AMA: Lexia Learning Director, Demand Generation & ABM, Laura Lewis on Event Marketing Strategy

Historical data is going to be your biggest assist when selecting events that have the highest ROI. However, historical data is not always available. Here are some other things to consider when selecting events: Number of attendees in your target personas at target companies Whether competitors are attending the event, or not Location, and whether you need to pay employee travel cost to attend or if you have local employees Other activations besides a booth, such as evening events, speaking sess ...Read More

Events are expensive. Before allocating any budget, it's important to make sure that you have the resources to fully support the event - a robust pre-event plan, adequate staff on-site and money for additional activations, and people and technology to follow-up post-event. I have seen many cases of "let's go to many events and buy a booth, and stand at the booth" and this strategy will not maximize your budget and generate ROI. Assuming you can adequately staff your events, sit down with sales, ...Read More

This is such a relevant question for me, as I recently started a new role at Lexia Learning - a $200M edtech company with a marketing team of 80 people. The journey to get here was not straightforward! If you know your goal, then that is the best starting place. For a few years now I have known that I wanted to get out of the start up space. So keep that goal in mind. Then, figure out your path to get there. If you are working for a start up now, that is okay. There's a change your company could ...Read More

Pre-event: This is when you figure out your theme, staff, activations, and all other details. Once those are ironed out, you need to work with your sales team to run a robust outreach campaign. See if you can get an attendee list from the event; if not, a company-only list can also be helpful to focus efforts. In lieu of either, get into the event app and start pulling contact names with the help of AI. Send a marketing email, have sales call, have sales connect with them on LinkedIn - focus on ...Read More

I would attribute revenue and pipeline the same way I do for any other campaign, according to the company's attribution model. This usually look like some version of the following: First-touch: Far into the future, could be 6 months or 3 years from now, did a contact that entered our system for the first time from this event become a customer? Last-touch: What meetings, opportunities, and customers did we receive directly following this event? Multi-touch: Both of the above, plus was this event ...Read More

Be quick and personalize, personalize, personalize. There's not much else that's going to help you. Reach out ASAP after the event - the next day if you can download your scans. Marketing should have their series of follow-ups and nurtures already prepped so they can turn around the follow up this quickly. Sales should already know the leads are coming, and have their day partially blocked to jump on follow-ups for the highest value leads immediately. Sales outreach also needs to be personalized ...Read More

In some of my other answers, I've talked about the importance of timely outreach and personalization from sales. This is critical, but only if leads are warm or ready. A lead that isn't warm or ready (for example, someone who came by the booth for swag and said they did not have a use case, even if they are your target persona) will not convert and should be nurtured first. Best practice would involve creating journeys for each funnel stage of your target buyers. Let's say you sell to IT Adminis ...Read More