What is Event-Led Growth?

“We need more leads.”

“No one has heard of our company.”

“There’s no way we’ll meet our revenue targets this year.”

There are so many reasons why companies host events, from building brand awareness to generating pipeline. And events work for these goals. Splash’s 2024 Outlook on Events report shows that 77% of marketers say events are the most effective marketing channel.

But not all of them have done events right.

The Old Way for Event Marketing

Let’s look at the traditional industry conference. This has historically been a primary way for event marketing professionals to meet their ambitious goals.

You secure a booth space — if you’re lucky, you’re early enough to grab a high-traffic spot. You spend months planning the booth experience, weeks agonizing over what swag to order, and days convincing your sales team to participate.

You get to the conference early to manage booth setup. The conference starts, and you spend day after day scanning badges, keeping your happy-event-organizer smile on, and silently cursing yourself for not getting those band-aids on your feet earlier.

The conference ends. You report on the number of leads scanned and pass the CRM report to your sales team.

Do you do more with event measurement and ROI after that, or is this where you wipe your hands and move onto the next event?

If you said the latter, you’ve got a big problem. (Don’t stress, though — it’s a fixable problem.)

The problem is that, even though you captured event data with those leads, that’s likely not enough. You’re assuming (not proving) that you generated greater brand awareness and more pipeline — and there’s nothing tying those leads to a bigger event marketing strategy.

Enter: event-led growth.

Event-Led Growth, Defined

Event-led growth (ELG) is a go-to-market strategy that uses events as the primary customer acquisition and retention channel. These can be in-person, virtual, or hybrid events, or a blend.

These events are: 

• A collaborative effort across multiple go-to-market teams, and not just event marketing’s responsibility
• Scalable
• Measurable
• Tied to specific pipeline and revenue goals
• Delivered to hit specific audiences and specific points in the funnel

Fundamentally, event-led growth isn’t new. There are plenty of teams out there that have been driving event-led growth for years. 

But truthfully, not enough teams are doing that. Too many teams are still focused on siloed strategies, saturated channels, or “just doing” one-off events. None of those are enough anymore. The highest-performing teams will tap into a holistic event marketing strategy to drive pipeline and revenue through ELG.

Types of Events for ELG Strategies

Event-led growth relies on running a variety of events, at a variety of different times, to reach the right people. This is just like the funnel we often refer to in marketing. But with ELG, you’re not just doing conferences (or any other kind of event). You’re pairing those with other types of events for maximum effect.

We looked at platform data on Splash to identify the types of events most event-led growth companies are running at the highest level. (Note: There are overlapping features across some of these types of events, but each has defining characteristics.)

• Marketing Events are primarily prospect-facing events meant to attract prospects through education and thought leadership. Marketing events are fully owned events (not sponsored or included in an event partnership) and may have many attendees or just a few.

• Sales Events are primarily prospect-facing events meant to close deals through customized experiences. A marketing team may have complete oversight of sales events (common in smaller organizations), or partner with sales (common in larger organizations with dispersed sales teams focused on specific geographic territories). Sales events are often smaller in attendee size.

• Customer Events are exclusively customer-facing events meant to renew or expand business. Customer events could be small in attendee size (e.g., local customer appreciation event) or very large (e.g., annual user conference).

• Third-Party Events can overlap with both marketing events and sales events, depending on the goal. The difference is that third-party events are not owned, but sponsored — meaning they’re hosted by an outside organization and sponsored by multiple other organizations.

• Partner Events can overlap with marketing events, sales events, or customer events, depending on the goal. Partner events are hosted jointly between your organization and another. Both organizations mutually benefit from one another with little to no competing attributes. Partner events are not paid sponsorships.

• Community Events are for anyone belonging to a defined group. They strengthen the relationship between your organization and its community members through engagement and shared experiences, ultimately (ideally) resulting in new or expanded revenue.

Conclusion

More brand awareness. More pipeline. More closed-won business. More customer expansion. More product adoption.

Whatever your goals are, events work. 

In fact, US-based teams that adopted ELG were 75% more likely than those who didn’t to see a growth rate of +50% in 2023. 

Think about it: Events offer a personalized, valuable experience that digital marketing campaigns will never measure up to. This is especially true as nearly every marketing channel (except events) has become digitized. (And yes, even webinars and virtual events offer great opportunities for engagement, just like in-person events.)

For many companies, it’s time to hop on the event-led growth train — before all of your competitors do. It’s time to stop assuming greater brand awareness and more pipeline, and start proving it.