How B2B Companies Can Drive and Measure Growth Through an Event Strategy with Jonathan Kazarian

Events are one of the most underutilized tools B2B marketers have at their disposal.

One event can propel your marketing efforts further than all the traditional methods combined.

Events are so powerful because people willingly engage with your content, spend their valuable time, and give you their information.

However, as an event organizer, you shouldn’t be focusing on connecting a bunch of unrelated tools and trying to build your own tech stack.

The event platform should be there to facilitate everything you need and have a single contact record that flows through all of the events throughout your annual event program.

Is there any platform that can facilitate this? To help us with that topic today, we have John Kazarian, the Founder and CEO of Accelevents. In this episode, John shares how to maximize your virtual and in-person events, what mistakes B2B marketers should avoid, and how to best measure your success.

Why are events so essential for your B2B marketing strategy?

In digital marketing today, third-party data is less valuable than it historically has been, which makes first-party data far more relevant.

Though mechanisms for capturing first-party data like white papers and ebooks are helpful, they limit marketers in the amount of information they can get.

But in the world of events, be it an in-person experience, hybrid, or virtual, you get thousands of touch points that help you learn about a person. And people are willing to give you their registration data, tracking information, time, and money, all in exchange for access to your content and community.

This is how you can empower the rest of your marketing strategy and organization.

“Events already make up twenty-five percent of the B2B marketing budget. They need to be contributing at least that in leads.“

John Kazarian, Founder and CEO of Accelevents

Two event mistakes B2B marketers must avoid

When running events, many marketers don’t have a call to action that will encourage people to speak or act on their behalf. You should come up with simple things that will get them to register for your next event.

Another common mistake is a lot of marketers don’t go into their events with an event strategy. Once you figure out the intended outcome, then it’s a lot easier to figure out the KPIs that you want to measure against.

Take the time and think about the goal of your event and the criteria or the information you can use to trigger a campaign or some form of re-engagement for your audience.

There are little things like that that you can set in place in advance and reuse from one event to the next that will drastically increase your engagement rates.

In-person versus virtual events

One of the opportunities on the virtual side of things is that with in-person events, you have to hit a certain critical mass for it to be worthwhile. With virtual, you don’t have as many fixed costs per event.

If you think about your annual event program and keep people engaged throughout the year, not only are you increasing those touch points, but when you have that flagship in-person event, you’ve already nurtured your audience and built a community around that.

Many people love and want to get back to in-person events. However, attendance rates are down, and companies are so globalized today that your buyers are spread out across the world, making it cost-prohibitive for them to attend in-person events.

Your event attendees crave engagement

Regarding virtual event engagement, various software solutions like challenges, rewards, and even games allow people to interact effectively. Ultimately, the most impactful and successful way is to move that virtual experience offline.

“Part of the event design needs to identify what success is, not just for you as the organization hosting that event but for each of your stakeholders.“

John Kazarian, Founder and CEO of Accelevents

Now that you know the importance of events for your marketing game… learn how to apply other tactics and tools for a disruptive B2B marketing strategy. Check out the full list of episodes here: The B2B Revenue Executive Experience, and instructions on how to rate and review the show are here.

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