10 tactics to drive maximum value from marketing events in Singapore

With global macroeconomic uncertainties and subdued economic outlook for 2013 for Singapore, it’s time to take a look at how companies can make marketing events more effective to increase revenues and power growth.

If your company is in the B2B space, face to face events can help you in increasing demand, accelerating deals, supporting your brand, articulating value propositions, and raising awareness of your current and emerging solution sets.

By offering experiences to prospective clients via events, you can demonstrate value and build trust. They can be very useful in cultivating purchase consideration and preference for your products and services.

Traditionally in Singapore, enterprise software companies like Salesforce, Novell and SAP have run very effective events. Professional services firms are now following suit.

An effective marketing event is able to create new conversations- both with existing clients as well as new prospects resulting in new opportunities and more business.

You are also providing your audience a platform to network with peers, share ideas and help build a community. This will raise the profile of your brand and position your firm as a thought- leader. So if your prospective clients have a need, they will think of you first and reach out to you for solutions.

Here are 10 tactics marketers can execute before and after an event to drive maximum value:

1. Executing an event requires lot of planning and resources. So you need to make sure that sufficient contacts matching the profile of your targeted audience are attending it.

If your event agenda has not been finalised, send out 'hold the date' emails to your contact lists with a short description of the theme first. This will give you a head start in audience recruitment.

You can always follow-up with a detailed agenda later. The agenda should be able to clearly illustrate how the event's theme is relevant to the business issues impacting your audience and the key learnings they will be able to take away. Many prospective participants tend to register only few days before the event.

So send email invitations to your contact list more than once. These could be supplemented with phone calls.

2. Once your clients have registered, it’s important that they show up on the event day. Send reminder emails to them at least two days before the event. If mobile numbers have been shared by the registrants, you can also send them sms reminders. Make use of online applications which can enable you to send bulk messages to a list quickly.

3. Participants are looking for insights and perspectives instead of just data or information. Ensure that your speakers are subject matter experts and are able to frame your clients’ potential business issues, have a point of view and are articulating solutions clearly.

4. Participants also love to hear from other practitioners. Invite your clients to speak as well and ask them to present case studies on their pain points and how they derived value from using your solutions. Your client-speakers will also welcome and appreciate the opportunity to increase their visibility among peers.

5. Simple things like having big screens in the event venue and big fonts in the slides can improve the participant experience. And don’t just stop at slides. Offer a multi- sensory experience. Events are ideal platforms to run videos showcasing your client case studies and testimonials thus reinforcing your brand messages.

6. Invest in a professional videographer to record the presentations. You can then convert the recording into short 'thought leadership' clips later. These should be uploaded to your website and other social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Linkedin.

You can also run these clips during your next event. The idea is to reuse content multiple times to power your future marketing efforts.

7. To increase audience engagement, give them an opportunity to pose questions to the speakers. It’s also a good idea to give them a topic to discuss and let them share and report back the findings. You may also conduct some spot surveys.

This increases group interaction, and both the participants and speakers get some fresh data and insights to draw on.

8. Invite journalists covering your industry to attend the event. This will give them an opportunity to hear your speakers present their perspectives. It’s also a good idea to have a separate media briefing on the sidelines of the main event.

This will allow the journalists to ask questions and have one to one discussions with your speakers and subject matter experts. Help them build context and story angles by sharing relevant local data and insights. Also, journalists love to get quotes from a cross section of the industry.

Offer to facilitate interviews with your clients who are attending the event. The journos will thank you for it since this will help them to file comprehensive stories covering all points of view, making it easier to get them past their editors. The published stories will increase your organisation’s visibility among your target audience and may even result in request for proposals.

9. Ensure that all participants get feedback forms and have the emcee remind them to fill and return those back to you. As an incentive, offer to email copies of speakers' presentation decks to participants who take the time submit their feedback forms.

10. The feedback form is an important tool for marketers. Use it to seek the participants’ ‘permission’ to meet with them again, their preferred time for the meeting and the specific topics they would want to have a discussion on.

In this age of media clutter and information overload, this permission is very valuable and it’s important that you realise full value out of it. If a participant indicates interest to meet with you, flag them as a 'Lead'. Immediately after the event, assign owners to each Lead and circulate the list of Leads to all the lead owners and sales leaders.

Ensure that these Leads are followed up and track them as they progress to ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Wins’. Use a CRM solution or just use Excel for it. The lead management process is critical to ensure that the business development teams are focused on follow-ups and closing business. This will also help you to maximise the ROI of your event.

In summary, the above tactics will help you in executing an event which will increase awareness of your brand and generate demand for your solutions and services.

Effective marketing events can play a key role in supporting your company's business development initiatives in increasing revenues and driving growth. This is the need of the hour for Singapore companies grappling with a challenging business environment.