Events Marketing Analytics – A Game Changer

In the new era of digital-first and ever-shrinking attention span, marketing teams are fighting hard to get just an additional few minutes of attention from customers. A few percentage points increase in email click-through rates or an increase in website traffic is considered a big achievement across marketing organizations these days. Investments are being made in marketing tactics and mar-tech tools to understand these customer engagements and continue to accelerate them. All good stuff! But there is 1 additional tactic in the marketing mix where the engagement times of customers span not just for a few seconds but over a couple of days.

Yes, we are talking about events and field marketing, which includes customer user conferences and trade shows. Even in the digital-first world, the value of human interaction is priceless. Across all our marketing analytics projects, we see that events are the biggest driver when it comes to deal acceleration and new pipeline creation. No other marketing tactic has the potential to impact so much pipeline in 1 go. Given the potential of events marketing, it is not surprising to see that events and field marketing continue to get more and more attention of marketing leaders. At the same time, events continue to be the biggest line items in marketing budgets and mar-tech community continues to come up with new tools to make it easy for event marketing teams to improve the customer experience from event registrations, event apps to surveys and follow-ups, etc.

While marketing analytics and data are transforming marketing organizations in general but events and field marketing continue to lag when it comes to adopting this data-driven paradigm of modern marketing. Events marketing, in particular, is still focused primarily on brand awareness and legacy metrics around tracking YoY increase in the number of registrations, attendees, social mentions, after-event parties, etc. All these metrics are important but they do not help a CMO when she has to justify the biggest line items on her budget or demonstrate in QBRs the measurable impact on the pipeline that marketing organization is making.

At marqeu, we are making it one of our priorities to transform events marketing to be a more data-driven function and be key a driver of growth in the marketing organization.

A few years ago I was in an annual planning meeting with a CMO where we were reviewing marketing plans and the associated budget proposals for the upcoming year. She posed a question to me:

I have so many proposals for all the different events that we should be doing next year. They all are great events but we have budget limitations. I need some data-driven insights to objectively evaluate the performance of these events and pick the ones that would have the maximum impact on the pipeline.

I am sure that every CMO, field marketing and event marketing leader can relate to this dilemma. When I heard about this ask, for a few minutes I was lost trying to make sense of what is being asked and how to go about helping the CMO. This is the best part of being in marketing analytics at marqeu where we get the opportunity to be part of these strategic conversations, which always help us push our limits when it comes to leveraging data and analytics for solving some of the key challenges that modern marketing leaders face as they continue to transform their organizations to be revenue driving function, that CEOs are beginning to rely on more and more for accelerating growth their companies.

After that meeting with the CMO, it was time for us to get back to the drawing board and start figuring out how to truly quantify the impact of event marketing efforts and it led to the formulation of our event marketing analytics framework, which has proved to be a game-changer for our customers. Given the strategic value of events in any marketing organization, the success of our events marketing analytics frameworks is helping organizations to further accelerate the wider analytics initiatives across the marketing organizations.

Since its inception, our events marketing analytics framework continues to evolve as we expand our work across different organizations, understand their unique go-to market strategy and align our framework with their business needs. Given the impact that we have been able to make, our events marketing analytics framework, which started more of a post-event analytics deep-dive, now spans across the entire life cycle of events from planning, targeting, content strategy, outreach, to pipeline impact and post-event strategy. Here are the key areas our our events analytics framework:

1. Account coverage and geo-spatial data (via zip codes etc.) for pre-event analysis to find events in the key geographic areas based on customer engagement and pipeline goals.
2. Demographics, intent and behavior data based micro-segmentation for events outreach and pre-event information to drive engagement and registrations.
3. Events tracks, sessions, and speakers planning based on the insights from audience persona and their interests via data captured in marketing automation, event polls/surveys, event apps, and campaigns tools.
4. Pre-event persona and engagement based targeted information sharing to drive maximum attendance rate and engagement during the events. This has been one of the key initiatives to drive up the attendance rate at events for our customers. Just beating the registration goals are not enough! Customer should feel excited about attending an event given that it will be big time commitment for them.
5. Events attendance, sessions, tracks feedback, surveys and polls data analysis for contextual follow-up and sales strategy at individual sales rep and sales region level.
6. Pre-event and Post-event pipeline and engagement analysis to quantify the impact on new pipeline creation, existing pipeline acceleration, and ROI. CMOs love this data!

These key insights from our events marketing analytics framework are re-shaping the entire events strategy for our customers to deliver the maximum impact across all the key objectives from brand awareness to pipeline, ROI. It also enables marketing leaders leverage data on the fly to demonstrate the quantifiable impact for sales and the c-suite.

Our events marketing analytics framework is another example of how business strategy drives the success of analytic strategy, when done right. We started with the key (and extremely strategic) challenge that marketing leaders face, translated the need into metrics that would provide insights into solving it. We then reviewed what we could answer with the capabilities we had put in place based on the earlier asks, had follow-up discussions and then we went about building the solution. Fancy analytics tools or platforms were brought into the conversation only when we are clear on the asks and the deliverables, which helped us evaluate and pick the best solutions that would scale and provide the best results. We usually see that most of the analytics projects start the other way round where pitch from analytics tools vendors drives analytics strategy only resulting in projects getting delayed and increased frustration for marketing leaders.

At marqeu, we strongly believe in the game-changing ability of marketing analytics. This belief only gets stronger every day as we are working tirelessly with our customers to help shape and implement their analytics strategy, which is increasingly driving the success of their marketing strategy.

We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing and sales communities to keep adding value for our customers. We would welcome the inputs from other leaders and practitioners around leveraging analytics as the key part of the events marketing strategy across their organizations.