Companies run events to build brand awareness and pipeline. But they haven’t always done it right.
They’d scan badges at a trade show booth, report on the number of leads scanned, pass those names on to the sales team, and move on to the next event. At the same time, they’d offer up feeling-based “results” from that event.
Things like:
“Our branding was everywhere in the venue. It was so cool to see!”
“So many people commented on how much fun they had.”
“Everyone who stopped by said they were going to reach out for more information.”
“The booth was so popular. We’re completely out of swag.”
The problem with this — even though data had been captured through lead scanning — is that this event assumes (rather than proves) greater brand awareness and more pipeline, and there’s nothing tying it to a bigger event strategy.
This is where event-led growth (ELG) comes in.
Event-led growth, while not fundamentally new, is conceptually new.
Traditionally, many marketing teams ran one-off events: the exhibit hall presence, lunch and learn, or networking happy hour, to name a few.
As event marketing started becoming more of a formal function within the marketing organization, one-off events started becoming event programs. These looked similar to the one-off events but were often part of a larger, integrated marketing program or campaign.
Now, teams are adopting an even more sophisticated and strategic mindset around events, and it’s not just marketing teams involved. Event-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that uses events as the primary customer acquisition and retention channel. These events, which are a collaborative effort across multiple go-to-market teams, are scalable, measurable, and tied to specific pipeline and revenue goals — making them more valuable than events from the past.
So, what types of events are teams running as part of their event-led growth strategies? Based on platform data from Splash, we’re seeing teams run six types of events most commonly. Before we get into those, it’s important to note that there are overlapping features across some of these event types, but each has defining characteristics.
Think of event-led growth as a new, strategic mindset that will help you operate, plan, and execute events more effectively. Sounds great, right? And there’s even more to look forward to when you start adopting an event-led growth motion.
Even with all of those benefits that come with an ELG motion, like anything else, it doesn’t come without challenges. Let’s take a look at the things you should consider when adopting an event-led growth approach, and you’ll see why the benefits far outweigh any of them.
Event marketers have no shortage of things on their to-do list — so you’re probably not jumping at the chance to build an entirely new strategy focused on event-led growth.
But there’s good news: If you’re just getting started, your strategy will look similar to other event strategies you currently have or have built in the past. The difference is that an event-led growth strategy will inform your entire marketing plan, so it’ll likely be much more robust than you’re used to.
When you start leveling up or moving into best-in-class event-led growth, we'll introduce some more complex things to consider.
What are your organization’s business goals this year? At the highest level, you should consider this as you set goals for your holistic event-led growth strategy. Then, you can begin to narrow down how you’ll meet those goals through various events and which KPIs you’ll track at the event level to prove success.
For example, let’s say one of your organization’s business goals this year is to increase ARR by 30% over last year. With that in mind, the goal for your entire event strategy might be to source X opportunities, influence $X in pipeline, or generate X dollars of closed-won business across all events.
Then, based on data from past events and projections, you can begin to assign a percentage of that high-level goal to individual events. (This will also help you create your events calendar, but more on that in a minute.)
If you work for a company with a well-defined and specific target audience, half of your job here is already done. But look back to those goals we just set. Are you going to meet those goals by reaching net-new prospects, potential customers who have already engaged with you in some way or another, existing customers, or a mix?
For those working with a broader or less clearly defined audience, you’ll need to research. Market research, competitor research, and even diving into your own product can help you better understand who you want to reach. What are their pain points, and what do they care about?
Remember that your audience might change. Factors like company evolutions, market changes, and even world events can alter who might want to engage with your product. If you can stay updated on changing trends and preferences, you’ll stay in tune with who your audience is — and keep a leg up on the competition.
First and foremost, take stock of your available budget. How many events can you realistically fit into that budget?
Whether you’re planning for the coming year or planning mid-year to spend whatever is left, you’ll want to allocate your budget strategically to make the most of it and prioritize what will help you meet your goals.
And don’t forget that while managing your budget is obviously important, it’s equally important to deliver value. Invest in owned or sponsored events that will offer your attendees a personalized and immersive experience while working toward your goals and keeping your budget on track. Make your approach to budgeting well-balanced, and you’ll more likely deliver value and results.
For so long, marketing teams were stuck in a pattern of just doing events for the sake of generating leads. But now that you have a tangible goal or two for your event-led growth strategy — and an idea of what you’ll need coming out of each event — you can more easily (and strategically) decide what events to host or attend. This is also a good time to identify which events will happen in person, virtually, or a hybrid of both.
Other things you’ll want to consider when creating your events calendar are things like when industry and competitor events are happening, time of year, holidays, when you typically launch new products, and so forth. These can all be indicators of when could be the best (or worst) time to host an event.
If your audience includes a lot of parents, for example, you’ll probably want to avoid hosting something during the back-to-school chaos. If your audience is sales pros, the end of a quarter probably isn’t your best bet.
The bottom line: Work cross-functionally to build your events calendar. Other teams, especially those with boots on the ground and working closely with customers, may have different perspectives on when to host events. Plus, you’ll want to ensure marketing and sales alignment so everyone simultaneously promotes the same campaign.
Although your marketing plan might vary based on the type of event, the people you’re inviting, and so forth, it’s a good idea to have a blueprint ready. From here, you can always adjust how or where you’re promoting the event based on what you think will resonate the most and generate the results you need.
No matter your marketing plan, it should always start with defining your event's value prop. Why would your audience want to attend? What value will they get?
Once you define these things, you can start building out the content you want to promote on various channels. Here's a list of channels you may want to include.
-> Event Website
Pro Tip: More than 42% of the highest-performing events hosted on Splash show images of people in the header. Humanize your event page, and you're likely to see more registrations than if you go text-only.
-> Paid social
Pro Tip: Templates are one of the easiest ways to start scaling your ELG strategy. Create email templates for invitations, reminders, follow-ups, and more, and watch the time spent on building those emails drop dramatically.
-> Direct mail invitations
-> Owned newsletters
-> Influencer marketing
-> Blog posts
Pro Tip: You could write a full event recap or choose one insight captured from the event and dive deep into that. People love meatier content, plus it's an excellent way to continue highlighting the experts you brought in for the event.
-> Partnerships and sponsored content
-> Media outreach
Creating a central event plan or checklist is one of the best ways to stay on track with your planning and hitting your goals. (This will also help keep things a little less stressful for you as you execute each event.)
It might sound daunting, but start this exercise by writing down every single thing you do to execute an event from start to finish. Group each task into larger categories to keep everything as organized as possible. And our most valuable advice: Put your list in some digital space where you can maintain it as needed — because if we know one thing, these lists will just keep growing.
Your future self will thank you.
We set some goals earlier for your event-led growth strategy, and now it's time to identify how you'll measure progress toward some of the more common event goals.
Rookie, veteran, anyone in between — if you're in marketing, you know the importance of KPIs. So, while we don't want to downplay these, we also want to say that measuring individual events does not have to be difficult.
Pick your goal below to explore common KPIs and where to track them.
Reporting Pro Tip
Brand awareness KPIs are often spread across disparate data sources. Ideally, you'd create a single view in your business intelligence dashboard or a consolidated tracking spreadsheet.
Reporting Pro Tip:
Define an inactivity period (e.g., 30, 60, or 90 days) to track the number of leads reactivated by your event.
Reporting Pro Tip:
Remember to consider different opportunity types, including net-new, expansion, renewal, or others. Track this alongside your opportunities to better understand what kinds of events to double down on.
Reporting Pro Tip:
Compare the length of your sales cycle for event attendees versus those who don't attend events. This will give you a good understanding of the lift you get from events rather than looking at the sales cycle more generally.
Reporting Pro Tip:
If you don't already have set stage-weighted probabilities, consider calculating those first to help give you an earlier view into program performance.
After you've started executing your event-led growth strategy and running some event programs, you might decide it’s time to level up. And the best way to do that is by finding the gaps to fill.
You've probably heard the term "leaky funnel," and that's what we're talking about, to an extent. Where do people drop off in the customer lifecycle? Do you struggle to get new people in, or is the problem retaining them after a year?
But it's not just a leaky funnel you should be worried about. You should also consider where there are slow areas in the funnel — a clogged funnel if you will. Work with other revenue leaders at your organization to understand where the leaks or clogs are so you can build relevant events that fill those holes or open up space for faster deals.
Splash did this recently when our experiential team noticed a gap in our mid-funnel programming. At this stage, we focused everything on showcasing the product. Our question was: What experiences could we offer to people already familiar with Splash but not ready to see a demo or dive into product capabilities?
We landed on a new event series called Spark Inspiration, a virtual meetup of fewer than 10 event professionals where they can troubleshoot common challenges and share effective strategies. This series combines the thought leadership often found at more brand-building, top-of-funnel events with the intimacy of a small, bottom-of-funnel experience meant to close deals.
If you're at the point of wanting (and have the ability to) scale your event programs, you're well on your way to gold medal status in your ELG journey.
Scaling your event programs means being able to run more events faster and with the resources you already have. This method encourages an event-led growth motion since doing events at scale often means they're more intimate and personalized for the attendees.
One of Splash's global financial services brand customers used to host a few tentpole events each year. They were your typical one-to-many events that were difficult to consider "experiences" since they had to appeal to hundreds, if not thousands, of different attendees.
More recently, they adopted an event-led growth strategy and started leveraging technology to support it (more on that later), and now run around 1300 events each year instead. The kicker: These events are much more repeatable and only host 10 people each, making them more personalized and valuable. (And events are now the company's best-performing marketing channel.)
You've built an initial event-led growth strategy, found (and covered) all the gaps in your funnel, and started scaling your event programs. You've been maturing your programs, and now it's time to earn that best-in-class status officially. This is where you optimize … constantly.
Like many other marketing programs, the best way to optimize is to test, test, test again, and then adjust. For events, this can manifest in a couple of different ways.
A/B test your promotional activities. This is like the A/B testing you already know (and hopefully love), only specific to your event marketing. At the most basic level, say one of the KPIs you're tracking for an upcoming event is registrations. To better understand the type of content that's most interesting to your audience, you could send two versions of an email, each promoting a different speaker, value prop, or value-add from your event.
Pilot new programs. Even if you're at gold-level status, there's always a risk of getting stuck in an event rut. After all, didn't someone once say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Stepping outside of this comfort zone and trying new kinds of event programs takes some guts but can have lucrative rewards. If you don't try it, you'll never know if something could have worked even better. (And if it doesn't, that's okay too.)
You already know that events are a prime marketing channel for your company to build brand awareness, generate revenue, increase product adoption, and strengthen customer retention. But just looking at everything we’ve talked about in this guide could be a huge source of stress.
That’s why event technology matters: It helps event marketers do their jobs easier, faster, and more efficiently. But there’s more to that.
Event technology should enable event marketers to drive value. It should support all kinds of events that power registration, attendance, opportunity flow, and ultimately, revenue. And most of all, it should help marketers do what was seemingly impossible for so long: measure events through data-driven (not feeling-based) insights.
All that said, the big question is: How should an event marketing platform support an event-led growth strategy?
Event marketing is consistently ranked as one of the most stressful jobs. You have to manage a planning checklist that's a mile long, do everything in your power to fill the room, and constantly worry about having to execute your plan B.
If you're working from an ELG strategy, you're not just doing one big event each year. Instead, you're likely running a lot of smaller event programs, some of which are easily repeatable. With an event marketing platform, you can set processes up so some of the more time-consuming, tedious tasks are done automatically for you.
Think about setting up integrations once so all your event data is connected to your CRM and MAP systems every time you run an event. Create event page templates (with registration forms) so all you have to do for a new event is update your event information and content. Build reporting dashboards once (with your unique KPIs) and let the platform spin up visual reports for each event.
Event marketing probably won't ever find its way off those "most stressful jobs" lists, but a platform's ability to support repeatability sure could help.
Let's face it: Even if we're graced with all the time in the world, it seems like it's always a struggle to launch event promotions on time. Add an ELG strategy with a jam-packed events calendar, and it becomes even more challenging to stay ahead of launch dates.
Think about everything you need ready for launch: your event page, invitations, reminders, follow-up emails, and social share cards, to name a few.
An event marketing platform is designed to templatize these things for you, so it's faster to launch your events and start seeing opportunities flow in. And not to mention that these templates also offer more design consistency, which can help support overall brand awareness and recognition.
Once you get to the point of having an ELG strategy, you might be running so many events — and involving so many parts of the organization — that it makes sense to start handing over event marketing powers to other teams.
One of the biggest challenges we see with democratizing events is what we call "events gone rogue": too many people making too many decisions about things they're not well-versed in.
For example, a sales team in San Diego hosts a networking event. They are familiar with their venue options, can pick out food and beverages based on their budget, and don't necessarily need a marketing representative on-site. Less work for marketing, right?
Wrong. This team built an event page and sent email invitations featuring unlicensed stock imagery, colors that are nowhere to be found in the brand guidelines, and no company logo.
Situations like this aren't uncommon. With an event marketing platform, you can give these other teams governed access, which helps them quickly and easily build on-brand event pages and promotions. This ensures that all events, no matter which teams are running them, use marketing-approved assets that work toward the bigger strategy and goals — not against them.
Having an ELG strategy implies you have multiple event programs running concurrently, and they're serving different stages of the customer lifecycle. These events are also a collaborative effort across multiple internal teams.
An event marketing platform can provide greater visibility into these programs for everyone involved, keeping teams aligned on event details, progress toward goals, and next steps.
In addition to giving others in the company-governed access to your event marketing platform, we recommend integrating it with other business tools for maximum visibility. Connect it to your CRM so anyone can quickly see how many registrations are flowing in, pull reports for follow-up, and understand the program's impact on pipeline.
To make internal communications even more manageable, use your event marketing platform's Slack integration to push real-time notifications to dedicated event channels when there's activity, like registrations, check-ins, and survey responses.
Event-led growth is the most powerful lever for authentic connection, engagement, acquisition, and retention.
Think about it: Events are the sole survivor left in a world where every marketing channel is becoming digitized. There's still a massive appetite for event experiences — and even the virtual ones need that human element to be effective. Events have changed, but the core of why events work remains intact.
One of the biggest things that has changed is the need to make more data-driven decisions around event marketing. Budgets are tighter than ever, so running out of swag, getting positive anecdotal feedback, and scanning some leads isn't enough anymore.
It's time to stop "just doing events" and start doing events right — and that means getting your event-led growth strategy in order.
