Event Marketing

Obtaining funding and corporate sponsorship is fundamental to the success of many events. However, it can be challenging and sometimes downright frustrating to secure funding for your event. Here are some tips to make the process a bit easier.

Setting the Foundation

Before you begin looking for sponsors, you should construct a foundation for sponsorship. This includes a list all the details of what does and does not constitute sponsorship, and any issues that may come up as you seek sponsorship, such as companies and industries you may need to exclude.

Some key issues that should be addressed include:

• Defining the purpose of the sponsorship (marketing, fundraising, establishing long term partnerships)
• Who will be responsible for seeking sponsorship and to whom they should report and how frequently
• What benefits will be provided for each level of sponsorship (number of participants that can attend, policy on company promotional materials, invite to speak at event)
• Policy for payment and deadlines for any materials such as company logo and speaker bios
• How will the sponsorship funds be used? What are the fundamental costs? What are the monetary goals for sponsorship?

Define Your Target Audience

While your marketing plan should be targeting people that may be interested in your event, your sponsorship strategy should focus on obtaining sponsors who wish to communicate with your target market. This may mean focusing on a brand area for a specific product within a company instead of going directly to the corporate sponsorship department, which is usually swamped with requests for sponsorship. Keep in mind that the company itself probably sells many different products with a target area far greater than the one you are providing, so if you can offer niche marketing to the marketing department of a specific brand, they may be more willing to sponsor you.

Research Potential Sponsors

Before you contact potential sponsors, do some research via business magazines, websites, annual reports, etc. It is good to know what each company’s current marketing objectives are, what new products they’ve just released, who their competitors are, what their current sponsorship policy is, and if they’ve ever sponsored an event similar to yours. Many companies do publish sponsorship guidelines, so make sure their policy fits with your conference objectives and benefits. You may even want to talk with a potential sponsor either by phone or in person to obtain more information and to establish a personal relationship with the company before presenting a sponsorship request.

Sell Your Organization

Some things to heavily promote when asking for sponsorship:

• Having a strong brand associated with your event really aids this process greatly, so build your brand and promote awareness as much as possible!
• State your purpose and objectives for the event as clearly as possible.
• Include all sponsorship levels and benefits you’ve defined including marketing and promotion, hospitality, public relations and media, special access to events, number of attendees invited, category exclusivity, networking opportunities, speaking opportunities, if the contribution is tax-deductible, etc.
• If you’ve held events in the past, use past speakers, topics, sponsors, and past success to promote your current event.
• Don’t just stress who will be attending your event, but to whom you will be distributing pre-event advertising and promotions, and the amount of publicity you expect to obtain.

Setting Sponsorship Levels

There are a couple of different strategies for setting levels of sponsorship. Ultimately, you want to offer your sponsors a choice, but you should make sure that when developing levels, you are not offering all levels the great benefits with the lower levels receiving less of the supporting benefits. The most common approach to sponsorship includes “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze” or something similar, with gold receiving the maximum benefits offered. Another approach may be to offer two completely separate packages of relatively equal price (one might be a marketing package while the other may focus participation & involvement in the event). A third option would be to provide a standard package with the opportunity to upgrade to a premium package. Don’t forget about media sponsorship - you can save yourself a lot of money by asking for free advertising from companies (especially on the web) in return for sponsorship benefits.

Developing a Proposal

A proposal should give your potential sponsor enough information to make a decision. You should include:

• A description of your organization
• Information about your event including date and location, speakers, proposed topics, sponsors, preliminary agenda, ticket costs, background information, and anything else you can include.
• An overview of your marketing plan and a profile of the demographics of your target audience
• Your list of benefits and their corresponding monetary values

Time Frame

Try to approach sponsors 6-12 months in advance to allow them to participate fully in the benefits you offer them. If you are offering your sponsors a timeslot for speaking, keep in mind that people plan their schedules well in advance, so ask early to secure a prominent speaker. Planning ahead is also very important in getting sufficient funding to continue with your event planning and marketing. You don’t want to find yourself falling short on funds early on in the game.

As you begin to plan your event, ask yourself a couple of fundamental questions - what value am I providing my attendees? Why would they spend their time at my event when they could be doing something else? Those questions should always remain in focus as you proceed with the event planning process.

What is Your Mission Statement?

Before you begin to plan an event, spend a good deal of time thinking about what you hope to accomplish by holding the event. A conference should have a mission statement stating its intent, just as every business does. Don’t just throw ideas around in your head, actually discuss it with your conference planning team and work out a written statement of purpose. Some ideas for a purpose can include networking, building community, and being social, solving a problem or discussing a current issue, forming an agenda for a future project, fundraising for an organization, or educating your attendees.

Who Are You Targeting?

Picking a specific target group is essential to the success of your conference. You can’t market to everyone, and while some people will be very enthusiastic about attending, others will need some convincing. Unfortunately, the more you need to convince someone to come, the more money you will end up spending on advertising to them, so you should plan your marketing strategy carefully in relation to your budget.

What Does Your Audience Want To Know?

Once you’ve determined your audience, you can put yourself in their shoes. Your audience ultimately wants to know how the event will benefit them. After all, they will most likely be paying you to come to your event, so they want to know what they get for their money. If you have the opportunity, ask them. Set up a forum for discussion on your website, send a questionnaire, or conduct phone interviews asking them what information they hope to learn from your event. Otherwise, plan your event as if you were going to be an attendee. Why would you want to attend?

Have a Clear and Defined Purpose

As much as you may like to believe that your attendees will remember everything you told them the next day, week, or later, chances are, they won’t. They probably will only remember 5-10%, so make your message clear and concise, and repeat it several times throughout the event.

Schedule Enthusiastic Speakers

How many times have you walked out of a lecture and thought, “Thank goodness it’s finally over!” Enthusiastic and knowledgeable speakers add life to your conference, keeping attendees interested and engaged. Speakers only have a couple of moments to capture your audience’s attention, and if they fail to do so in that time, your audience will become distracted and wonder what else they could be doing with their time.

Keep Attendees Comfortable

Work out the logistics of parking, food, restrooms, breaks, room temperature, and other materials beforehand. If your attendees are not comfortable, their attention will not be on you.

Add Variety

Mix learning events with networking events, lectures, panels, or round table discussions throughout the day. People have a hard time paying attention when they have to sit through one lecture after another, so keep them engaged with opportunities to share their opinions, meet other attendees, and ask questions to knowledgeable speakers.

Make Every Minute Count

Organize your event so that it runs smoothly and logically from one activity to the next. Have questions or topics of discussion posted on an overhead projector or written on a handout for early attendees to ponder. Schedule breaks for networking and open discussion. End activities with a Q/A session for further consideration.

Ask for Feedback

After each scheduled activity, have attendees evaluate the quality of the speaker involved, the information provided and any additional questions and comments they might have. If possible, email respondents with answers to their questions after the event or post their questions on your website for further discussion.

Provide Resources For Further Information

Give out handouts or book and website recommendations for attendees interested in more information. Post speaker notes, conference proceedings, or a summary of the key topics on your website after the conference along with a message board or forum to facilitate discussion and feedback.

According to the Center for Exhibition Research (CEIR), trade show exhibitions come in second only to direct sales in generating new and repeat sales for most companies.

If you are like most people, you are looking to make your marketing dollars work harder, especially with current decrease in corporate spending that has allied itself with the downturn in the economy. Everyone is looking to improve their return on investment, and for some, unfortunately, that may mean cutting the huge expense of trade show marketing out of their budgets. Trade shows are a great marketing tool for those who take advantage of the benefits. So what are some ways to make trade show marketing work better for your company?

Picking the Right Trade Shows

Obviously, you need to start with the basics - who will be attending and who else is exhibiting? But you can dig much deeper than that. Start asking the trade show organizers questions like where do attendees spend most of their time, what specific product categories are they most interested in, and how the event compares to competing trade shows. Just knowing that there will be 5000 attendees may not help you if few are interested in your product category.

Choosing an Objective

Pick an objective and stick with it. “But I’m here to get leads”, you say. Absolutely, but trade shows can also help you do a number of other things like getting feedback and generating buzz for new products, educating potential customers on the benefits of your current products, finding new distributors and meeting people in other industries, and promoting your brand.

Pre-Show Advertising

Make sure your current customers and industry members know you are going to be at a particular trade show. You can do this by sending out teaser postcards with your booth number or advertising in trade magazines. If you are going to launch a product, gradually leak information about it in pre-trade show materials. Create a website that hints at what it may be and include the url in your teaser promotions. If you’re having a contest for free tickets to an event, let people know they need to come to your booth to sign up for the drawing. The more pre-show buzz you can create, the more popular your booth is going to be.

Making Your Booth Stand Out

Having a really nice booth can definitely attract traffic and media attention. You only have a couple of seconds to grab someone’s attention, and anything that may set you apart from the other booths will drastically help. Think of it this way. Having a creative setup for your booth means you’ve thought quite a bit about the event and put a lot of time and effort into making it happen. This enthusiasm will transfer to your booth staff as they talk to visitors. The more “into it” your staff is, the more leads you are going to generate.

Ask For Feedback

You have a huge pool of customers and potential customers available to you. Do some market research. Ask them what they think of your booth and presence at the trade show, your product, whether your sales staff has been helpful, and any other questions you’ve been dying to learn from your customers. Ask for feedback before you give them your promotional goodies, or give those people that have filled out the survey something better than what you hand out ordinarily.

See What Your Competitors Are Doing

Another major benefit of trade shows is that your competitors are there as well. Now you can check up on what they are doing, who their business partners are, and what kinds of visitors they are getting. You can also pick up some of their corporate literature to compare to your own.

Publicity - Give the Press a Story

Trade shows provide excellent opportunities to meet and interact with key industry journalists. If you can, set up a time to chat with them to let them in on how your company is innovating the industry or the success of events you’ve done. If you can, volunteer to be a speaker or panelist at the trade show to gain further media exposure. You may also look to sponsor a speaker or panel. While you’re at it, make sure you keep copies of your press kit in your booth, as you never know when members of the press might drop in.

Meet As Many People As You Can

Face to face interaction can really improve sales. Make sure your staff is well trained in answering questions about your product or service.

You should also do some networking yourself. You can meet a lot of people at a trade show just by checking out other booths and talking to their staff. Some of your contacts may become potential business partners. Some may bring new customer leads. And it doesn’t hurt to expand your working network in case other opportunities may arise in the future.

Measure Your Return On Investment

At the end of the day, you want to make sure your costs were justified. Did you generate enough leads to justify the cost? How did your numbers compare to previous years or other trade shows you’ve done? Why did people visit your booth - because you had a pretty booth design and promotional giveaways or out of interest for your product? How effective were your sales staff - what did visitors think when they walked away?

You’ve put in the time, effort and money to create a successful meeting. Now you want to know what types of rewards your company reaped. Calculating the return on investment (ROI), evaluating questionnaires, and rating the services you hired for the event can give you a clearer picture of the gains and losses from the event. Being informed of your strong and weak points can help your business succeed.

Success Through Asking

Knowing the objectives of the meeting and where your business is headed are essential to evaluating your meeting. In order to compare and contrast each meeting, create a basic layout of questions and stick with them when evaluating of all your meetings. No, all your meetings won’t be the same, but setting different criteria makes it far more difficult to objectively compare one meeting to another.

When creating questionnaires to obtain feedback, make sure you keep your goals in mind, as you certainly want to know if attendees picked up on and retained your central message. Your questionnaires should include questions on the general program, presentation, location, services, and other aspects specific to your event. Give these questionnaires out to attendees after every presentation to receive feedback while the content is fresh in their minds. At the end of the meeting, give out another questionnaire for attendees to rate the entire program and obtain feedback as to what they thought was most beneficial or needs improvement. You can also send out questionnaires a week or two after the event to evaluate what attendees retained.

The Survey Says

Your first task in creating questions is making them objective. Be careful that your own biases don’t slip in - after all, you want to determine how the audience perceived the event, not how you wanted them to perceive it. The most common type of questionnaires contains questions with set answers. This allows you to calculate percentages and rank responses accordingly. The drawback of this type of question is that it does not give insight into why the assessor responded in that particular way. Therefore, you may want to have a few personal response questions that allow assessors to answer in their own words. Using a mix of both set questions and personal response questions can help your company get a greater feel of the success rate of the meeting.

The questions, themselves, should be informative and specific to your event, and quick for attendees to fill out. The easiest and quickest types of answers are basic rating scales. The three most common include

rating the performance: “excellent, very good, good, fair, poor”

agreeing or disagreeing: “strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree”

measuring satisfaction: “very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, very dissatisfied”

These can also be measured based on a 5- or 10-point scale. For example, on a scale of 1-5 with 5 meaning “extremely satisfied”, how satisfied were you with…

Another key issue to the layout of the questionnaire is privacy in sensitive issues. If you are looking to collect information such as age or income, group answers in ranges so the respondent doesn’t feel violated. You may also want to consider keeping assessments anonymous depending on the questions you ask to ensure greater openness and honestly with their answers.

You should also include your company’s contact information somewhere on the evaluation, and above all, don’t forget to thank respondents for giving you their opinion! You may also want to include a url or an address where attendees can view the results of the survey.

Reward and Analyze

Remember that people are taking time out of their busy lives to fill out your evaluation. Therefore, be considerate and show your appreciation in any way you can. For example, if you mail our questionnaires, sent a gift and a postage paid envelope for respondents to send the questionnaires back to you. If responses are not mailed, have a drawing for a prize or give out a thank you gift when the sheet is returned.

Once you’ve received all responses, it’s time to analyze the results. Basic math will calculate the means, standard deviations, and percentages you need to know to determine the success of the meeting. More advanced statistical analysis can include using Microsoft Excel to more advanced statistics tools such as SPSS. If you don’t have the time to collect results yourself, hire a professional survey or marketing research company to take care of the logistics.

Return on Investment (ROI)

So, now that you’ve calculated the overall opinion of the event, it’s time to calculate return on investment. This is easy if you have specific monetary goals - compare the numbers to determine if you’ve met those goals. If you didn’t create specific monetary goals, ask those that financially invested in the event what they expected the return to be and analyze those projections against expenses. Once you’ve calculated ROI, be sure to inform your investors of the financial results as well as the results of the opinion survey.

Giving Back to the Services

Services play a major part in making meetings successful, so if you’ve had a good service team, be sure to show your appreciation. Gratuity is sometimes added directly to the service bill automatically, but if you feel your service team has done an excellent job, show your appreciation by giving them a bit more. You may also want to consider sending a thank you gift. Sometimes, there is one person who just has a tremendously positive effect on helping your meeting run smoothly, so do something special for them to show your appreciation, such as letter of excellence to their manager or a special gift. Remember, there were a lot of people involved in making your meeting successful, so always try to give something back when you can.

A typical event marketing campaign will generally include most of the following marketing communications:

1. Sponsorship letters/kits
2. Save the Date postcard or email
3. Website
4. Mailer
5. Posters/Banners
6. Advertisements in relevant publications
7. Press kits/releases
8. Flyers for students
9. Email announcements
10. Day of Event Brochure

Save the Date Postcard

A save the date postcard is a cheap way to let people know well in advance that you are having a conference. Ideally, it should be sent out about 4-5 months before your event, and should give details like date, location, and website address. Save the date postcards can also double as conference flyers, which can be given out at any other events or around campus.

Website

Along with the save the date postcard, getting your website set up during the initial planning stages is critical for giving potential sponsors and speakers information about your event. Often, conferences are hesitant to get the site up and running early because they think they don’t have any solid details about the conference to advertise. However, just having a web presence gives speakers and sponsors the piece of mind that you are taking the conference seriously.

Here are some ideas of what you should include:

• date/location
• region-specific logistics
• opportunities for sponsorship
• proposed topics and objectives
• tentative agenda
• keynote and panelist bios
• who should attend and how they will benefit
• information on past conferences
• information on your organization and its goals
• workshop details
• special events like alumni dinners or a career fair
• sponsors logos and links
• a press kit
• option to join a mailing list for more information
• online registration option

Your website is your means of informing your audience of any news about your event. That includes potential attendees, potential speakers, sponsors, and the press. You can even make this an interactive experience, setting up surveys to obtain initial feedback from potential attendees on possible topics and expectations, allowing visitors to join a mailing list for continual updates as the event develops and to aid in word of mouth marketing, or setting up a forum so visitors can establish a community presence before the event that will carry through the event and facilitate discussion even after the event has passed. Another critical function of your website is to provide online registration for your event. You can set up online payment processing through online event registration vendors such as Acteva.com.

Mailer

A mailer typically includes all currently known conference details including the benefits of attending, who will be speaking, the types of events planned, a proposed agenda, your sponsors, and any other general information. It should also emphasize date, location, and your website, and urge readers to register online.

The mailer is designed to build awareness of your event now that many of your key features have been confirmed and to urge people to register for the event before it is sold out. You will want to send it at least 6-8 weeks in advance.

Email Announcements

One of the cheapest and most efficient methods of marketing is email marketing. However, the newly implemented CAN-SPAM Act imposes a number of restrictions on your mailings. If your organization does not have a list of members who have chosen to ‘opt in’, you must include certain information in your emails. Some guidelines include:

• Don’t use misleading sender information or subjects
• Include a postal address
• Include a clear method for recipients to unsubscribe
• If your list isn’t ‘opt-in,’ include a clear notice that states the e-mail is an advertisement or solicitation

Typically, emails are sent out about 6 weeks before your conference to coincide with the mailers, and again around 2 weeks before your conference to remind those who may have put off registration. They should announce the event and drive people to your website for more information and to register. You may also want to send out a final email a day or two before the conference to those registered to provide general information such as driving directions, parking options, and opening registration times.

Advertising

Advertising in trade publications, local newspapers, and through Pay Per Click campaigns in search engines can be a good way to promote your conference and remind people to register. Where you advertise will depend greatly on your target audience and budget.

Banners/Posters

Posters and banners also aid to promote awareness of your event. You can hang posters inside your organization or by your ticket sales locations. Banners can be hung outside as reminders of your event. For the majority of conferences we work with, banners are full color, scrimm vinyl with grommets and are typically 6′x3′. Posters are typically 24″x36″ and mounted.

Day of Event Brochure

The day of event brochure is basically the program guide and summary of the day’s events. It should include all information related to your event, which can include a welcome letter, the agenda, the location with map, keynote pictures, biographies, and quotes, panel descriptions and panelists, other events such as career fair or cocktail reception information, sponsor ads and logos, information about the organization managing the event, volunteers and committee members, etc.

Marketing your conference or event is a lot like marketing a business. The essential ingredients are

1. having clearly defined goals and objectives
2. setting a course of action to achieve them
3. creating a timeline
4. establishing a budget

Creating an initial marketing plan gives you a blueprint for how to accomplish your conference objectives and gives you a way to measure your progress. You should create the marketing plan as early as possible in the planning stage. It is never too early to start.

Here are some key questions that are essential to your marketing communications and should be addressed in your marketing plan:

1. Who is your target audience? What percentage of Students/ Alumni/ Recruiters/ Business Professionals do you hope will attend?
2. How can you best reach your target audience? Which mediums are most effective to reach them? (ie many corporations now have elaborate spam filters - will your pdf attachment or html email reach them? Should you send them a physical postcard or mailer instead?) How much will you budget for reaching each?
3. For each target audience, what are the 3 key benefits of attending your conference? (ie Students have different needs than Alumni/Business Professionals - how does your marketing message answer “what’s in it for them?” Why should they attend your conference over a competing time commitment?)
4. What is your conference/event’s purpose? It’s theme? What does it mean to you?
5. What types of images and photos come to mind in regards to your theme? What types of messages should your marketing communications present?
6. Are there any special considerations or limitations? (For example, if something related to your topic might be offensive or stereotypical to attendees - colors, specific imagery, cultural differences, etc)
7. Do you have a budget to incorporate stock photos or photography?
8. What are your objectives for your marketing communications? (ie to get $X in sponsorship, for X number of students to register, to remind those registered of the time/place of the conference, etc)
9. How will you attain sponsorship for your conference? How much do you hope to raise? What is your break even point? What will you do if you receive more money than anticipated? Less money?
10. Who is in charge of which task? What is your critical path?