The Return of Events
Marketers have spent years trying to replace the role of in-person events for lead generation. So, why is everyone suddenly going back to events?
Prior to the pandemic, events were central to every marketing calendar. In the enterprise space, many field marketers spent most of their time and budget organising local seminars and breakfast briefings. Smaller companies focused their marketing efforts on sponsorship of a small number of industry tradeshows. My own employers at CRMT Digital were no exception.
Since 2019, events have become a much less important part of the marketing mix, as marketing has moved towards digital channels. Eventually, even webinars were superceded by the general push towards content marketing. Again, my own employers are no exception. It is interesting, therefore, that in 2024, CRMT Digital are sponsoring an industry event for the first time in five years. That is one anecdote from one company, but it is reflective of the broader industry trend.
Content Readiness
The shift towards event marketing is happening across the board. This isn't just due to sales wanting more face to face opportunities with customers, although, that is a factor. It's also driven by very real concerns about the effectiveness of content syndication, the tactic which mostly replaced events as the main source of sales-ready leads during the pandemic.
For all the investment in content marketing to boost awareness and drive engagement, marketing teams are struggling to identify when even the most active accounts are ready to engage with sales. It doesn't matter how optimised your scoring model is, content marketing isn't quite hitting the mark in this area. BDRs frequently complain that the leads they receive are passed over too early in the buying cycle. Much of the discussion around the decline in email nurture is driven by this problem.
In the past, companies used conversations at in-person events to identify when engaged prospects were ready to buy. Engaged accounts were invited to local events in the hope that an in-person conversation would result in a potential sales opportunity. Various attempts to find digital alternatives to this strategy have been tried, but nothing has come close in effectiveness. Sales teams have even started to create their own bottom of funnel conversion nurtures in an effort to generate meetings from among the leads sent to them prematurely. Such sales nurtures are generally no more successful than the marketing equivalents.
Dark Funnel
The problem is that customers expectations of sales have changed. Many B2B buyers are engaging with sales much later than in the past. The length of the so-called dark funnel has grown, because buyers are conducting much more of their research and requirements gathering before engaging with vendors. The explosion of thought leadership content has filled the gap, but engagement with such content isn't indicative of any particular buyer readiness or purchase timeframe.
In an ideal world, business development teams aim to informally qualify prospective customers before they raise their hands to vendors, and ideally as soon as they initiate a business change project. That allows your organisation to get a headstart on the competition, and influence business requirements before they are finalised. With so much of the buyer's journey carried out anonymously online, Events are now one of the few opportunities to achieve that goal.
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