Friday, March 18, 2011

Executive Availability – Key Asset for Marketing Events

The inventory of executive hours available for meetings and other duties should be regarded and managed as a key asset in an event marketing opportunity. To squander this resource is among the most costly mistakes in event management. The opportunity for positive business impact is great as is the the cost for having a top level executives participate, making the objective of having these executives fully booked at top priority.

Customer, supplier, partner and alliance development and press interaction are all valuable opportunities for executive participation. Sometimes having the right executive available to make final commitments and clarify remaining issues is all that is needed to seal a really big deal.

Having a top level executive meet with 20 or 30 customers, prospects and others in one place, over a short period of two or three days, can produce a surprising impact on cost, totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These savings provide very tangible event cost justification.

Treat your inventory of executive hours as a key event asset to be optimized.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Post-Event Follow-up - by Heather Deloach

Working on a post-event follow-up project for one of our clients recently made me aware of how important post-show follow-up is to event ROI.

Too often, event managers lack a well-planned system for what to do with leads information once it is collected at shows. A strong leads management system and an aggressive post-event campaign are absolutely crucial to a successful event marketing program and positive return on investment.

Companies spend thousands of dollars on pre-show direct marketing, but post-show marketing is where actual business results are likely to be realized. A well-executed post-show marketing campaign such as an email blast sent to qualified leads or a post-event survey serves three major purposes:

• Exposure is recreated for your company and products or services
• Prospects have the opportunity to access and learn more detailed information about a particular product or service
• Prospects are given a way to initiate contact with someone from your organization

In order for a post-event follow-up to be successful, an event manager must plan strategically. The follow-up must be planned well in advance of a show or event. The goals of the follow-up must be explicitly decided beforehand. The questions your team must answer before the follow-up method is agreed upon are the following:

• What products or services do we want to focus on?
• Who are our targets for the follow-up?
• What information is of most importance to our target audience?
• What do we want the targets to do as a result of receiving our correspondence?

Once the answers to these questions are clear, it is much easier to execute a successful post-event follow-up.