Announcing Our 2016 Event and Marketing Automation Benchmark Report
According to our newly released event marketing benchmark report, 82% of marketers consider event ROI a valuable metric in defining event success. Event marketers, demand generation specialists, content marketers, and sales teams have the shared goal of generating revenue from events, but what does it take in order to achieve event success?
How are other industry leaders in your field defining event success— leads generated, press mentions, brand awareness, MQLs, or SQLs? More importantly: how do your event and marketing automation processes and best practices stack up against enterprise companies in your field? What’s their secret to event success?
In order to distinguish you and your company from your competitors at events, it’s important to understand the value proposition of your company and what makes your brand unique. At the same time, staying on top of event marketing trends and the latest event technologies enables B2B marketers to capture prospect data and buying signals and leverage that data to drive measurable results.
Knowing where your competition stands enables you to out-perform, out-innovate, and out-do the attendee experience at your next event to become an event industry leader.
At Certain, our event automation platform is able to scale enterprise events on a global scale, manage the data of thousands of attendees, and help B2B companies host and exhibit at hundreds of events a year. What is the key for other enterprise companies to grow their event program, and how can marketers leverage event strategies for event success?
Our Event and Marketing Automation Benchmark Report gave us valuable insights into how events are integrated into the digital marketing landscape. For example, you may not know that 30% of marketers aren’t aware of how to maximize their email marketing campaigns in order to generate and nurture leads during all stages of the event lifecycle.
What does that mean? A third of marketers are losing out on lead generating opportunities. Without the right combination of email targeting, lead nurture, and follow-up, you are losing those hard-earned leads that you generated from your event.
If your event and marketing automation system are integrated, when a prospect attends a session or shows interest in a product, this could trigger a follow-up email to set-up a demo or an appointment, which accelerates the buyer’s journey. However, without engagement or lead scoring integrated into your email marketing campaign, you may be capturing the contact information of a lead, but the revenue generating potential of that lead goes nowhere.
Digital marketers know that email marketing is only one piece of the event marketing puzzle. With the rise of data-driven marketing, the need to capture data is what enables personalized and targeted marketing and sales campaigns.
We found in our event marketing benchmark report that 56% of B2B marketers are unaware of how to capture event intelligence and leverage attendee buying signals into cross-channel marketing campaigns. Over half of all marketers need to improve their event marketing strategy in order to convert leads into customers.
We’ve recently covered the many challenges that digital marketers face when trying to implement an effective marketing and event automation strategy. Messy data, too many systems, and IT dependence, are roadblocks to a comprehensive marketing strategy.
But in order to successfully integrate your event and marketing automation systems, your company needs to define its goals, target your audience, capture as much data as possible, and analyze and evaluate your event metrics to measure event ROI. Digital marketers must ask themselves: do I have the necessary processes in place to ensure event success, or how can I refine these processes for better results from events?
What does this mean for digital marketers? There’s a lot of room for improvement for integrating events into your marketing strategy. When event and marketing automation are fully integrated, you can leverage live events to establish attendee interest, create a dialogue between you and your prospect, enable cross-channel marketing campaign integration, raise brand awareness, and position your company as an industry thought leader.
With a clearly defined demand generation and event strategy, you are well on your way to delivering event ROI and event success.