I’ll be honest here: If I never have to hear the word “pivot” ever again, I’ll be one happy camper. I may even skip over that episode of Friends whenever I’m binge-watching the show … for the hundredth time.
But despite my hatred of the word, it has a place today. Companies must be able to modify their strategies fast, especially as world events and industry happenings evolve.
Event marketing is clearly no exception. Today’s event programs need to move quickly and be adaptable, all while keeping a close eye on attendee engagement and event performance. In other words, agile event marketing continues to be the name of the game.
The old era of event marketing meant creating in-person programs that were difficult to transform into other formats, like virtual. (But in every single marketer’s defense, who would’ve thought we had to think about that?)
That means the old-old era of event marketing was all about the large, tentpole event. You know what I’m talking about: huge investments, massive time commitments, and more resources than you ever knew existed.
What do these eras have in common? Beyond the fact that they are (mostly) behind us, they weren’t that scalable — and they certainly weren’t agile enough to compete with today’s event programs.
Agile event marketing that’s scalable is an approach where teams can deliver a greater number of high-value events that are measurable, easily adaptable, and highly customizable. They’re also often smaller events with guests hand-picked by sales or customer service teams.
Agile events are fast, flexible, and hyper-effective at driving meaningful connections.
Agile event marketing has a place in nearly every single events strategy. The best part: There are a few easy steps you can take to create agile event programs — and ensure they scale.
Like every other decision you make for your event marketing strategy, you need to first define what event success means for your agile event programs. Does it mean enhanced brand awareness, increased sales pipeline, or improved customer loyalty?
The goals you have for your agile event programs will directly impact the types of events you choose to run, who you invite, and the content you present. Your goals will also help inform whether you should host in-person, virtual, or hybrid events — or a combination (when it’s safe, of course).
Smart agile event programs are only as smart as the technology supporting them. Even when events run flawlessly with no modifications required (see how I avoided the “p-word” there?), marketers must still adjust their programs based on different event goals, formats, and audiences.
This means you need a platform that’ll keep your event design on-brand, your data accurate, and your communications consistent — whether your events are in-person, online, or a hybrid.
After all of this, we know what you’re thinking: With a greater number of events, how will I ever keep up with event design assets? When you’re hosting more events, more people get involved and things can slip through the cracks, so it’s no surprise this is one of marketers’ most common concerns.
But it is more easily mitigated than you might think. With an event technology that scales, you can develop marketing-approved, branded event templates that anyone in your organization can use.
Agile event programs are great opportunities to empower other teams within your organization to help run events. In fact, we recently conducted a survey where 29% of event professionals said that more non-marketing staff are involved in creating events than pre-pandemic.
Small, local events and virtual events are much more manageable for non-marketers to build and run with minimal help from marketing. The key to doing this is ensuring those teams have controlled access to the marketing-approved, branded event templates were talked about earlier. Plus, if your event technology has a built-in approval workflow, it makes enabling your internal teams even easier and more streamlined.
Many event marketers focus on the more visible elements of an event, like promotion and production — but your event data strategy is equally important.
Tapping into data about attendance, participation, and preferences can bring more customization and value to your guests, which can lead to higher-quality leads and better understanding of your event ROI. The best way to manage this event data: Integrate it (bonus points for automated syncs) and share it across technologies, so everyone has visibility.
Just like every other marketing or business activity, it’s important to continue making your agile event programs better over time. Even though agile event marketing means marketers will always have to think on their feet and adjust as necessary, continued innovation means you’ll remain ahead of the curve rather than reacting to every force of change thrown your way.
