Let's face it the events industry is no exception to the challenges we're facing right now with the Corona Virus - in fact we're one of the industries being hit the hardest. Hearing about Mobile World Congress, IMEX Frankfurt and SWSX cancelling just as a couple of examples .. of course creates this anxiety for the whole industry. 

I've been in the events industry for over 20 years now and I've seen some of the difficult times with September 11, SARS in 2002, the Credit Crunch and now COVID-19 is causing the storm. Those that survived these challenging cycles know that strong, positive action, firm decisions, effective planning, flexibility and openness are crucial for survival! 

With events being cancelled and others being postponed until H2 or even next year, I feel a positive fighting spirit is needed to help us get through. So in true resilient style taught by my event industry Jedi's and other mentors along the way, these are 18 actions that we can take today to pick ourselves up, push forward and come out stronger.

This post is split in three parts:

1. Considering cancellation or postponement of your event(s)
2. 18 ideas on what to do now that you postponed/cancelled your event
3. Very important resources you must check now / subscribe

You've heard us say before that automation isn't just for marketing teams - automation is something that applies to the whole organisation and honestly we seriously believe that if there's one function within B2B businesses that will benefit the most it's got to be sales!

Selling delegate places and sponsorship packages in this day and age, doesn't necessarily require a lot of phone calling, but instead a lot of desk research, hours on end checking LinkedIn for contacts and for the more experienced sales pro, hours checking social networks and communities hunting for the right conversations to participate in to connect with "interested and engaged" individuals.

We have met hundreds of marketing teams and sales teams over the years, and these are the tools that some of the best sales individuals use ( understandably they don't want anyone else to know about their ammunition!) 

We want to empower B2B event sales teams to become much more efficient and hit their targets by using tools and tech that they can start using immediately.

There is nothing fancy about event sales automation to be honest - it's all about having some common sense first and using technology as an enabler, second.

True that technology makes your life easier, but you can achieve similar results without it.

With this blog I want to stimulate your creative cells and give you specific tips and templates to think about how you the marketer OR the sales exec will find efficiencies in your day to day job.

What is event sales automation?

See this as a copy-and-paste exercise on steroids. ;-)

This post was updated on 24th August 2020.

One thing is clear, in the world of events to increase website visits you will need to spend money on advertising or you will need to start writing value adding-content that will drive free and organic traffic.

What is value-adding content? The term refers to content you produce for which your sole intention is not to sell but to educate, inform or entertain. In my world event generated content meets the education and information purpose by default. Event organisers should not have any issue with publishing top notch relevant content in the first place. The challenge is repurposing it efficiently to drive engagement and as a result of that engagement intiate/spark/stimulate interest in future events you have coming up.

If your organisation wants to compete against new and exciting events that are constantly coming up in your sector and want to preserve your market share, or even compete against already established organisation, the events team will need to evolve and keep evolving into a really strong and resilient team of superheroes.

Who doesn’t love to gossip in the midst of this cold season, holding a comforting cup of steaming hot coffee? Whether it’s at the office or a the nearest caff, people are talking about something that you haven’t heard about.

Well lately, the story that’s been circulating through the digital marketing grapevine is that email marketing is a dying trend. You’re probably raising your eyebrows and wondering,

“Is that really true?”

Building an online community with the help of your content is a great strategy and it’s one that absolutely works! But there are various things to consider in making the most of your content - at the most basic level you need to PLAN and know what to do with it. Sounds simple right, but often content can become your master without you even realising it has taken control!

This blog will help you take back and keep control with one of the best ways to succeed - by developing your own content marketing framework and exploring the skills needed by your team.

Nowadays, it has become a constant struggle to catch up with the market and increase productivity to help execute the aggressive growth plans B2B and more specifically companies have. Needless to say marketers very often find themselves doing the same work over and over without having any time to actually execute new and fun marketing ideas.

In anyone's to-do list, work will constantly be postponed or piled up because budget couldn’t be extended to hire more staff, the tasks at hand are time-consuming and it is becoming harder to come up with fresh new ideas to plan and execute.

There are many resources at the marketer's fingertips to grow productivity without much budgetary requirement and leverage tools in the market to make way for new initiatives to come to fruition.

After making a list of the tasks that are most time-consuming in a marketing department, these are the best sites we've come across to help get the work done. These sites have experts working in every field possible, from design to content and finance. We’ve made a list of the top 4 sites that will surely help increase your marketing productivity and reduce your headache.

This post was updated on September 15th, 2020

We all love measuring our results and every team will have a set of event marketing KPIs that they live and die by. If you’re still measuring your activities the old way and moving towards marketing the new inbound way, you’re not going to have the info you need to make smart decisions.

By the way, we have decided to refer to a virtual, hybrid or physical event just as "events", while there are defined differences in the delivery and format of each, they way you approach their marketing is generally the same.

Right after Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet, despite also being a social media site. This means that the importance to build and promote an online video presence has gained more relevance over the past couple of years and will continue to do so.

B2B companies are now seriously using videos as part of their overall marketing strategy and B2B events have been recording tons of video content at their events far longer BUT they are no way near as savvy when it comes to capitalising on it.

That is why we have come up with 6 simple tips to optimise your B2B YouTube presence:

Your event has been launched, everyone is excited, you have received plenty of interest and registrations have started to come through. GREAT.

BUT, at some point registrations slow down and suddenly 3 weeks have gone by and you have received NO registrations at all!

You hit the PANIC button, and everyone gets concerned.

What to do?

It is fair to say that LinkedIn Groups have lost steam and have become a junkyard of spam and can hardly be distinguished from the already crowded feed.

BUT there is one group that is run properly, vetted well and always has a very good source of discussions for event professionals worldwide The Event Planning and Event Management Group.

A recent discussion on the LinkedIn group got some momentum and I thought it would be worth sharing here.

An event prof user asked the question:
I’m just starting to design our exhibition stands for next year and wondered if anyone had any good tips or tricks for attracting people to your stand?

Since it is a question we are constantly asked and part and parcel of our day to day work, I wanted to share how we approach this question and objective.

"Our contact database is the lifeblood of our event business, without it, we are nothing"

Agree? If you do, are you really getting the most out of your prospect and customer database?

You are not alone. When I ask this question to CEOs and leaders of the event industry, 9 out of 10 people give me a categorical "No" or a "I don't think we do, certainly we don't know enough from our contacts; we could be doing more with it".

If your sentiment (or that of your boss) is aligned with the statements above, read on if you want to fix that for good.

This blog was updated on the 15 October 2020

So this blog is inspired by years of working in events and conferences and experiencing for myself all the positive progress in the industry. But of course whenever there is change, there are always those that resist it and just like to keep things the way they are - the dreaded "comfort zone."

Launching a paid per click campaign is not as simple as paying an agency to do it or getting a member staff to simply spend a couple of hundred bucks on it and off they go.

Before you launch a PPC campaign there are certain aspects that you need to cover, we split this into 4 key areas:

1. Required PPC settings for your websites
2. Required settings for your Landing Pages to guarantee PPC campaign success
3. Required assets and materials before you launch a PPC campaign
4. How to monitor and track responses of your PPC campaign 

This is a guide that will tell you exactly what to do at each of these 4 stages, if you follow them you will ensure that your campaign is successful and more importantly, trackable.

How do you promote your B2B event through video? I am talking about doing things beyond the usual boring panning of lanyards at the registration area, lots of people going through the doors, shaking hands, speakers on stage and packed rooms.

My intention here is to offer some different perspectives and specific ideas that you can implement immediately.

By the way, think about posting these videos on your website, twitter, social media, email messages with it and more importantly on LinkedIn!

Before you watch the videos please:

1. They are intended as inspiration.
2. Watch them with an open mind.
3. Take into account that American audiences dare to take more risks in terms of pushing the boundaries.
4. Yeeahhh yeahhh yeahhh, I know your audience is a bit different. Just watch them and hopefully from the whole list there is some inspiration.

B2B event lead generation is an essential component of event marketing. Many event business leaders and marketers allow their campaigns to be killed too early or dismiss future ones outright simply because “the leads the campaign is generating are crap”.

The goal here is to explain that on any normal lead generation campaign, around 66% of the leads  generated will not be good or even relevant at all. So if only 33% of the total leads generated are good then you're not doing bad at all -  you are well within the benchmark.

So what is deemed as a good or bad response from a lead generation campaign?

Here are the top take aways from the video with some good examples:

It is a fact, there are event and media organisations that are having a difficult time with HubSpot and think that "HubSpot does not work, and that inbound marketing is a big scam".

After running more than 50 inbound and content marketing implementations in events and media, most of them with HubSpot, we have looked at a variety of factors as to why it works for some companies and not for others?

These are the reasons WHY: