Planning a virtual event determines its success. Knowing what to do and when to do it can greatly affect the success of your event. I have identified five areas that you should think about while planning your next virtual event. If you have others please share them.
A few weeks ago our marketing team put on a virtual event. We had some great successes in this project and there were some things which I would do much differently next time around. I want to share my thoughts and hear from you on your experiences with this medium as well.
1. Planning. These events take tons of planning and doing it yourself will require lots of effort so partner with others if you can; events teams, PR, and marcom all are good partners to look for when putting on a virtual event. Also, if you are less than 90 days away from your event and haven't started planning you may be behind. Planning and executing your promotional activities will take time. Promotional items like banners, newsletter links and industry calendars can take a while for placement. Not to mention the fact that you will need to have an idea of who will be presenting and what they will talk about to do your promotions. A six month head start is the best case scenario. You can definitely do it in a shorter timeframe but you will probably need to set other projects aside.
2. Content. Timely and relavent content is another key factor. If you can get a well known speaker in a field, do it. Next to promotion, key speakers and topics are some of the most important items to get for an event. Review your event goals with the speakers so they understand what you are trying to accomplish with the event. They can help you with your event goal if they know what it is. Plan ahead with content templates and style guidelines so you can share them with the speakers prior to them creating their presentation. Meet with the speakers prior to the event to make sure you can answer their questions and make them feel more comfortable about what will happen on the day of the event.
3. After the event. Plan for what you want to attendees to do after the event; is it visit a landing page or have attendees contacted by sales teams, etc... Don't wait till after the event to figure this out. Warm leads aren't warm for long. Custom landing pages on your website can be a great tool for keeping the interaction going with event attendees. You can provide additional information, host videos by the speakers, present flash demos, etc... all are good ways to engage attendees after your event. The point here is don't let all your hard work go to waste by not thinking about what you want attendees to do after the event.
4. Send invitations out to people who will care. Inviting large numbers of potential attendees is important but make sure the attendees you invite are your target audience. If you have buy or rent a list it can be expensive so make sure you have a very specific audience identified for your event. Click through rates can be less than 2-3% for invitations so plan accordingly. To some degree the success of your event will be driven by identifying your audience or target market prior to the event and then using that information to drive who you invite, where you promote and how you promote your event.
5. Do a postmortem on your event. Make sure you plan to review all aspects of your event after it has taken place. This helps ensure that you set up ways to measure each step along the way. For example did all the lists you used perform equally towards your goal? Did attendees stay to the end of each session or did some speakers turn the audience off completely? How many attendees visited your landing page? Did the web page serve its purpose? These are just a sample of the items you might track. Having the measurement tools in place prior to the event is critical as some metrics cannot be gather after the fact.
Planning is critical for any virtual event. Knowing what and when do certain things can help you plan a successful event. What types of things do you use to plan your virtual events?
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
It is Time for Marketing to Fully Embrace Analytics
More and more marketing efforts are applying metrics to gauge their success or failure. This trend is not stopping and metrics will become a critical requirement in ensuring marketing has a seat at the key decision maker's table.
Forrester recently published a paper on Lead to Revenue Management for Tech Marketing that takes a look into making revenue the focal point of marketing activities. In my opinion, this has been too long in coming. Many marketing efforts are content to focus on merely getting leads; regardless of the quality. This type of measurement usually leads to a lead quantity game. Sales organization typically despise these types of activities as they have little time to track down poor quality leads. The Forrester paper mentions that marketing should be more responsible for nurturing leads as well. This would definitely keep marketing organizations focused on attaining quality leads. By having marketing teams focus on revenue as opposed to merely lead gathering their strategies and approaches to marketing efforts should become more outcome driven. However, tying marketing to close to sales is not without its own issues.
These issues include marketing focusing on more short term goals and not thinking about the lifetime value of a customer. All too often sale teams are focused on their quarterly numbers and it is marketing who represents the long term view of the market and customer. It is critical that marketing not lose that view. In addition, measuring revenue against marketing activities can be difficult. This is an issue that the Forrester report doesn't cover that much. Tying revenue to marketing activities is difficult in that marketing efforts often move potential customers through different stages of the sales cycle and this process takes time.
Depending on how long the sales cycle is can determine how marketing efforts to revenue should be measured. But for organizations that don't have the sales process from lead to conversion completely mapped out measuring marketing to revenue is almost impossible. Marketo has written a number white papers which address this issue of marketing to revenue and time. I recommend this one as a good read before starting a measurement program.
Ultimately, measuring the impact to sales of marketing efforts can help with forecasts. Predictive models can help sales, manufacturing and even CMOs work together to help drive the business. The time for marketing efforts to be better to tied to sales is now. The fun really begins in choosing a model that takes into account both the time of sale funnel and the methods of nurturing customers through the process. It may be a long journey to get to a predictive marketing model but it is a journey we should start now.
What are your thoughts?
Forrester recently published a paper on Lead to Revenue Management for Tech Marketing that takes a look into making revenue the focal point of marketing activities. In my opinion, this has been too long in coming. Many marketing efforts are content to focus on merely getting leads; regardless of the quality. This type of measurement usually leads to a lead quantity game. Sales organization typically despise these types of activities as they have little time to track down poor quality leads. The Forrester paper mentions that marketing should be more responsible for nurturing leads as well. This would definitely keep marketing organizations focused on attaining quality leads. By having marketing teams focus on revenue as opposed to merely lead gathering their strategies and approaches to marketing efforts should become more outcome driven. However, tying marketing to close to sales is not without its own issues.
These issues include marketing focusing on more short term goals and not thinking about the lifetime value of a customer. All too often sale teams are focused on their quarterly numbers and it is marketing who represents the long term view of the market and customer. It is critical that marketing not lose that view. In addition, measuring revenue against marketing activities can be difficult. This is an issue that the Forrester report doesn't cover that much. Tying revenue to marketing activities is difficult in that marketing efforts often move potential customers through different stages of the sales cycle and this process takes time.
Ultimately, measuring the impact to sales of marketing efforts can help with forecasts. Predictive models can help sales, manufacturing and even CMOs work together to help drive the business. The time for marketing efforts to be better to tied to sales is now. The fun really begins in choosing a model that takes into account both the time of sale funnel and the methods of nurturing customers through the process. It may be a long journey to get to a predictive marketing model but it is a journey we should start now.
What are your thoughts?
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