtual and hybrid events – in a narrow space of time.

Fortunately, the online nature of digital events has inherent benefits. The lack of physical venue means a potentially global market of sponsors, and the reduced cost of sponsoring such an event (no physical collateral, travel, accommodation or out of office expenses) opens the floor to many smaller companies.

The desire is there too. Potential sponsors have also been affected by Covid and must generate sufficient leads via their own marketing to ensure their business can survive in these challenged times. They’re on the lookout for promising new opportunities; digital events’ focused content, engaged audiences and relatively low cost for good reach and a large number of relevant leads may just be the answer.

This short-term revenue challenge for events relying on sponsorship therefore doubles as an opportunity to invest in long-term event and brand growth. Event organisers can grasp the chance to expand globally, diversify their sponsorship base and put their event firmly on the path to growth.

So, what is the best approach to attracting companies from this now larger market? And how can it be done quickly?

Generate marketing qualified leads to help your salespeople acquire new sponsors

Sponsorship sales teams have traditionally focused on – and are generally most skilled at – the retention and upsell of existing clients. They will recognise the significant opportunity to find new sponsors in a larger potential client pool, but they will need help in efficiently and rapidly surfacing this new revenue.

This is where smart and effective marketing becomes the key to unlocking the potential of digital event sponsorship. Your marketing function should not only be focused on attracting event attendees, they should also be reaching out to, engaging and converting potential clients into relevant and qualified leads via targeted, personalised and data-driven marketing campaigns.

Here’s a tried and tested process for your marketers to follow to generate great sponsorship sales leads and bring in new revenue:

Step 1: Define your target market of potential sponsoring companies and key decision-makers within these companies

Use demographic profiling, considering company type, size, sector and location, as well as the job function and seniority of the individuals within these companies responsible for marketing budgets. Consider how the reduced price point may make sponsoring your event feasible for smaller companies and how a more global audience may attract sponsors from a more global market. Create a map of this new market to understand its size and composition.

Step 2: Create routes to market

Once you know who you’re targeting, you need to reach them with relevant marketing messages. First, analyse your existing database to understand how many contacts you can already reach within your target market. Identify key gaps and fill these with targeted database research, then get started on your outbound and inbound marketing activity to attract the right people to your event website.

Make sure the benefits of sponsoring are well presented on your website, alongside (ideally multiple) lead generation forms, such as sales brochure downloads, enquiry submissions and ‘send me event updates’ requests. This is an essential first step, as your website is the end destination where most prospects will convert to a lead.

Create integrated, multi-channel marketing campaigns, incorporating email, PPC and social media, to reach out and push relevant people to your site. Make sure your messaging is informed by persona analysis and includes at least one clear USP with some compelling benefits.

Also, consider using account-based marketing if you are confident on who the ‘top 20’ (or more) companies are that should be sponsoring your event. Feed them personalised comms specific to their organisations, and where possible reach out to decision makers on a 1-to-1 basis with highly relevant and compelling messaging to elicit a response. Once key contacts are engaged via this kind of marketing it will be easier for salespeople to approach and convert them.

Step 3: Use marketing to nurture leads – to ‘warm them up’ (or keep them warm!) for the sales team

Don’t focus only on acquisition of leads. A key part of winning new sponsors is nurturing these leads and effectively growing engagement so they become even hotter leads, eager to start a conversation with one of your salespeople. To do this, build in automations such as triggered emails when forms are completed on the website (e.g. a sales brochure download) directing them to more relevant content. Your sales team won’t be able to reach every lead quickly, so automated emails can be used to keep them ‘warm’. Remarketing via Google and social channels can also be used to share relevant content and product messaging with individuals who are already engaged. Don’t let them go cold!

Step 4: Measure, measure, measure

Every campaign is a learning opportunity, but only if you measure the impact. Make sure you understand who is completing the lead generation forms and what type of lead is most likely to convert to a sale. Also, measure and analyse the average order value and length of sales cycle achieved via various lead types – sales KPIs can be improved with intelligence-led marketing.

Some marketing channels and activity types will work better than others. Make sure you focus on what works best for your audience and event.

Consider how much visibility you have of the marketing and sales funnel. Do you know how leads are coming in at the top (where they first engage)? How are they engaging near the middle? How many are dropping off when hitting the sales team at the bottom of the funnel? What does the conversion look like for each stage? Understanding these points will help you plug any gaps and improve overall performance of both marketing and sales functions.

It’s important to note that not all of the leads you generate will convert within the first few months, but there is a long ‘sell-by-date’ on sponsorship leads and you may be able to convert them for a future event (with all the hard work of identifying them and collecting their data already done!). Keep their info safe and retain them in your communications, it will pay dividends in the longer term.

Wrapping up

Employing these steps effectively will not only secure the revenue for your next digital event, but also provide you with a solid foundation for growth in years to come. Your audience will have expanded geographically, your event will be attracting new and exciting sponsors and – most importantly – you’ll have battle-ready marketing and sales teams with the know-how on generating new sponsorship revenue; whether that’s for digital or in-person events.

As we’ve mentioned frequently over the past 4-5 months; we believe the companies that invest proactively in marketing now will be the winners in 2021 and beyond. There are many opportunities in digital events, you just need a good strategy to grab hold of them.

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How to find new sponsors & exhibitors with smart marketing

by Helen Coetzee, on 21/11/2019

How to get new sponsors & exhibitors to invest in your event

Sponsors and exhibitors are essential to the profitability of an event, but too often sales teams rely on the same few clients that return year-after-year, neglecting the opportunities available in ‘new business’.

Why acquiring new sponsors and exhibitors really matters

Events need a variety of partners to work. Attendees expect to see new companies each time they return. Part of the value proposition of a successful event is that the event presents new and innovative suppliers and vendors in the sector. Mixing up old and new faces also protects your event long term; even the most reliable clients can change their marketing objectives and end their commercial relationship with your event, putting a key source of revenue in jeopardy.

Why sales teams neglect new business

Sales teams’ natural process doesn’t usually focus on sourcing and nurturing new business – especially for an established event. Most go first to their tried and trusted contacts to renew their contracts and secure quick wins. It’s often only when the event looks like it might miss its targets, that the urgency arises to reach out to new prospects. But by then it can be too late to source, nurture and convert clients before the event happens. This can be compounded by sales teams lacking an established process to generate new sponsorship leads.

How a sales lead generation process can deliver a 500%+ ROI

What is the solution to the ‘new business’ challenge and this often missed opportunity? You need to invest in good ground-work and forward planning in sponsor and exhibitor lead generation. This can often generate faster growth than pushing harder on your delegate marketing. Specific marketing programmes focused on generating new leads for sponsorship and exhibition sales could deliver as much as 5x on your marketing investment, based on the KPIs we have been tracking on events MPG has supported over the past year or so.

Here are the steps we recommend you take:

1. Define the sponsor value proposition

Be clear about the USP and benefits of your event from a sponsor or exhibitor’s perspective, especially the key gains for them if they commit at an early stage many months before the event.

2. Define your target market and decision making unit

The decision to sponsor or exhibit at an event is usually made by a group of people. CMOs or CEO’s may be the final decision-makers, but senior sales people and marketing managers are also key influencers. You will need to reach and convince them all that their presence at your event is worth investing in.

3. Build your marketing database & inbound channels for lead generation

Map the market, deciding the ideal size of business, geographical location, sector and job titles. Then research your database, ensuring you include all the decision-makers within one organisation. Consider how you can quickly build your database to reach out to them, using data research for rapid growth and by also feeding engaging and relevant content in to your inbound channels and optimising your website for maximum ‘enquiry form’ completions.

4. Set up your marketing funnel

For outbound marketing, plan your email campaigns, with tailored messages for different audience segments. Get your inbound marketing working well by pushing compelling messaging and content via the obvious inbound channels – PPC and social media. Optimise your sponsorship landing page (with enquiry form) on your event website and also offer carefully crafted sponsorship options and event attendee profile PDF’s behind forms for lead capture. Optimise the rest of the website to direct sponsors who land anywhere else on the site to your sponsorship page.

5. Leverage your delegate marketing

Add sponsorship and exhibition lead generation elements to your delegate marketing by including in delegate emails and on delegate focused web pages some calls-to-action pushing people to the sponsorship opportunities page. Also consider adding to all lead generation forms on the website – including those focused on delegate marketing – the option for people to tick what they are most interested in (e.g. attending, speaking, sponsoring or exhibiting) before submitting the form. Those who choose sponsorship and exhibition options are clearly very good people for your sales team to call straight way.

6. Nurture your leads

Use marketing automation to track incoming sponsor leads and set up a nurturing programme. This is an easy win as you are earning more revenue from the investment you have already made in your marketing automation systems for your delegate marketing.

7. Incentivise sales teams

Monitor how quickly sales teams follow up on marketing generated new business leads. Offer enhanced commission rates for acquiring brand new clients to reward the extra effort, or nominate one person in the sales team as the new business specialist.

8. Learn and fine-tune

In the first year, measure everything and find out which types of leads convert fastest and for the highest average order value. Consider how profile (e.g. company type, country etc) and engagement behaviour (e.g. what they downloaded or clicked on) when ‘scoring’ leads. Even if you can’t convert a new business lead for the event it was generated for, you still have a good chance to convert it for the following year’s event.

It is important to consider that generating leads for your sponsorship and exhibition sales team requires a different approach and skill set than what is required for delegate marketing. You might need to set up a specialist marketing team to generate sponsorship and exhibitor leads, or consider engaging an agency to initially run a pilot programme for you to assess how to proceed longer term for further investment in lead generation for your sponsorship and exhibition sales teams. A steady stream of new business leads is bound to make any sales person happy!

About the author

Helen has over 2 decades’ experience in the B2B events space. She is now the proud CEO and Founder of two high-performance marketing agencies – MPG – designed to address the most pressing exhibition and conference marketing challenges facing organisations today.

Kirsty is MPG’s Marketing Director for events globally, and a seasoned event marketing campaign manager, strategic expert and marketing function leader. Her team of conference and exhibition marketing pros deliver outstanding, high performance full-service campaigns for some of the world’s most prestigious events and brands.

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