How to organise corporate events with a focus on return on investment

08 Dec 2022

How to organise corporate events with a focus on return on investment

According to Forrester Research, B2B events represent the greatest portion of an organisation's annual marketing budget, accounting for an average of 12% of all B2B marketing expenses. A B2B event ROI gauges the net value obtained after a corporate event, such as a user conference, roadshow, product launch, or sales meeting.

Beyond merely financial assets, additional resources that contribute to the event's higher return on investment (ROI), such as skill, time, and missed opportunities, are also invested in its planning. As a result in the business world, it stands to reason that one of the most crucial event marketing requirements is to develop a motivated strategy that yields notably higher returns, justifying events spending in the corporate sector.

PRE-EVENT Marketing

Investing in hybrid events can help you draw the widest audience possible as the hybrid event model develops. Local events in industry analysis can be made available to a global target audience. The twin-powered event format encourages massively expanded sponsorship contributions, maximising return on investment, while also driving ticket sales, generating prospective leads, and increasing brand visibility globally. According to Marklectic, a virtual or hybrid event sponsorship package normally costs $8,456.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) for events are the tools the brand employs to carry out its strategies. The most well-liked KPIs contain data on website traffic, event registrations, event check-ins on social media, enquiries, social media mentions, new sales, profit, survey findings, cost-per-lead, clients, and a lot more.

Internal Stakeholder Alignment: To make sure that everyone is on board with the organisation's goals, it's crucial to set clear expectations with the main internal stakeholders (sales, marketing, customer success, etc.) before investing the time and money to conduct a corporate event. When internal stakeholders collaborate, resources are pooled, marketing budgets are optimised, and pipeline opportunities are increased.

Develop a Broad Promotional Strategy: The promotion plan determines the event's success.

Develop a Comprehensive Promotion Strategy: The event's success is largely dependent on its promotion strategy, so it is critical to think creatively and look beyond email marketing to increase prospect engagement, event registrations, and attendance, which in turn generates potential business leads.

The following areas should be prioritised as part of an integrated cross-channel marketing plan in order to generate targeted outcomes quickly.

customer channels (advocates, customer communities)
networks of influence (executive networks, social media influencers, etc.)
Partners and organisations (technology partners, resellers, etc.)
Demand gen (email, web, social, paid, etc.)

Utilise technology's power: It goes without saying that organising an event requires a lot of time and work. However, the power of technology innovation has considerably aided event planners by providing them with event management solutions that allow businesses to greatly simplify complex processes, save an estimated 20–30% on event expenditures, and even boost event attendance by up to 20%.

Prospect Engagement Advancement: Following registration, a pre-event warm-up campaign that promotes the desired behaviours, such as upgrading to paid registrations, choosing sessions or tracks, scheduling one-on-one meetings, app downloads, and social sharing, should be implemented. Brief information sharing on important breakout session subjects, business insights, webinars or speaker audio, and so forth should be a part of this campaign.

Live event promotion

Active Prospecting: Active Prospecting is a winning strategy for lead generation in relation to live industry events, conferences, and expos. It uses a systematic methodology of rigorous prospecting, prospect filtration, and scheduling one-on-one meetings with highly-targeted CXOs and key decision-makers within the prospect organisations.

POST-EVENT Marketing

Lead Nurturing and Repurposed Content Marketing

Marketing teams in the company news leverage post-event analytics, which contain a sizable database of participants and helpful data about audience interaction patterns, to construct laser-focused lead-nurturing strategies that convert attendees into highly qualified prospects.

Reused content is integrated with high-value gated assets, such as ebooks and B2B marketing coaching sessions, to provide on-demand services as an essential part of the post-event marketing strategy. A repurposed content marketing approach interacts with attendees and communicates with no-show registrants and other prospects in order to generate leads that could eventually become clients.

Optimising Strategy for Future Events: A Markletic survey found that 88% of event planners evaluate the success of their events using post-event analytics and NPS surveys to assess the relation to KPIs.

Thanks to the useful data provided in economy business regarding the event's performance, the marketing teams are able to optimise the brand's hosting approach for upcoming hybrid or virtual events with the aim of raising the ROI for the business.

Conclusion

Corporate event planning, regardless of the type of event, requires high-value investments that demand a justifiable justification supported by a noticeably better ROI.