I recently had the privilege of joining a podcast run by Paige Buck at Kennedy Events, a San Francisco events marketing agency. We were joined by a good friend and partner, Maeve Naughton, of MKN Consulting. Together we covered a topic that has been neglected at many companies – how event marketing must evolve its approach from what is often a tactical “booth focus” to a strategic “business focus.”
Event marketers have the most energy and spirit in the entire marketing organization, maybe the company. They are spark plugs. They are busy bodies in constant motion. They work as many hours as anyone. They herd cats. They deal with immense stress. They are service providers who are eager to execute.
But many sell themselves short, exhibiting an administrative tendency to jump into tactics like logistics, booth design, layout, staffing, schedules, and position on the showroom floor. Candidly, many do not understand their business. They ignore a tops-down view of revenue goals and material objectives.
To be clear, this characterization does not apply to every event marketing team. We’ve seen both sides. But the profession’s shortcomings are prevalent in far too many organizations, as acknowledged from our frontline experiences – Paige as an events agency, Maeve as a contractor, and me as a CMO. There are gaps to fill and upside to tap, especially as boards press marketing executives for ROMI and budget justification going into FY24.
In the podcast, we reset what matters most for event marketing, focusing on how to align plans with top and bottom lines. Here are three guidance points I shared, tops down from a CMO perspective with the intent to elevate event marketing’s brand image and material effect within businesses.
1.) Rationalize events marketing “tops down” with business goals.
Events marketing is one of the top two most expensive line items in B2B marketing budgets. (Digital marketing being the other.) Companies spend millions a year on events. Some spend millions at one event. Leadership teams want to know ROI on the function, especially coming off 2023 in which EBITDA reigned supreme.
Many event marketing directors turn to budget spend in spreadsheets and the number of scans and booth demos, leaving out lead-attributed pipeline conversion and revenue. Yet every year they sign up for the same events with large budget requests. It’s a bottoms-up approach that adds to the company’s cost burden but is untethered from top line business metrics.
The first guidance point resets the approach to event planning. Rationalize tops down from the executive team’s perspective, not bottoms up in isolation. Let me explain through storytelling.
I once took the marketing helm of a public company. I conducted an immersion tour to meet everyone on the team. When I met the events marketing manager, she was stressed. Within seconds, she jumped to the punchline.
“I have to manage 50-60 events this year.”
“That’s more than one a week, including holidays,” I replied empathetically.
She agreed and wanted help.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Why 60?” I asked.
She called up a spreadsheet and rifled through the list. “We have to go to these events. We always go to these. Sales wants us to go to this one and that one…”
After hearing her out, I refocused our attention on business goals. I’m paraphrasing and using bogus numbers for confidentiality’s sake, but the logic flow went like this:
- Let’s rationalize the plan, volume, and budget based on revenue objectives.
- Assume our company wants to grow XX percent this year.
- Assume we want to be profitable and hit an operating margin of 0.
- Therefore, assume with simple math that our revenue goal is $100.
- The CFO and I rationalize Marketing’s budget as 10% of revenue.
- That’s $10 for Marketing overall.
- Assume a 50-50 split, headcount vs. program spend.
- That means $5 will go to programmatic marketing spend, such as events, digital marketing, PR, AR, corporate marketing, ops, and stack.
- Assume a typical B2B budget with 70-20-10% ratio of allocated program spend for digital, events, and other, respectively.
- That means 20% of that $5, or $1, is allocated to events.
- Now consider real numbers…
- If $1 really represents $1 million, good luck doing 60 events.
- Two or three are big industry events that cost $150,000-$200,000 each.
- That leaves no more than $500,000 for other events, many of which cost $50,000 or so.
I could see the computation flicker in her eyes. She never operated with this logic flow in mind. To her defense, I said she was not alone. No other event marketer I met in any company, big or small, talked this way. They are often utilized as order takers and admins, and I told her we need to change that brand image starting with our team. Starting with her.
By the end of our 30-minute 1:1, we cut 60 events down to the low 20s. We had a good idea of how many we could manage based on human resources and right-sizing the budget to align with revenue and business goals. Many events were small and did not require her to travel. Being a Mom and wanting to be home with her family, she sighed in relief. For the first time I saw her smile.
We weren’t done though. We had a reasonable quantity of events for the year. But we needed to rationalize the event mix and ensure it contributed to revenue and marketing goals. We lacked historical evidence of per-event ROI because the company did not track it, so we would model our events plan in a pragmatic way.
“Not all events are created equal,” I said. “And no event is the same.”
She nodded in agreement, engaged as ever.
2.) Apply a “portfolio” approach to events planning.
In the 1:1, I advised that we strategize our events plan as a “portfolio,” just like our 401k or estate plan. We diversify assets purposefully to protect and grow equity. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, cash, gold, real estate. Our collective portfolio provides checks and balances against ups and downs, growth and value.
We applied that concept to events, ensuring we had enough volume and diversity in our event portfolio to support revenue and marketing goals. We listed major factors that make an event important: Lead gen, speakerships, brand, thought leadership, market intelligence, customers, analysts, media, investors, competitors, partners, location. Then we rated events against each factor on a simple 1-3 scale, with 3 high value and 1 low. If a factor was irrelevant, we scored it 0.
We scored events with an overall average to complement individual factors. Some events were a 2.4, others a 1.9. These scores indicated an event’s multi-dimensionality and well-roundedness. If we had to tighten event volume, we could rationalize investing in shows that killed multiple birds with one stone.
We created a slide template in her events plan that included a bar chart representing each factor. Then we applied that template to a few of the important events to visualize the event portfolio’s balance and diversity. A big industry event featured 3s across most factors, including lead gen. But some were great for analyst interaction, such as Gartner summits. Location played a huge role too. New York, London, and San Francisco events were beneficial for customers, partners, media, analysts, and investors compared to Washington, D.C., Dallas, or Chicago.
The planning exercise also exposed gaps in event types. For example, we saw a lack of events where we were speaking or exhibiting thought leadership beyond product demos. We needed more events with media and analyst attendance. We subbed events in and out to maintain quantity but achieve balance across all event factors.
Our portfolio approach revealed a need for better balance. We found an imbalance of events in some sales territories based on regional revenue goals. We needed to right-size the plan across business goals, product mix, and territory mix. This tops-down approach differed from previous years in which the team built an events plan bottoms up, listing shows that Sales requested and the company historically attended without ROI measurement to cost-justify investment.
When she presented her plan to executives, Sales, and Marketing, a cultural shift occurred. This was not yesteryear’s random “yes man Nike” plan driven by execs and salespeople pushing Marketing to “just do it.” Her plan had rationale, balance, and materiality. It was tied to business objectives. It showed math for achieving pipeline goals within budget. It spoke the CFO’s language when we secured her events budget. Everything was rationalized. It was right-sized for the fiscal year.
At the end of the presentation, there were no questions. Just a litany of compliments and praise from sales leaders, which is always a great metric for any marketer. She transformed. The whole planning journey, which began with that intro 1:1, ignited her confidence and energy. The brand image of event marketing changed in that company. Like a financial adviser, she was managing the company’s events portfolio with levers tied to business goals.
3.) Don’t just do. Think and do. Be a consultative partner.
The event marketer’s plan was so rationalized that it set the standard for others on the marketing team. Whether it was a digital marketing or PR plan, a calendar slide with a few obvious objectives no longer was the norm. Objectives had to be tied to marketing, sales, and business goals. Math had to show it. Strategy and rationale must drive the plan’s storyline.
In retrospect, she realized others requested events because she never proactively advised the business on a plan or strategy. They were simply trying to help and fill a void she was accountable for addressing. They were doing the thinking, and she was doing the doing.
The portfolio planning process shifted her mindset. Instead of just “doing,” she became a “think-and-do” practitioner. She became accountable for ideating, creating, rationalizing, strategizing, socializing, and executing. She capitalized on that mindset and changed her brand image in the eyes of her team and company.
Suddenly, the armchair quarterbacking stopped. Instead of Sales telling her which events they wanted to sponsor, they started asking her which ones were best for their field teams to attend. They approached her as an adviser, not an order taker. She became declarative in tone, not inquisitive. She became the traffic cop. She was in control. And she deserved a raise. She was playing beyond her compensation.
How to Make Event Marketing’s Stock Go Up
The story of this event marketer is uncommon. Many event marketers lack the acumen of their business to model and rationalize plans. At another company, our events marketer asked me for $2 million without first understanding the budget’s overall size, Marketing’s contribution percentage to revenue goals, and the overall revenue picture. She couldn’t itemize the $2 million either. She just wanted a lump sum blank check.
What she did not realize was that her number was almost half of our programmatic budget. If I handed it to her, we would undercut digital spend so drastically we would miss our pipeline goals and bloat our CPL. I ended up setting the events budget at 40 percent of her initial ask.
To come full circle, event marketers get so wrapped up in the logistics of an event – traveling, shipping booths, choosing carpet, setting customer dinners, ordering swag – that they box themselves out of developing strategy for the business and demand gen. They are passive participants at best and do not realize the greater role they can take on Marketing teams.
Event marketing managers have a golden opportunity to reset their brand image and drive strategy, not follow it. They need to demand more from their marketing peers. They need to be included in devising integrated marketing strategy. They typically are paid tens of thousands of dollars less than demand gen and product marketers, and in all honesty, their comp is right-sized if they maintain a tactical status quo.
But like the transformative story above, they can be much more than executors. They can be consultative partners with Sales, CMOs and demand gen teams. They have the energy and personality to do it. It’s their choice. As we start a new year and a spring event season, rethink the role, expectations, and impact we need from event marketers. With a tops-down, portfolio approach to rationalizing events, they can stand out, increase their compensation, and grow revenue with great efficiency.
