What is the problem with most marketing from an ROI perspective?

Most marketing is designed to achieve aesthetic purposes: a beautiful ad, a colorful logo, a nice web site, a commercial that makes you laugh, attractive event décor. All of those things are fine, but they’re not the real purpose of marketing. Marketing should grow the business and generate return on investment. Period.

If you spend $10,000 to market anything, you’ve got to be able to generate more than $10,000. Often, companies don’t know what their return is, they don’t measure their results, and they simply do something that’s aesthetically pleasing, which may or may not sell anything. Sales are really what justify the marketing process.

How do corporate events fit into the marketing process?

I don’t think they should be called events. They should be called the most important selling opportunities of the year. You’re gathering a pre-qualified group of customers and/or prospects in one place, where they will focus on you and your company.

But events usually aren’t treated like the most important opportunity of the year. The staff that attends may not even be very good at selling. They just happen to be available. Then they view it as a junket and they all go out every night and get drunk. They come in the next day looking like they got drunk the night before. And they come home with a stack of business cards, which ends up in a desk drawer.

If you’re going to hold a corporate or channel event, set clear, measurable objectives, send the right people to staff the event, and then follow up with customers who attend. That’s a microcosm of what real marketing is. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t happen that way.

Channel events are a great investment if you treat them like investments and make sure you work hard before, during, and after the event to cultivate new relationships and grow existing ones. It’s not about a vacation.

What should a company do before and after the event?

Companies should coordinate their channel events with all of their other marketing initiatives. Most companies treat their marketing activities as a series of one-offs. They have a PR campaign, an advertising campaign, an event campaign, and a web site. They’re not connected. So you don’t get the power of synergy.

For example, companies should drive customers to their Partner Web sites before and after a channel event and track their online activity, e-mails, and downloads. They should look at an event as an opportunity to build a customer community. When somebody comes to your event, they’ve actually entered your family (and your database) forever. You don’t want to treat them simply as someone who walked into a hotel where you’re holding a meeting or presentation. You want to treat them as someone with whom you want to build a customer relationship, learning all you can about their needs.

How to get greater value from your marketing investment?

It’s the absolute insistence that if marketing isn’t generating new business it has failed. When we fail, and we sometimes do, we go back to fix what didn’t work. The classic marketing excuse is, “we can’t measure the value because there’s a lot of goodwill being generated.” I’ve never seen anyone deposit goodwill in the bank. If you can’t deposit it in the bank, you haven’t demonstrated any real value.

You have to be willing to admit you failed, and willing to reconfigure the approach until you succeed with measurable dollar results. If you’re going to spend $10,000 and you can’t generate $10,001, you’ve lost money.

What gets in the way of proper effective event marketing?

Event people need to better demonstrate their value. They should position themselves as catalysts of business growth. Event marketers are often preoccupied with details. Will the food be cold? What’s the room size? What they ought to be thinking about first is: Who will come to this event? How much business are we going to do? How do we build relationships and partnerships with them? Are we well prepared to meet them? What will we do to follow up the day after?

A lot of people will say, “You can’t measure that. You never know what influenced the purchase.” Those are excuses. You need to know: Are we generating sales from our events? If you can’t actually do business when you bring together a group of customers and prospects, something is wrong and you need to fix it.

How can event marketers measure the success of an event?

Let’s say you get 100 prospects to attend a demonstration event. At some point, you need to assign a salesperson to follow up with them. It’s very easy to track whether any attendees buy your products in three months, six months, a year, or even three years, and track the value of that purchase.

If you are meeting only existing customers, you’re hoping to grow your relationship with them. So you want to have some evidence that the customers who came to the event are increasing their orders or renewing their contracts.

Then, based on the data you’ve collected, you can extrapolate each customer’s value and compare it to the cost of the event. You’ll be able to tell if you’ve got a positive return on investment.

Most companies don’t go through this evaluation process. They treat an event like a party, and they don’t measure it. All they know is that they spent $100,000 on an event and everyone had a good time. People seemed to love it. They liked the food. They thought the entertainment was great. They came to the free wine bar. Fine. But that doesn’t mean it was a successful event.

What if the event doesn’t generate a positive return on investment?

You don’t want to scrap it. You want to find a way to make the marketing initiative work. If an event wasn’t effective, you have to reverse engineer back through the process and figure out why your customers didn’t buy from you.

Did you meet the wrong people? Was the product too expensive? Did they already have a competitor partnership? Did you tell your story well enough? Did you have the wrong salespeople? Did you follow up correctly?

People ask me all the time, “Do events work?” I say, “Yes and no.” They work if you plan them strategically, but don’t work if you think it’s as easy as inviting people and putting together a menu. Events can be a hugely successful marketing vehicle. For example, Oracle Corp. is an event-oriented company. Almost all of its marketing is done through events. And it’s a fabulously successful, profitable company.

A well-run business has to grow on an iterative basis. It has to gather information and then adjust the business model based on what it’s learned. Events are great because your customers and prospects are there, and you get a chance to talk to them and find out what’s working and what’s not. That input should be used to adjust the business model.

What elements are essential for a successful event?

First, a company has to make sure it meets customers and/or prospects who have the authority to make buying decisions. There’s no reason to hold an event for people who can’t possibly give you a return on investment.

Second, events should surprise attendees in some way. People go to an event expecting a typical scenario: They go to a hotel, watch a PowerPoint, go to a breakout session, and go to a cocktail mixer. The event will have more impact on your customers if you surprise and even entertain them.

Third, and most important, follow up with each attendee after the event to help move them closer to a sale.

The hard part of marketing is the measurement, the follow up, and the determination to use it to grow the business. But it’s also the most exciting thing about marketing — seeing that you took strangers and turned them into customers, or you took customers and grew your relationships with them. You have more than a job you love. You have an exhilarating experience. Instead of an event planner, you are a catalyst of growth for the company.