How To Integrate Events Into Your Revenue Marketing Strategy

Eventtia
October 25, 2023

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Our experience shows that most companies treat events as supplementary, on-off marketing campaigns. And there’s nothing bad about it as long as people don’t expect great results from running a one-time event. 

However, we’ve also seen that as a business grows, incorporating a variety of recurring events becomes imperative, as they can substantially impact revenue. This article will explain how, but first, let’s discuss revenue marketing.

What’s Revenue Marketing Strategy? 

In short, marketing revenue involves a customer-centric approach focused on driving revenue growth by aligning marketing, sales, and customer success (CS) teams. 

When developing a revenue marketing strategy, professionals aim to create a seamless customer journey from awareness to loyalty, ensuring that each touchpoint is optimized for maximum impact. In case of a B2B business, B2B revenue marketers build a customer journey map that outlines the various stages and touchpoints in the B2B buying process to make sure they effectively engage and nurture prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Revenue marketing teams usually consist of marketing, sales, and CS team members that use data and analytics to track customer behavior and tailor their strategy accordingly. 

Compared to traditional marketing, which focuses primarily on brand and product promotion, revenue marketing offers a holistic approach that enables the marketing, sales, and CS teams to exchange data and personalize the experience of their leads, prospects, and customers. 

As HubSpot highlights, “Traditional marketing efforts are all about finding ways to boost demand by making products or services more appealing at scale. Revenue marketing flips the script to focus on what customers want.” 

When focusing on developing a revenue marketing strategy, companies should focus on answering questions such as: 

  • What are the challenges people need to overcome? 
  • What are the expectations they may have regarding the product? 
  • Why do people buy from us? What makes them choose our product? 
  • What other non-product-related values make people convert? 
  • What makes people stay with us long-term? 

By answering these questions, companies can better understand their customers and create a revenue marketing strategy that resonates with them. Moreover, these answers can help your teams understand the real impact their efforts may have at different stages of your buyers’ journey. 

What’s great about revenue marketing is that it stops you from seeing and operating as if your marketing, sales, and CS departments are siloed entities working in complete isolation, covering specific parts of the buyer’s journey. On the contrary, it helps you integrate these departments into a global structure, breaking down the silos to ensure a seamless experience for the buyer. 

A unified approach, where each department works together, can ensure that the buyer receives consistent messaging and support throughout their journey, leading to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Where Do Events Fit In? 

Revenue marketing provides the framework for marketing, sales, and CS teams to align efforts, ensuring each department’s work complements and strengthens the results across the entire company. 

According to Paddle, “This is a strategy where marketing works with sales to attribute their campaigns directly to revenue and engaging leads even after the salespeople have taken over. It shifts the focus to more goal-oriented and targeted marketing tasks.”

Also, revenue marketing allows teams to work towards cultivating long-term relationships with their leads, prospects, and customers. And that’s where cross-departmental events fit in. Events can help your marketing, sales, and CS teams achieve revenue-related goals.

For example, your marketing team can run conferences, masterclasses, fireside chats with industry leaders, seminars and workshops, award events, and festivals. These marketing-driven events will aim to increase brand awareness, generate new leads, position your brand as a thought leader by developing non-product value for your audience and educate them on industry-related topics and possible solutions to existing challenges. 

Sales teams can engage with existing leads by inviting them to product launches, demo days, roadshows, user conferences, pop-up events, and more. These events will aim to transform leads into prospects and drive in-event sales.

Finally, your CS team can reduce the churn rate and strengthen connections with existing customers by running exclusive membership events, networking, educational, and training sessions. All these events will aim to educate customers, familiarize them with the company’s culture, ensure people’s positive attitude towards the brand, and make them feel accompanied throughout their journey of product use. 

Steps to Integrating Events Into Your Revenue Marketing Strategy

Events can harmonize the experience of your customers throughout their journey. Also, events will cover multiple touchpoints between people and your brand by creating space for: 

  • Starting the conversation
  • Building trust
  • Strengthening connections
  • Showcasing the product
  • Increasing the product-related expertise of your customers
  • Building full-fledged communities

Having this in mind, you can easily design a revenue marketing strategy that integrates events. Here’s how you can do it:

→ Step 1. Map the stages or the touchpoint on your buyer’s journey

Your revenue marketing strategy should be based on your customers’ experiences. From discovering your brand by searching for answers to looking for relevant solutions, you must guide people throughout their journey. Moreover, once people purchase your solution or product, you must keep providing your customers with the best guidance and additional value.

Next, identify which events work best for your buyer’s journey touchpoints. For example, someone in the awareness stage may be interested in a topic or industry-related conference. Someone in the consideration stage may want to attend a demo day or product launch event. 

→ Step 2. Align the effort of your marketing, sales, and CS teams

Outline the responsibilities of your sales, marketing, and CS departments. You can do it based on the buyer’s journey touchpoint you need to cover. Minimize overlap by ensuring that everyone understands the revenue-generating mechanism. 

Include a comprehensive communication plan, strengthening the interaction between your teams. Everyone should understand how each other’s work affects the results of all departments. For example, the sales team should be aware of the events your marketing team is running. This will give your reps an understanding of the brand contact point leads or prospects had before entering the pipeline. As a result, your sales team can adjust the messaging accordingly. 

→ Step 3. Organize resources to create effective campaigns

Don’t worry if you don’t have the resources to run simultaneous events for each stage of your buyer’s journey. You can run sequential events depending on each department’s needs. For example, before launching a new event, you can run a meeting with representatives from your marketing, sales, and CS teams and ask what their needs are. 

For example, if you identified a problem with generating high-quality leads, you can support your marketing department by allocating the resources for an event. If you see your sales team stuck at converting prospects into customers, you can help by organizing resources for a sales event. Finally, if your CS team needs support reducing the churn rate, you can organize an event for your user community.

→ Step 4. Define and track the right metrics

Apart from your general revenue marketing metrics, you’ll also want to highlight the main KPIs to follow when integrating your events strategy. For example, in the case of marketing events, you may keep track of the number of high-quality leads registered for your conference. For sales events, you should consider how many MQLs are converted to SQLs. 

Also, you should keep track of the number of sales that followed immediately after the event. Finally, the CS team can track the number of cross-sells and up-sells they’ve made during or immediately after the event. 

→ Step 5. Partner up with trustworthy providers

Collecting, analyzing, and extracting actionable insights make revenue marketing truly efficient. If you can’t see how many MQLs transformed into SQL or how many live demo attendees followed up once the event ended, there’s little to no use to your strategy. 

You need to gain a good understanding of your efforts for future strategy tweaks and improvements. By partnering up with trustworthy event management technology companies such as Eventtia, you’ll be able to access real-time and post-event data and derive actionable insights for improvement and continuous growth.

It’s worth noting that there are multiple approaches to setting up a revenue marketing strategy that integrates events. We’re simply offering a general overview of how it can work. However, each company can and should develop a personalized playbook aligned with its needs and resources.

Wrap-up 

Events are an important aspect of revenue marketing as they provide opportunities for the different departments to work together and cultivate long-term relationships with leads, prospects, and customers. 

For example, marketing-driven events aim to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and educate, while sales events aim to transform leads into prospects and drive in-event sales. CS events aim to reduce churn and strengthen connections with existing customers. 

To integrate events into your revenue marketing strategy, you need to map the touchpoints in the buyer’s journey and align the efforts of your marketing, sales, and CS teams.

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Eventtia
All-in-one event management software
Eventtia is a leading technology company, offering advanced Event Management SaaS solutions for large enterprise companies. Since 2014, renowned brands such as Pernod Ricard and Richemont Group have been trusting our All-in-One Event platform and API services to digitize, execute, and measure their events globally.