Last Tuesday, the team at Frost & Sullivan’s Brand and Demand Solutions practice presented our first eBroadcast (webinar) of 2017, Savvy Marketers’ Secrets Revealed: How to Drive Event Sponsorship Return. With a panel of B2B event marketing leaders, the content ranged from deciding the types of events you should sponsor to measuring event success. Thank you to our partner on this event, Attendify, the quickest and easiest event app builder. Attendify’s mission is to build deeper relationships at in-person events. Believe or not, that means using technology to create more face-to-face interactions, not replace them.
Our expert panel was comprised of Sparkcentral’s Demand Generation Manager, Kristina Koller, Autodesk’s Senior Manager of Enterprise Marketing, Pam Moon, Smart Action’s SVP of Customer Experience & Innovation, Steve Prodger and NTT DATA Services’ Senior Global Marketing Manager, Shannon Caldwell. The panel navigated moderator Nicole Coons, Frost & Sullivan marketing vanguard’s questions about event sponsorship, tracking return on investment and with ease and provided the audience with both tactical and strategic ideas to implement in their own event marketing plans.
Some of our favorite takeaways:
“It’s important to remember that the different types of events are going to yield different results. You’ve got to start with: what is your goal? Is it brand awareness? Is it lead gen? [Sparkcentral] found that the larger live events – these big tradeshows – are great for brand awareness, but for us, since we are still in a stage where we cannot afford to spend massive amounts of money to just to show our logo, we prefer to do smaller conferences…. smaller conferences tend to be more intimate and result in those qualified meetings.” – Kristina Koller, Demand Generation Manager, Sparkcentral
“When we start to focus on pipeline generation and looking at finding the leads, we’ll go after more intimate style[s] of conferences like the Executive MindXchange and one-one-meeting types of conferences.” – Steve Prodger, SVP, Customer Experience and Innovation, Smart Action
“I ask about past attendee lists, or if you can get it, current attendee lists. I look after named accounts, so for me to evaluate an event, I need to make sure that the accounts we look after are actually going to be at the event. Are they speaking? Are they attending? What mechanisms are in place to engage with these people on site?” – Pam Moon, Senior Manager, Enterprise Marketing, Autodesk “The beauty of the events we’ve done with Frost & Sullivan in the past – they have a lot of the one of one meetings that get scheduled on site. Those have been absolutely invaluable and we have dedicated time talking with specific people we are targeting.” – Shannon Caldwell, Senior Global Marketing Manager, NTT Data Services If you missed the live eBroadcast, the OnDemand version is available for you to watch at your convenience. Additionally, if you want more event sponsorship goodness, read our Event Sponsorship Handbook, the article that inspired this entire discussion. With this guide, you’ll learn the three simple steps you need to take to choose the perfect events for your business. Paired with the takeaways from the B2B marketing experts on our eBroadcast panel, you’ve got the recipe to make your next sponsored event a super success.
Graphics to support blog: Attendify logo, OnDemand graphic
