Integrating Events Into Lead Gen & Advertising Campaigns

You can tell a lot about the DNA of a company based on what the sales team likes to sell. Are events constantly sold out, but there is a ton of unsold digital inventory? The company likely started as an events business and then expanded into digital. And the same is true in the inverse. Selling events for a digital-first sales team can often be confusing. You’ll hear the sales team say that they “need to see the event first” before they can sell it.

I struggle with the either-or fallacy of sales teams wanting to focus on only one product. If we look at events and lead gen working together as more holistic campaigns, we can provide much stronger value to our advertising partners. Furthermore, selling events and good digital campaigns is really selling the same thing: targeted audiences.

On Tuesday, I wrote about Collingwood Advisory’s U.S. Media Acquisition Report, which looked at where things are headed over the next couple of years. There were two interesting themes that I think are worth exploring, because it demonstrates the need for looking at events and digital campaigns.

According to respondents of the report, events are absolutely crushing.

Live events have enjoyed resurgent demand as audiences and sponsors continue to place significant value on the capacity of live events to help them learn, network, and ultimately forge business partnerships.

…

The majority of respondents now report that 2022 and 2023 (year to date) event commercial and financial KPIs are ahead of 2019 levels.

Comparing to 2019 levels is important because, at least in the case of this report, it shows that the intense speed bump that was Covid is now behind many of these operators.

At the same time, there is growing demand for more diversified businesses. The authors of the report write:

There has been strong interest in businesses with more sophisticated client/sponsor propositions. With demand generation capabilities driven by high quality content being at the forefront of respondents’ criteria in an aim to move away from more traditional ad-focused business models.

There is increased appetite to diversify revenue streams within B2B media to offer a stickier solution and increase value to clients through…

One of the ways the author’s propose to increase value to clients is to “Engage with a defined audience segment through a suite of multi-channel marketing solutions.”

In other words, you use a variety of marketing channels to ensure that the right people are getting in front of the sponsor’s message. And if you mix both lead gen and events together in one, complete funnel, you can provide unbelievable value to the sponsor. Here’s how.

Why do sponsors like events? There is a belief that being able to have a face-to-face conversation with someone increases the likelihood that business is going to get done. It’s the entire Digiday model. When I was at CoinDesk, I went to an event in Vail for free because I agreed to speed date with 16 sponsors of the event. Each of those sponsors felt they got value because they were able to get face time with a “decision maker.”

Despite being a decision maker, I didn’t sign a contract with a single one of them. In two cases, I was already a client of the sponsor, meaning they wasted their money on those meetings. For the others, I had never heard of them, so I was coming into the conversation almost entirely cold. That’s an incredibly inefficient way to sell.

The same, by the way, can be said for lead gen campaigns. The sponsor runs a single campaign, gets a couple of hundred leads, and then starts aggressively trying to sell those people. Once again, these leads are very cold, a single filled-out form being the only qualification that has taken place. And yet, marketing teams get forced to over-invest in demand generation because there’s something tangible at the end of it: a lead.

The problem with the above scenario is that it puts an incredible burden on the sales team to do the qualification themselves. They have to do cold outreach—either through email or on the phone—and manage a pipeline of leads that might be months or years away from ever being in market for their product or service. It’s highly inefficient.

What if you could take these tactics, blend them together, extend the timeframe, and have an outcome where there was an increase in closed deals? It’s very possible.

Let’s look at the marketing funnel through three distinct phases.

The first is the education period. You need to let the defined audience segment know that the advertiser exists. This can be done through brand advertising—ads on site and newsletter sponsorships, for example—and thought leadership. The goal here is to make sure that the audience is aware that this advertiser exists and that they offer a service.

Once that phase is done, we move into the second phase, which I’ll refer to as qualification. Here is where you want to separate people who are in market for a product or service from those that are still in the curiosity phase. You care about this for two reasons. It reduces the number of email addresses you give your partners, allowing you to remain a quality source of leads for longer. And, you ensure that when you do provide leads, they are more likely to transact, which results in campaigns on your platform having a higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

To do this well, it helps to include a couple of lead gen opportunities in the campaign. For example, you might start with a gated topical sponsorship, much like Industry Dive offers with its trendline product (BioPharma Dive example here). Whoever fills in the form is then sent an email that promotes a sponsored white paper. And we can then add a third step, which includes a webinar that is promoted to the people who downloaded the white paper.

These are three lead gen opportunities. With each step, fewer people are going to fill in the form; however, those that do fill in the form are obviously more likely to be interested in what that sponsor has to offer. This is the basis for lead qualification.

But now we come back to events, which is the third phase. In-person conversations can be unbelievably valuable because the leads are much hotter. At this stage, the sponsor can invite the lead to come to the event for free in exchange for having an in-person conversation. Maybe the sponsor only has a few of these conversations at the event. However, they are much higher quality than the cold conversations that you might expect without the education and qualification phases.

Rather than looking at your lead gen & ad campaigns as separate from your events products, look at them as complementary phases in a multi-touch marketing campaign. The events are great opportunities to get face time with prospective buyers. However, you want those buyers to actually know who the brand is and, likely, be in market for the product or service being offered. By using brand awareness, thought leadership, and multiple lead gen initiatives, you can ensure the meetings at the event actually matter.

Ultimately, the closer we can get to actual deals getting done, the more likely we are going to become an integral part of a partner’s business. If you are able to help them build their brand, drive leads, and then close deals at your in-person events, these partners are going to renew year-after-year. And if we go back to Collingwood’s report, the companies that are most sought after have net retention revenue of 115%+. This is one way to achieve that.

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