For decades, B2B salespersons have depended on industry events to meet prospects, identify opportunities, win business and even win-back business. From Dreamforce to CES, from OracleWorld to Mobile World Congress, these industry staples – conferences, trade shows, summits, call them what you will – have in many ways been the lifeblood for sales teams behind thousands of B2B technology products.
That is, until they all had to go virtual in 2020. Suddenly, salespersons who depended on these events to expand their network and scope out new opportunities were at sea. On the marketing side, while events were technically part of the outbound strategy, the standards of operation changed overnight. Big-budget in-person events disappeared, and a calendar full of run-of-the-mill virtual webinars with shoddy on-demand video recordings would simply not cut it anymore.
Slowly, as both marketers and salespersons are finding their feet in this new normal, and visibility into customer engagement and selling in a post-pandemic world improves, B2B teams are realizing that a fundamental shift has occurred in the role events could play in the B2B selling cycle.
In a recent report on the state of event marketing, mid-to senior-level event marketers from companies like Yext, Forbes, Cloudera, SAP, Gartner, and more reaffirmed the status of event marketing as a powerful channel for engaging audiences and driving business objectives. Of course, this acknowledgement recognizes the fact that the nature of ‘events’ – propelled by changing buyer behaviour and amplified by the global pandemic – has permanently changed.
So what evolved version of events should you, as B2B marketing and sales professionals, be exploring in 2021?
The new focus areas for B2B events in 2021
To attract, engage and convert the right audiences, events today need to be about choice, convenience, and most importantly, content that creates value. They need to engage with more members of the buying collective than just IT or functional leaders to drive conversion and optimize event ROI. In the dominant omnichannel buying environment, they need to also be well-entrenched into the overall marketing strategy, integrating seamlessly with other communication channels (from email to social to content and performance marketing), for a friction-free customer experience. While some aspects of events today need more attention than ever – finding the right audience, creating the right content and enabling the right experience – others aspects are now also easier than ever, thanks to advanced event management platforms that automate many operational elements, and enable granular tracking and measuring of key metrics.
While neither a virtual nor in-person event of yore could achieve all of the above by itself, hybrid events seem to be the answer to bridge the traditional gaps in scale, reach, delivery, engagement, tracking and measurement. Technology-enabled hybrid events let marketers create a seamless virtual and in-person ‘event’ experience for attendees. They offer organizers never-before choices and flexibility; and attendees unprecedented options to engage either in-person or virtually or both, at their convenience.
Why Hybrid Events are the Future of B2B Events:
- Scale: hybrid events help drive scale for event marketers, while driving down operational costs of organizing an event, which we all know can be prohibitive even with limited attendance.
- Reach: marketers can broaden the scope of content, with a more diverse pool of speakers who can speak to more members of the buying collective with relevant-to-them content, driving higher engagement and ROI.
- Flexibility and agility: hybrid events let marketers tailor-make the event, with the freedom to mix and match in-person, virtual, big, small, exclusive, all-inclusive, free, paid, local or global sessions as per their needs and budgets.
- High-quality, ongoing engagement: hybrid events, with their combination of in-person and virtual engagement opportunities, help marketers effectively drive engagement before, during and after the event. Staggering the in-person and virtual components can also engage prospects at more stages of the buying journey and improves chances for conversion. For example,
- Registrants can be engaged early with exclusive virtual preview sessions and advance reading material.
- The main event could be in-person as well as virtual, where technology can enable interaction via virtual break-out rooms, interactive Q&A sessions, polls, and live chat.
- Post-event, the engagement can continue by giving the community of attendees access to updated content and exclusive post-event access to speakers via smaller virtual sessions that also encourage interaction within the community.
- Custom-designed events for the buying collective: marketers and salespersons can leverage the hybrid event model to organize smaller, more intimate, personalized event experiences for key and strategic accounts, where exclusive in-person events engage decision-makers, even as parallel virtual sessions involve their extended teams.
- Better event attribution: with new-age event platform technology, hybrid events can drive up the ability of marketers to attribute and track attendee engagement and event ROI like never before, tracking every small detail and interaction.
- Cost effective, convenient and accessible: hybrid events also open up a host of new avenues for attendees. The virtual element allows more members of the buying collective to attend more sessions, at their convenience and at a lower cost. They can pick and choose who attends the main in-person event, even as the larger team can engage virtually. This will bring in more industry participation into events that have relevant themes and speakers.
B2B buyers today expect a friction-free and seamless experience across all the touchpoints where they can interact with your brand, including events. In this context, hybrid events, enabled by event management technology, will undoubtedly become a key component of the mainstream B2B marketing strategy for 2021. This industry report found that 85% of respondents in B2B leadership roles identify in-person events as critical for their company’s success—that is double the number of leaders from 2019. So it’s not surprising that close to half (48%) marketers are investing at least 21% of their marketing budget in events. Progressive ABM practitioners are already investing in account-based hybrid event strategies that can be integrated into the rest of their inbound and outbound marketing tactics.
On the flip side though, these same respondents identified the biggest obstacle to achieving event success as attracting the right audience, and more than half (54%) of respondents expressed difficulty in proving ROI.
Despite all the wonderful promise that hybrid events hold for B2B marketers, this obstacle brings us back to the fundamental aspect of ABM or any engagement-driven approach to B2B marketing – starting with the right audience data. Like with any other tactic in your B2B marketing arsenal – whether inbound or outbound – audience definition, segmentation and selection are key to success, as they help drive bigger and better conversions while optimizing efficiencies and campaign expenses.
For that, B2B marketers must go back to the source of their ABM data, and re-evaluate if they have access to best-in-class intent data to inform their marketing campaigns and drive the best outcomes from each channel- including hybrid events.