As Dynamics ISVs plan their 2017 marketing strategy, the conference circuit is the elephant in the room for many of them.
And for good reason: It’s the elephant in the room for companies of all sizes and industries around the country.
Consider the staggering size and scope of events marketing in the U.S.: About 225 million people attend more than 1.8 million events sponsored by companies and associations, including 270,000 conventions and 11,000 trade shows per year. All this hosting, attending, and exhibiting at events comprises more than one-fifth of corporate marketing budgets.
The payback? No one knows, and that’s why it’s become the elephant in the room with marketing planners. Here is how the august Harvard Business Review put it in an article not long ago: “Event marketing is currently a very expensive and sloppy process in most firms because the relevant information is fragmented, difficult to assemble, and the ‘database’ is often a pile of business cards.”
A “pile of business cards”? It seems almost embarrassing to put it that way in this age in which so much important data has become digitized.
Yet that’s how it is at most companies, says HBR: “Three of five marketers use no tools to measure event ROI, and most companies plan and execute events without specific business objectives. Yet, after sales force costs, events are the biggest line item in many marketing budgets, especially for B2B firms.”
The HBR offers a few suggestions for marketers trying to extract at least a little tangible ROI-related data: try to gain access to conference signup data, try to get your conference leads into a CRM system, look at the “smile sheets” attendees fill out after particular sessions.
If these suggestions seem amorphous, that’s because they are. The reality is that conferences and other events are themselves amorphous, with the key outcome–sales leads–very difficult to calculate in a systematic way.
The HBR’s suggestions aren’t bad or misleading, they just fail to go far enough. Marketers should be exploring the highly targeted alternatives to events marketing that have sprung up in recent years. These targeted alternatives are breathing new life into the marketing campaigns of many Dynamics ISVs.
