The Marketing Practice

The great events robbery

I want to say two things about events. Knowing them could increase your ROMI by several hundred per cent and help you to see who is stealing your delegates…

First: the average buyer is getting five invitations every week but they attend just five in a year. Statistically, you have a 1 in 52 chance that someone will attend your event. Which emphasises the importance of making your event stand out. Put yourself in their shoes before you choose an agenda, venue, speakers, invitation process, delegate recruitment strategy – even before you decide to have an event at all.

Second: Although they only go to five events each year, there are 52 other invitations that they find relevant. Fifty-two topics that do attract their attention – but for whatever reason, they cannot attend. There is a massive opportunity here that too many organisations don’t make the most of.

What’s the real size of the opportunity? To take just one example, we’ll often find that we gather as many sales-ready leads among people that can’t attend an event as from registered delegates – but only with a well thought-through offer as part of a complete strategy wider than any specific event. And there are plenty of other examples of strategies surrounding events that can transform the success of a programme.

We’ve recently been looking at examples of events from the last two years – to hear some of our conclusions, please get in touch…