Many marketers view live events as either purely networking events or social opportunities. While this has an element of truth, it doesn’t tell the full story. Live events can be a vital tool for qualifying prospects and nurturing leads. In fact, they can have an excellent return on investment if you keep in mind a few key tactics to scale them to the potential of prospects and customers.
Events should be a critical component to converting your prospects into customers. Before launching one, however, you should rank and score your potential attendees based on several factors including: how close they are to purchasing, their individual purchase authorities, the size of their budgets and other technical and product factors unique to your market or industry.
Once leads are in your pipeline, a content-rich live happening is a great way to move them along the buying process.
Considering that in many markets products are very similar, a high-affinity, trusted relationship with your customer can be a real differentiator. You can start building this relationship at an event sponsored and/or produced by your company. However, when setting event budgets, you should get an honest assessment from your sales team regarding prospects’ potential profitability.
If you sell an expensive, high-margin product or service, a high-end affair may be a great tool to cement your relationship and drive incremental revenue. If you are in a low-margin business, it may make more sense to be part of an existing event or trade show.
You should consider your budget as an investment. Events are only worth doing if you can show that new and incremental business will cover their cost. They are not branding opportunities, as you are not reaching a large enough group of prospects to make them worthwhile.
Running your own event is more efficient than piggybacking onto someone else’s. Doing so also allows you total control over the content and audience development efforts. If you don’t have internal coordinators, there are many experienced consultants, meeting planners, and full-service event companies that can provide turnkey services for you. Never host something that is not professionally produced and executed; an amateur event speaks volumes about your company, and what it says isn’t very good.
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Compelling, original content is important to attract prospects. You have to strike a balance between getting your marketing message across while providing objective actionable content in order to get a prospect or customer to commit their time.
When it comes to event models, there are many to choose from, with great variety in scale and size. Since the primary reason for doing an event is to drive ROI, you need to be very strategic and honest when assessing what type you should produce. Optimally you will scale the gathering by the quality of your prospect or customer and the potential sales that they represent.
If you’re looking at prospects who are not close to buying or who have small potential budgets, you don’t want to spend too much per attendee. For prospects and customers in this category you should consider a low-cost happening such as an informational breakfast or, again, sponsoring a portion of an existing event.
A breakfast meeting for 50 prospects in a major city hotel can run you around $3,500-$5000, or roughly $50-$70 per prospect. In this situation, closing just two or three new customers can provide payback. It’s a small investment to risk for your weaker prospects and lower-margin customers.
Another type of event, for immediate prospects and solid customers, is the half-day or full-day affair. These can be run as road shows so you can replicate them in many cities in order to realize efficiencies and spread out some of your fixed costs.
Dell is currently holding a series of one-day events around the globe called “The Future of Computing”. These showcase the company’s ability to simplify IT through industry-leading products, solutions and services, as well as tying the brand to green computing. At these events, prospects and customers can learn about important topics and see and touch Dell products.
These types of road shows can be done for approximately $15,000-$25,000 per city, depending on the facility chosen. A good attendee benchmark for a road show is 100. A cost of $150-$250 per attendee is on par with interactive happenings, and this price includes the added value of making personal connections.
For top prospects and customers who represent significant upsell opportunity, you can create an exclusive environment via a one-day or multi-day conference. These high-value customers are usually very busy executives who are not only hard to get in touch with, but are very limited with their time and calendars. In these cases you will need to invest to get the executive to attend, and the reward will be much greater. You can use content and expert speakers as a draw, especially those who are famous or well known in their fields.
Another tactic for this high-reward group is to pay for the executives’ travel and/or accommodations. This appeals to their T&E line—not to mention their ego—and will go a long way getting them to commit to a multi-day affairs.
As mentioned earlier, you need to be realistic about the payback. The cost for a multi-day event can escalate quickly. You need to calculate the lifetime value of the prospects and customers you’re inviting. Conferences are significant expenditures (easily over $100,000), especially if you have big-name speakers, who can run anywhere between $15,000 to $50,000-$75,000. In addition, travel accommodations, if done in bulk, can cost around $1,500 per attendee.
If your company sells a solution with a six-figure-plus yearly revenue stream from a long-term customer, this can be an excellent investment. The key to profitable events is scaling your event to the revenue potential of your customers. Done correctly, they can be one of the most powerful customer relationship management tools available.
Gordon Plutsky is the Director of Marketing and Research at King Fish Media, a custom media solutions company based in Boston.
