Can we get an event marketing plan up in here? Letโs be real โ how many times has a variation of this thought occurred to you? Probably once a week. Maybe once a day. Or even several times a day! Because no matter how you feel about it, marketing is a fundamental part of any business. And itโs a fundamental part of your job as an event professional as well. But with the world changing so fast, and technology popping up everywhere, itโs easy to get lost. In which direction should you go?
Thatโs exactly what this weekโs Whiteboard Wednesday is all about. Weโre here today to help you navigate the uncertain waters of marketing. And more specifically, of creating an event marketing plan. Our amazing guide Nick Borelli has a six-step strategy that will turn your world upside down โ in a good way! Shall we see what happens when you welcome a scientific approach to the world of business? Press play, weโre building the ultimate event marketing plan!
Video Transcription โ The Ultimate Event Marketing Plan: A Six-Step System
Hi everybody. This is Nick Borelli, and we are on Whiteboard Wednesdays. And Iโm going to talk to you about how to create an event marketing plan. I think that sometimes that sounds very scary. It sounds very permanent, and it might not have an entry point. It just feels like you have to know everything.
Why Do I Need A Marketing Event Plan?
And the reality is is that, as long as you have a pretty solid methodology, it can be a little bit living. And it can change and adapt, especially at the bottom of this hierarchy. But thereโs kind of a system that is pretty foolproof. I find that, if you were to adopt these principles, and maybe revisit them on an annual basis, you would have a really strong idea of where your marketing is going. And you wouldnโt feel like youโre just doing things to do them.
Because what happens is is that people in this list, Iโll show you that it goes from one thing to the other thing, to the other thing. Most people go right to the bottom. They go right to work. They go right to the busyness. And itโs a bad place to start. In fact, the best place to start is knowing who you are. Right? And that is the mission, the vision and the values of your organization.
Event Marketing Plan: Mission, Vision, And Values
Be it an event, be it if youโre a supplier, it doesnโt matter. Whatever the organization is, you have to have these things. And I have talked to people, and theyโve told me in so many words that this is, itโs kind of fluff. Like, โOh, whatโs my mission?โ Well, Iโm going to tell you that youโve no idea what youโre doing if you donโt know that.
You are just making stuff up. Youโre inconsistent. Your ability to say, when to say no and when to say yes, itโs completely ruined without actually having a formalized mission. I have one for my business, and Iโm going to tell you. I just make all my decisions based on that. If it works for that, I do it. And if it doesnโt, I donโt.
Why Do I Do What I Do?
Itโs really simple to delegate. Itโs really simple to decline. To choose the things I want to do is simply based on what Iโm about, and what my why is. What really makes up my purpose and where Iโm going. When you have those things, you donโt really have to determine if this fits or not. Or if this is your voice or any of those things that are in marketing that I think sometimes is scary for people.
Because youโve done the work and youโve done your due diligence to figure out what makes you different, and what really makes you excited about doing what you do. Starting the business that you started, having the event you started, and events, sometimes itโs called an organizing principle, but the bottom line is, if you know these three things, you are doing things with purpose consistently.
Event Marketing Plan: Goals! Goals!
Moving on, thereโs kind of the idea of goals. Sometimes people think everything is goals. Itโs just goals and tactics. Itโs not true. Goals need to be something that, itโs kind of a, you canโt really touch or feel. Theyโre just big, right? Theyโre too big to really figure out exactly how to do them, but thatโs okay.
Itโs a good starting spot, and Iโm going to tell you that most goals ended up being kind of almost like too obvious. And thatโs kind of okay, right? Itโs like, โMy goal is we want to increase sales, or we want to increase attendance, or we want to make more money.โ Thatโs fine. At this level, you can be that broad and that vague. Because sometimes people donโt want to have all of the sales, right?
Your Own Definition Of Success
Iโm a consultant, right? So in my mission, Iโm not trying to have all of the clients. Because Iโm just one person. If I was an agency, yeah, I would try to get as many clients as I could possibly, exponentially grow. I have a cap on growth. I donโt want to grow past a certain period. So I just want to have better clients. Thatโs my mission. Thatโs how I do things.
But how you might do things is completely different. But if you donโt have those goals, if you donโt have the bottom-line goals, if you donโt have what your vision of a successful organization looks like, then again, youโre just doing things to do things. So this doesnโt have to be very tangible. It will move into the tangibility when you get into objectives.
Event Marketing Plan: Objectives
So thatโs kind of breaking these down. So if youโre, for instance, youโre an event and you want to grow attendance, right? Every year we want to have more attendees. Great. Well, how do you do that,? You donโt say, โOkay, everybody, weโre going to grow this event, get to work.โ Itโs not enough.
So making it a little bit more tangible and setting objectives, what you find is, okay, well, we want to ensure that we have as high of retention as possible. We want to go after, we want to have more first-year attendees. Protect whatโs there, and grow it in new ways. And we want to be able to have a presence that is increased in our industry.
These are things that will serve that goal of greater attendance, but theyโre a little bit more tangible. Theyโre still big, but theyโre tangible. And really breaking them down into kind of buckets assigned to the goals. So if you have a goal of, letโs say, more clients. You would say, โOkay, well, we need to be able to have more leads to able to have more clients. We need to have a better closing percentage to have more clients.โ
Event Marketing Plan: Letโs Get Strategizing
But itโs still not enough. You canโt just say, โOkay, everybody, have a better closing percentage,โ and then it just happens, right? Thereโs nothing, thereโs nothing smart, as the acronym SMART is stated, about just stopping at this point. So you know where you kind of want to go, and youโve broken those down into somewhat more tangible targets. Then you get into where most of the mental work happens, and thatโs strategies.
Thatโs my entire business. Helping people with their strategies. Because, and I donโt like to do the work, and I also donโt care about the goals. Those are your goals. I canโt tell you what you want. I canโt tell you if you want to exponentially grow, or if you just want to have better โฆ Thatโs your business, right? So I canโt touch that. I donโt want to do the work.
Where Am I Going With This?
So I can help you figure out how to be streamlined. And thatโs really what people do when theyโre in the strategy point of view. They take this stuff and they say, โOkay, how do I break this down into a path that is here, then here, then here?โ Itโs actually being able to see the endpoint from the goal. And then figure out, okay, how is this done? Hereโs a roadmap for success.
So this is about laying out what the repeatable actions will be. And knowing a few things about a business that lets you make those decisions. So for instance, you need to know at the strategy level how many different channels you have to market on. You need to know, do you have relationships with publishers? Do you have relationships with allies, associations?
Social media channels, email, website? A photographer or videographer? Or a copywriter? Do you have subcontracting organizations? You need to know all of the pieces, and then you need to know a couple of business things that are really important.
Event Marketing Plan: Tactics Are Your New BFF
So number one, I find that you absolutely need to know what your cost per acquisition is. This is one of two big things when it comes to marketing that makes all of this happen. And that means cost per acquisition is simply how much money you spend in acquiring a lead before it turns into a conversion. So you need to know, I spend this much on marketing, and this is how many clients I get out of that.
When you know that, you know how much each one of your leads is worth, and you know how much your budget can be, and you can start making decisions that are based in reality. Thatโs really key. Probably, the next biggest thing you need to know is your closing rate. And this is when thereโs a kind of a sales component, so you know how much it costs to get someone to basically call you or email you.
And the next is how often are those calls and emails turning into clients, turning into attendees? Even if itโs attendees, and itโs simply like a registration page, you know how much it costs in your online advertising, your websites, your social media people, your graphics. Itโs all of that marketing stuff to be able to turn into somebody coming on your registration page. And then you know, once they get there, the opportunity for them to go all the way through and give you your money.
Why Doing The Math Matters
That closing rate and cost per acquisition allow you to strategically look at all the pieces that you have in play and then start getting the goals made, broken down through objectives. And then the last bit is really the doing. Itโs taking the strategies and saying, โOkay, well, we know that, for instance, our goal is to increase registration. One of the ways to increase registration is to increase our pipeline by increasing our visibility.
So, strategically, that means that we are at more trade shows, we are working with our associations, we are sending out better and more frequent emails. And then the tactics say, โOkay, well, the best time to unleash an email is Tuesday, between 10:00 AM and noon, and we know we need to do that weekly. And social media has to come out once a day. And there are these different kinds of campaigns that we have, and that we have one come on a Monday, and one comes on Tuesday, and these ones are based on personas.โ
All of the doing stuff, that happens here. And even things like based on frequency, you can create templates so you can do things more frequently, if thatโs a challenge that you have, as far as time to do things. Automation, you can have a pipeline. So if somebody comes into a certain point, thereโs conditional logic that routes them in different directions. So the work is not necessarily manual, but the work can be done through systems.
Event Marketing Plan: Measuring Results
And then just getting everything down to a science of you know this is always happening. And then the last, last bit of all of this is, is that youโre not done. Youโve done all the work, and youโve created systems that allow you to know that itโs happening routinely. The last bit, basically, is a judgment on what youโre doing, and then starting over again, and re-evaluating based on the data that you have.
So you say, โOkay, letโs say the tactics. Every Tuesday we send an email, every day we do a Facebook post, everyday tweets.โ Well, eventually, youโre going to start building up some analytics, and itโs going to tell you how successful the ideas that you had here to take on this, to take on this, itโll tell you how the ideas, once you started executing them, actually worked out.
Once you do that, you can say, โOh, you know what, actually, I probably shouldโve done it on Thursdays, because we AB split the emails. So instead of Tuesdays, weโre going to do it on Thursdays, and weโre going to do it at 3:00 PM, between 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM.โ You start tweaking things, and you get better and better and better. That way, when you put stuff and you reevaluate your objectives, maybe your goals to the same, maybe not.
Never Stop Tweaking
But when you look at your strategies again, as it comes closer, these change more frequently. This rarely changes. These might change a little bit every once in a while. And these change maybe quarterly, more frequently. But these change all the time, based on this. Looking at your measurables and saying, โOkay, this is working. This isnโt working, this is working. Itโs working.โ
But you have to have a foundation from the most pie in the sky, so what youโre put on this earth to do, to what you want to do, to how youโre going to do it, to create solutions to get there, to doing the work every single day to make sure that it happens. And then seeing how you did in order to determine if itโs the way to do it or how to tweak.
Event Marketing Plan: Keep Going At It
Thatโs really a real foundational system that you can apply everything to, but you have to start here, and work through this each time, and consider that without a mission, you donโt know what the work is. If you skip to this bit, youโre just doing to doing. So I thought this would be a good tweet, so I did it. It just feels hollow.
All those feelings that you have when you do your marketing that donโt feel good, that donโt have the results youโre really looking for, is because youโre not staying the course and building on a foundation of uniqueness. So I really urge everyone to say, โAll right, letโs have a group together. Letโs focus on this stuff here. And then letโs create a system that each and every time that we do this, in order to be consistent, and in order to learn.โ
Most of the marketing is guesswork. Itโs mostly a hypothesis. This is a hypothesis to test and back. This is essentially the scientific method as it applies to marketing. So if thatโs something that you think that you can adopt, I would go for it. But if thereโs anything here that you donโt quite understand, as far as how it would fit your business, Iโd be really curious to hear that in the comments below.
Conclusions
So, if thereโs some kind of stumbling block to getting you to this point, let me know. Because Iโll chime right in. Otherwise, thanks for watching this episode on creating an event marketing plan. Make sure to come back next week because thereโs more awesome content coming your way!
Resources
How Endless Events Does Marketing โ #EventIcons Episode 171
How to Use Podcasts & Events as Marketing Tools โ #EventIcons Episode 160