3 Key Differentiators of Today’s Leading Event Marketers

As event marketers, we know that in-person events work. But some can prove their event success better than others.

We partnered with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services and surveyed over 700 marketers across the globe to learn about their event strategies, tactics, and best practices. And we found that the top event marketers (23% to be exact) can calculate the ROI of their events.

So, what are these top-performers (at Splash, we call them Event Optimizers) doing differently? In this new Run of Show video, we share our top three takeaways from the study – three attributes of the industry leaders who are able to connect their events to revenue.

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Welcome to Run of Show, I'm so excited about what we're releasing this week. We launched a study with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, and we've been working with them for the past six months to learn from the top event marketers across the globe.

And what we learned very quickly was that there was a top quartile of event marketers that really thought about events differently, and used event technology a little differently. And so in this study (which you should totally check out) you're going to see the differences, and how they think about event marketing.

Before we dive into some of my key learnings from the study, I want to call out one quick disclaimer. You're going to see huge businesses in the study – companies like Facebook and Salesforce or MAC Cosmetics, and you might say to yourself, "Of course they can run an event program and invest in it. They're huge businesses."

I just want you to remember that I've seen from firsthand experience that these organizations, they take their ROI equations very seriously. And many of them are separated into smaller groups that operate very similarly to startups. So, if you think that you can't apply some of these learnings to your small business, you're wrong. This is really applicable to any event marketing program.

The first thing that popped out to me was a shift towards more hosted events. If you look at the entire data set, on average we're seeing that about 73 events a year are hosted and about 62 events a year are sponsored, so that's a relatively even split.

But when you start to look at some of the highest performing programs, they're reporting out that they're actually reinvesting in their hosted events, and really boosting their hosted program.

Nearly all of those respondents who were the highest performing event marketers actually reported hosting their own trade show that got sponsorships. So, that move towards owned and operated events became really clear through this study.

The next thing that jumped out to me, and I'm sure this one's going to be an often-used benchmark in many marketing planning discussions, is how much we should invest in our full-time event personnel as we scale our event programs.

And what surfaced was that for every four or five people on the marketing team, these programs had at least one dedicated event marketer.

If you had a 40-person marketing team, you should be looking at about eight to 10 dedicated event marketers – and that doesn't include your freelancers or your subcontractors. These are full-time employees dedicated to in-person marketing. This is definitely interesting as we think about what it takes to scale big event programs.

The third insight is my favorite one, and it's all about budget. The conversation around budget in the study is fascinating. Okay, let me rattle some stats to you that we learned.

We saw that B2C businesses are spending about 19% of their marketing budget on events. That's a lot. But then we looked at the B2B segment across the 700 respondents, and 29% of their marketing budget was spent on in-person marketing. Very cool.

But then, when we looked at some of the top fastest-growing businesses that can prove ROI, that can actually measure and predict and drive value – they're spending about 50% of their marketing budget on events.

50% of the entire marketing mix – that's crazy. That's really, really exciting to see. And it's also just exciting to see that they're doing it and their business is growing. We're finally drawing that connection between events and ROI.

Those are my top three takeaways. But don't forget – 700 people responded to this survey and they are all executives from top businesses across the world. So, check out the full study. I think you're going to enjoy it, it's pretty darn good.

And thank you to HBR for running it with us, and thank you to our community of event marketers for responding to it and bragging about their programs. It was really cool to read this thing.