The Power of Events
How to Use Events to Drive the Buyer's Journey
No channel is as effective at developing relationships, generating demand, and driving advocacy across customers and prospects. But are you using the right event types at the right point in time to reach your events’ full potential? Here’s how you can create a strategy for your event channel to achieve success and drive ROI for your company.
Events in the awareness stage
Connecting with your audience is the holy grail for any business. Whether you're exhibiting at a trade show or hosting a webinar, your choice of events will help you build those connections and brand awareness.
Webinars
Webinars have long been a tool in most marketers' toolboxes. But as audiences demand more binge-worthy video content, there's never been a better time to transform your webinars into powerful event experiences that build trust and cement your position as an authority.
How to use them
If your goal is to increase brand awareness, webinars help you share your expertise with new audiences. Create content that a) delivers value and b) resonates with your target audience, and you'll soon establish your brand as an industry thought leader.
Tech tips for success
The best webinars provide seamless, interactive experiences for attendees—so make sure you've got the tools to keep them engaged. Features like built-in chat, polls, Q&A, upvoting, and surveys are just some of the essentials.
Why they’re valuable
As you integrate webinars within your event strategy, you'll want to have a complete picture of that attendee journey. Using the same platform to manage your webinars and all your other events will unlock key insights into how engaged your prospects are.
Events in the consideration stage
You’ve built some level of awareness with your audience. Now what? Events can help you get prospects to the next stage by providing additional touchpoints and opportunities for them to learn more about your products and services.
Networking events
Events are all about connections. Networking events bring people together to connect, exchange ideas, and build long-lasting relationships. Hosting a networking event is a golden opportunity to get prospects in the room—and leave a great lasting impression.
How to use them
With no strict agenda, use networking events to forge organic relationships without directly selling to your audience. Instead, you let attendees try your product whilst they meet and mingle. Your audience may not want to be sold to—but that doesn't mean they don't want to experience what your brand has to offer.
Tech tips for success
There's an app for everything these days—so why should events be an exception? An event app at your networking event allows attendees to connect with each other before, during, and after the event. You can also host competitions and polls through your app to spark conversations among attendees.
Why they’re valuable
Networking events are a valuable opportunity to build personal connections with prospects and customers. By creating a positive experience for attendees, you establish trust and credibility that can lead to increased brand awareness, word-of-mouth referrals, and ultimately, more sales and revenue for your business.
Evaluation
Now your prospects are carefully considering your brand’s offerings—that’s a win! By crafting the right event experience at the evaluation stage, you’ll maximise the chances of getting prospects over the finish line.
Conferences
Conferences serve a multitude of purposes at different stages of the buyer’s journey. But at the evaluation stage, they help you engage with your audience on a deeper level, cultivate existing relationships, and build loyalty and retention.
How to use them
Build a conference experience that allows attendees to engage directly with your team and evaluate your solutions. Presentations, workshops, and general sessions give ample opportunity for buyers to learn more about the benefits of different products, best practices to follow, and ultimately helps them make informed purchasing decisions.
Tech tips for success
The right tech helps everyone at your conference make the most of every minute. Lead capture technology allows teams to easily check in each appointment, ask and capture further qualifying questions, and then get that information quickly into the hands of your sales and marketing teams so they can follow up and get that deal done.
Why they’re valuable
User conferences provide a platform to connect with potential and existing customers in a meaningful way. They can help you build a loyal community of customers and advocates who are excited to do business with you. Conferences also offer networking opportunities, which are perfect for building and maintaining relationships.
Purchase, and beyond...
Your prospects are now customers…congrats! But the work doesn’t stop there. You need to continually engage with your customers to ensure that they stay happy and loyal. Here’s how events can help.
Training & workshops
Training programmes contribute to post-purchase goals, including retention, adoption and customer expansion. Hosting regular training and workshops shows that your organisation is invested in your customers’ ongoing success.
How to use them
Use training and workshops to educate customers on how to get the most from your products. They’re also a great way to capture customer feedback to inform product roadmaps, upgrade existing functionality, and improve the overall customer experience.
Tech tips for success
For customers to get the most from your training programmes, you need a platform that allows learners to access training schedules, live or pre-recorded sessions, as well as on-demand content. Surveys can also help you collect valuable feedback to optimise for future sessions.
Why they’re valuable
Investing in training and workshops can drive significant ROI for your organisation. By offering regular training sessions, you can boost product adoption rates and empower customers to use your product with confidence. Additionally, these sessions can help you identify areas for improvement, leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
Bringing it all together
As you plan your events, remember: events aren’t siloed activities. For maximum impact, consider how you can integrate your events with other channels, like social media, email, and content marketing, to continually engage with your audiences and build a holistic brand experience. And while that all might seem daunting, it doesn’t have to be. Managing your events from one event platform will allow you to execute your events seamlessly, capture valuable audience and event data, and share those insights across all your in-house systems.
Are you getting ROI from your events?
The power of events to drive ROI is unlimited, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. Watch this on-demand webinar to learn more about how to use different event types across the buyer’s journey to achieve success.
