Say farewell to spray-and-pray marketing. Say welcome to value and engagement.

by Dann Anthony Maurno | September 02, 2011 | (1)

If only attendance was the measure of success. Then, the ILA Berlin Airshow, the biannual aerospace industry event with routine attendance of 1 million plus, would be among the most successful events in history. “But how many of the million are going to buy an Airbus A380?” asks Colja Dams, CEO of Vok Dams Group, an event management agency based in Germany.

Hardly any. “It’s cool to exhibit there and to go there and bring your kids to see big fighter planes,” Dams said, but it is misguided to hope that some buyers will be among the million. 

“Hope is not a strategy. It does not work and never did,” said Ian McGonnigal, senior vice president of client strategy and brand performance at Jack Morton Worldwide.

Meeting industry veterans McGonnigal and Dams describe a shift from tactical marketing to strategic marketing for events.

The difference is in achieving a predetermined business outcome, according to Kerry Smith, president and executive director of the Event Marketing Institute.

“Ten years ago, event marketers would think, ‘Let’s spend money to get our brand out there and create some good will,’” Kerry said. “But senior management is saying, ‘It’s not good enough anymore that it’s what you used to do. There’s got to be clear ROI.’ That puts pressure on marketing and event professionals to show a measurable impact; to figure out the business outcome you want before the live event,” and focusing the message and attendees to suit that outcome. “So the emphasis now is not on mass quantities of people, but on smaller quantities of the right people, and engaging them.”

Engagement is no soft-edged deliverable or silly new buzzword; it is the new way of thinking about the classic sales cycle, or as the Event Marketing Institute describes it, the age-old purchase funnel: “Brands around the world [recognize] the power of the human connection and then [use] that engagement” to drive sales. 

Engagement, says McGonnigal, is a two-way dialogue rather than one-way mass communications.

“People are used to conversation now, and user-generated content,” McGonnigal said. “Some brands do a good job of using a case study approach—including customers to tell a story.”

As far back as 2001, Salesforce.com recruited customer evangelists to speak to prospects at its road shows—without vetting by Salesforce.com. Attendees were guaranteed authenticity, and CEO Marc Benioff trusted that a satisfied customer would deliver a compelling, if unpolished, pitch. 

“[In such cases], the brands act as facilitators more than broadcasters,” McGonnigal said. “They risk a bit of brand intent to facilitate a true conversation with their audiences, but the message is stronger and better perceived.”

Engagement is more peer-to-peer, than B-to-B. The challenge then becomes finding the peers who will reach out to their peers.

Social media is an obvious route, but, just one of the possibilities. Experiential marketing fosters engagement with a carefully selected core group, and wins them over with a positive experience that they want to share. Smith points out the new practices in pop-up retail for consumer engagement.

“Ten years ago, a company would take over 50 empty retail stores to demo some new software or gizmo,” Smith said. “The spaces looked temporary. Now they’ll stay for 30 days instead of three, and pick three strategic markets instead of 50.”

Microsoft, for example, opened three pop-up spaces across Canada in October 2010, to demo its Xbox Kinect interactive gaming console. But these stores stayed open for the entire months of October and November.

“They’re not looking for numbers, necessarily; they’re looking for disciples who bring their friends back to the ‘church,’” Smith said.

Microsoft in 2008 used pop-up retail to launch its Live Photos photo-sharing service, and determined that its target audience was high-income, tech-savvy mothers. So, it opened two stores, in San Francisco and Brooklyn.

“Years ago there might have been a coupon and a five-second interaction,” Smith said. “But these mothers were in there for 30 or 45 minutes, an engagement that created a better understanding of the product”—and fostered disciples.

Finding disciples to recruit more disciples sounds ideal for social media—and it is. But McGonnigal stresses thinking of the marketing, the event and the follow-up as a continuous engagement.

“Think of the event as part of the ongoing conversation that begins on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, moves on to the event and continues after,” McGonnigal said, noting that social media is neither a substitute nor a simple add on. 

“Starbucks does an excellent job engaging its audience online to have conversations and talk about the product,” McGonnigal said. “It doesn’t necessarily own the conversation, but facilitates it.”

This is much like Salesforce.com with its customer/prospect engagements. Customers sell prospects on a Salesforce.com live event the way Starbucks customers sell one another on the value and experience of drinking coffee at Starbucks. The brands stand by, but not idly.

The customers are influencers—a powerful target for event marketers. Cutter Consortium, in a 2010 report titled “Social Media Success,” advised, “The line to new customers is no longer a direct one.” Between a company and its customers is a “cadre of influencers: bloggers, news aggregators, portals and organizers with influence, for good or for ill.” (Don’t miss our coverage of key industry influencers in the October edition of One+.)

NBC Universal at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) used bloggers and webcasters to market its appearance. They did so by inviting them to use the NBC Universal stand as a hub, an idea proposed by Jack Morton.

“[NBC Univeral was] looking to showcase their top brands, like the SyFy Channel, Bravo and Oxygen,” McGonnigal said.

Bloggers like Robert Scoble (of Scoblerizer) and Leo LaPorte (“The Tech Guy” on Premiere Radio Networks) attracted attention before the event, then at the event and online during the event (broadcasting live). Perhaps watching a blogger sounds dull, but not to CES attendees, who came by the NBC Universal booth to meet and greet their favorites, McGonnigal says. NBC Universal’s number of Twitter followers jumped by 25 percent, and the company boosted attendance at the stand by 8,000 over the previous year, to more than 20,000. 

So the lines between the marketing, the event and the follow-up blur into a hybrid of physical and digital engagement, says Colja Dams.

This live event, plus “MOSOLO” (mobile, social, location-based services) enables event engagement to begin virtually, before the event. 

“For example, we are doing an event for Nespresso Coffee, where people are invited over Facebook to take part, and release some of their data on Facebook and print out a coupon, and get into the event with a chance of taking part in a sweepstakes to win a coffee machine,” Dams said.

In this case, rather than social media being an extension of an event, the event is an extension of social media. But observes Dams, neither is a substitute for the other. 

But if the social engagement online is so powerful, why bother with the live event at all? 

“The more digital we go, the greater the need for in-person interaction,” Dams said. “So the two trends are combining, even though they seem to be exactly the opposite of each other.” 

CES attendees were not content to read blogs and view webcasts, and NBC Universal promised an immersive experience at the event. In addition to offering attendees the chance to meet favorite online celebs, blogger Mark Lukasiewicz broadcast live from the NBC Universal booth, marveling at a demo by Top Chef’s Richard Blais who used popcorn, liquid nitrogen and a blowtorch to make some amazing treats. Attendees flocked to see Blais and also to see the amazing booth which NBC Universal marketed as an attraction of its own. 

Marketing begins before the event, of course, but continues during. Sales begin before and close during, observes McGonnigal.

“I see sales teams integrated into event selection and development, working hand-in-hand with marketing,” McGonnigal said. “And now follow-up is not just after an event—it’s during. Companies are adopting procedures and processes in which sales is required to log the qualification of leads that used to be in the fishbowl.” 

That creates a sense of immediacy that didn’t previously surround events, McGonnigal says. Additionally, it sends a powerful marketing message to prospects: This is the quality of attention you can expect from us. 

“I went to ComputerWorld a few years ago, and was evaluating their competitors and presence,” McGonnigal said. “I was looking for who sold laptops the right way. I put myself in the place of a small business owner interested in buying 100 laptops and used that platform to gather competitive intelligence.”

Toshiba was not yet a market leader, but McGonnigal had voicemails at his hotel room and a couple of emails from the local marketing rep, who offered to help with the purchase.

“They did an amazing job,” McGonnigal said.

So the event marketer’s job is as it always was—to drive attendance and produce quality leads. But they have allies now, in sales and among prospects, for driving that success. And they can engage attendees long before they ever lay eyes on that splashy booth. One+

TAGS: One+ September 2011 , future of meetings , event marketing