Most companies treat events as one-off moments.
A rogue field event here, a random webinar there, all disconnected from the rest of the marketing plan.
It’s why events are often seen as money pits instead of the revenue drivers they really are.
Enter event-led growth (ELG): a go-to-market strategy that turns events into a growth engine for the entire customer lifecycle.
With ELG, events aren’t a one and done checkbox. They’re connected, repeatable, and measurable programs that fuel acquisition, pipeline, adoption, retention, and loyalty.
ELG-led organizations:
Events are one of the few channels where brands can create genuine human connection at scale. When used intentionally, that connection becomes a competitive advantage.
That’s where the power of ELG comes into play. It uses a variety of event types and formats to meet audiences where they are and move them forward in their journey.
In this guide, you’ll find the eight most common event types used in ELG, mapped to the three buying stages:
Think of these stages as guidelines since buying behaviors and ELG strategies don’t usually follow a linear path.
Whether you run some, all, or none (yet), there’s something for everyone. You can jump to the events that matter most to your strategy or build the full growth engine from the ground up.
Let’s dive in.
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Training events remain a cornerstone of any event program.
While companies may be shifting away from massive conferences, they still rely on trainings to educate buyers, enable customers, and accelerate time-to-value.
With an event-led growth strategy, trainings aren’t only used for education. They accelerate conversion and adoption, too.
From hands-on workshops to interactive demos, training events give attendees practical skills they can immediately apply, strengthening trust in your brand and product.
Your opening remarks and agenda are crucial. Attendees usually come into a training event with a certain level of anxiety about the materials. This is your opportunity to set the expectation that the content will be digestible, give them a sense of direction, and allay anxiety that a certain topic won’t be covered.
Zach Napolitano
Director of Product Marketing, Splash (part of Cvent)
Training events can be broadly defined, which can make measuring success a challenge.
Depending on what you want to achieve, consider:
Brand Awareness KPIs
Demand Generation KPIs
Event Revenue KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
The online version of a training event is often similar to a traditional webinar.
To streamline production, create a branded template in your event marketing platform designed specifically for webinars. It’ll make your life so much easier every time you need to create a new event. Bonus points if it automatically spins up a corresponding program in your CRM and marketing automation systems.
The smartest leaders know there’s nothing more important than having an incredible bench of employees ready to knock their work out of the park.
Great recruiting events can differentiate your brand and engage your talent pipeline in ways no other channel can.
In ELG-focused organizations, recruiting events are treated as relationship-building opportunities.
Whether you’re hosting an hour‑long speed dating style interview event or a multi‑day career fair, these tips will apply.
Analyzing and understanding your metrics at a holistic view is the key to future success with your recruiting events. Determining what impact your event had on guests—your candidates—will help you strategize and plan future events. The most meaningful insights we use to attract the best candidates: event page clickthrough rate, channel funnels, and repeat registrations.
Cindy Lien
Ops Coordinator, Global Employer Brand & Marketing, Meta
Since your goals are likely to build brand awareness and develop the talent pool, focus on:
Brand Awareness KPIs
Recruiting Event KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
Whether the venue for your recruiting event is your company’s lobby or a virtual meeting room (or both) candidates want the same thing: to learn about the people, what the company stands for, and what it would be like on the inside.
Immerse your candidates in your brand when hosting virtual events.
Ensure every touchpoint is on‑brand, regardless of format.
Teaching a workshop.
Leading a roundtable discussion.
Showing off a demo.
Meeting for happy hour.
Field events can take many forms. These smaller, localized experiences are often hosted by field marketing and sales teams to connect directly with priority buyers in a more personal, authentic way.
But without a clear strategy in place, field events can easily become one-off sales activities.
With an ELG approach, field events are treated as repeatable pipeline accelerators that sit at the intersection of sales, marketing, and customer success. When executed well, field events create multiple high-value touchpoints before and after an event that build trust, move deals forward, and shorten sales cycles.
Field events can look like nearly every event type in this playbook, which makes them flexible but risky if they don't have the right guardrails.
That's the benefit of using an ELG strategy.
It helps bring structure to field events without limiting creativity so you can create consistent, compliant, and measurable results across every region.
Since your goals are likely to build brand awareness, generate demand, and drive sales, consider:
Brand Awareness KPIs
Demand Generation KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
Since the goal is to engage your audience and build relationships, aim to keep your virtual events as personal as possible.
To do this, find out what your audience likes to do and create an experience around it. For example, host virtual wine tastings, baking classes, or even escape rooms.
Remember to keep the focus on the experience, not content. People attend these events to create connections. If your events can deliver that, you’re on the right track.
First impressions are everything, especially when you’re dealing with VIPs.
All events aim to make attendees feel special, but VIP events take that effort to another level. Hosting VIP events means going beyond knowing what your attendees want.
It means understanding:
Most importantly, it means knowing exactly what it takes to get them to show up.
VIP events provide a unique, exclusive experience for high‑priority prospects, customers, or partners. Business leaders often hand‑pick the guest list, and guests are usually close to (if not already) working with you.
In an event-led growth strategy, VIP events are relationship multipliers. They're designed to deepen trust, unlock growth, and strengthen long-term loyalty.
Since your goals for VIP events are likely to drive sales and improve retention and loyalty, consider:
Event Revenue KPIs
Retention & Loyalty KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
VIP events are all about special, exclusive treatment and meaningful conversations. Virtual and hybrid formats can pose a challenge creatively, especially when trying to foster the vulnerability needed for executive‑level discussions.
Ally Masi, Senior Manager of SMB Executive Events at Salesforce, suggests offering a shared bonding experience first, such as a virtual cooking class or chocolate tasting. Whatever the experience, take a hyper‑local approach when possible (e.g., a food tour featuring local restaurants).
One of the best ways to let the world know about a new product or service is through a launch event.
Here’s the thing: the event shouldn’t only focus on your company.
Yes, launch events are about showcasing your latest release, but they should also be about your attendees and their experiences.
Think about big industry launch events for giants like Apple and Google.
While new products are the reason everyone is there, those companies also ensure the audience has memorable, unique experiences as they listen, learn, and engage.
Within the lens of event-led growth, think of launches as campaign arcs. They combine awareness, enablement, and adoption into one connected experience.
To ensure engagement at an event, I work closely with the customer success team to identify customers who have great use cases and are charismatic speakers. Once we identify those customers, we ask them ahead of time to volunteer to speak when we engage the audience, as it’s always hardest getting the first person to talk. Once you get the conversation going, it usually flows well from there. This is also a great tactic to use if you can’t get official approval for that company to be on the agenda but still want to share their story.
Alison Bensch
Head of Global Events, Cloudinary
Your launch goals might be to build awareness, generate demand, drive revenue, or improve retention and loyalty.
Decide what you want to achieve, then measure:
Event Revenue KPIs
Brand Awareness KPIs
Demand Generation KPIs
Retention & Loyalty KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
It’s hard to recreate the interactive moments of in‑person launches virtually, but not impossible. A simple secret: choose the right hosts.
Recruiting the right hosts to emcee your virtual or hybrid launch can make or break it. Put two engaging, expressive co‑hosts on the mic. This will keep attendees excited about spending time with your team to learn about your newest product or service.
Roadshows are no small endeavor.
They’re a lot of work, but they’re also incredibly powerful.
Roadshows typically take place in cities with strong representation, or strong potential representation, from your audience.
They’re designed to engage otherwise hard‑to‑reach decision makers. Unlike other event types that invite buyers to come to you, roadshows take you to your buyers, making it effortless for them to engage.
Within ELG, roadshows are seen as a distributed growth program. Each stop adds insights, pipeline, and relationships that contribute to a centralized strategy.
Promoting your roadshow isn’t just about registrations, it’s about getting guests to actually show up.
Lisle Friedman, Director of Marketing at Infillion, found success partnering with charities to encourage attendance: “At our Charity Engagement Roadshow, we took a product demo to agencies in Chicago. For everyone who completed the demo, we donated $1 to Off The Street Club. By showing up, they helped to make a difference in their community.”
With roadshows, people always come in waves. Dozens of attendees will show up at once, then you’ll have stretches of time with no one at all. And if there’s a wait at the door, people are more likely to leave without ever talking to you. We use a great check‑in app to make the line move fast, and our entire team has access to it—so if the line starts to bottleneck, we can pull anyone from any station to help. The more people you equip to support check‑in, the less drop‑off you’ll see. Offering tacos and margaritas never hurt, either.
Lisle Friedman
Director of Marketing, Infillion
Your roadshow goals may include building awareness, increasing thought leadership, generating demand, driving revenue, and improving retention and loyalty.
Consider:
Brand Awareness KPIs
Event Revenue KPIs
Demand Generation KPIs
Retention & Loyalty KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
The beauty of roadshows is that you can customize each event based on location.
It’s one of the best ways to differentiate what might otherwise feel like the same program over and over.
Going virtual shouldn’t be an excuse to recycle agendas word‑for‑word or broaden your invite list indiscriminately.
Keep your planning focused on the locations and audiences that matter most. Invite speakers who have a connection to those locations. For added value, create a Slack channel or LinkedIn group so guests can connect with others in their area pre- and post-event.
No matter the interest, people crave community.
The same is true in our work lives, which is why we join user groups.
User groups bring together people who can share strategies and best practices for using a product. They’ve become an important part of customer marketing programs, nurturing relationships, improving loyalty, and giving companies a direct line to product feedback.
Your team may be responsible for managing event builds and marketing, but allowing your customers to lead the charge can create a powerful user group program.
For instance, if you’re starting a New York user group, recruit one of your super users in that region to be the group’s leader and determine what content will bring people in the door.
When it comes to their place in your event-led growth strategy, think of user groups as compounding assets. The longer they run, the more loyalty and value they generate.
Since your goals include driving sales and improving retention and loyalty, consider:
Retention & Loyalty KPIs
Event Revenue KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
User groups are usually structured by location, but you don’t have to stop there.
Encourage leaders to:
Talk to your user group leaders to understand what’s important to them today and select topics based on their challenges and successes.
Companies spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars each year on events to reach external audiences.
But what about their internal audiences?
When employers find talented employees, they do everything they can to invest in their happiness and potential.
Hosting internal events, like all‑hands meetings, incentive trips, and team‑building activities, is one way to keep employees informed and engaged. These events can improve communication and collaboration across departments, and they can also help gather feedback and nurture employee loyalty.
Even with the best internal event promotions, it’s important that each department understands why an event is a must‑attend. Get managers aligned so they feel empowered and excited to cascade invites to their teams. When invitations come directly from a manager, employees are more likely to join and stay engaged.
Think of your internal events as force multipliers that align teams around your event-led growth strategy and shared goals.
Ask yourself: How can we initiate informal conversations by way of internal events? Our Leadership Bites series gives a small group of employees the chance to connect with leaders (for example, our Head of People Operations recently led a chocolate‑making group). They’re open to all employees, but limited to maybe 10 people to keep them intimate. It gives team members who wouldn’t ordinarily interact with each other the opportunity to get to know each other.
Nico Sahi
Growth Marketing Manager, GumGum
All‑hands meetings are a great place to share updates, celebrate milestones, connect teams, and drive alignment. But to break up the monotony of the usual announcements, bring in new speakers, like other employees or external guests (even a client). We do a program called IX Shares, where we incorporate casual storytelling into our all‑hands meetings. Employees from all offices can submit stories, and we select new people each time to join us on the main stage—either in‑person or virtually.
Marissa Maguire
Head of Experiential Marketing, Index Exchange
Since your goals are to boost employee retention and engagement, consider:
Employee Engagement KPIs
Get definitions for all of these KPIs in the appendix.
When everyone is joining from behind a screen, it’s easy for attendees to disengage quickly. Common engagement tactics include enabling chat, holding a Q&A, and keeping presentations short.
Some other options to try:
Brand Awareness KPIs
Demand Generation KPIs
Event Revenue KPIs
Retention & Loyalty KPIs
Employee Engagement KPIs
Recruiting Event KPIs
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