• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

In a world dominated by digital media, how are events still so valuable?

The answer is simple.  Humans are communal social animals, and almost nothing is more important for our well-being than in-person contact and conversation.  That’s why experiential and event marketing continue to be so important, especially in the B2B landscape.

Since the pandemic, most traditional B2B channels have become less effective.  Email is utterly overwhelmed by spam and noise, so most cold emails go unread.  Direct mail, while still interesting, is also less effective because of the simple fact that you never know where anyone's really working -- in-office or remote --  so you never know where to send things. 

The two best channels you have for B2B are video and events, with the overlap of the two being virtual events or webinars.  These still work, and the ROI from events can be much easier to measure than you may have previously thought. As a result, more B2B marketers are engaging in person than ever before.

There are three methods of in-person marketing: you can host an event, sponsor an event, or “hijack” an event. 

Hosting an event is the largest outlay from a budget perspective, but you can control the environment, the conversation, and the composition of the audience.  It's a ton of work, but the response can be incredibly beneficial for your brand. 

Sponsorships are typically the easiest because most of the time, they’re plug-and-play.  Someone else takes on the lion’s share of the work and planning,  coordinating the who and where, while you stay focused on the what of the message.  Sponsorships are great because you can do many of them at the same time, simply relying on the people you send to activate the event. 

If you don’t have the budget to do either of those, then you’re left with a “hijack” strategy, which can be hit or miss, but mostly a hit when done well.  A hijack strategy means you know where the event is and who will be there, and you craft some form of engagement that takes advantage of the collection of people in one place, but without a formal relationship. 

Hijacks can be as simple as scheduling a dinner, or as complicated as street teams and posters being plastered all around an event to own the eyeballs without being on-site.  The thing about a hijack strategy is, you do risk annoying the event owners, and you can be blocked from being involved in the future.

Events will always be important.  Just look at what happened after the pandemic: People flocked back to in-person events as soon as they could, trying to ensure they could see real people in real life, or IRL as the kids call it. 

Events scale, even in a cluttered environment.  The trick to a successful event is to have engaging content and interesting people, because it’s rarely just about what is being shown on a stage.  That face-to-face engagement is what delivers results, and measurement is a key element of any good event. 

Of course, you own the list of who attended, and you can track the engagement with those people following an event, which provides you with real value over time.  

Keep in mind that post-event follow-up is a marathon, not a sprint.  It requires patience.  You’re hoping for long-term, fruitful relationships, which can be accomplished by balancing value beneficial to both sides and not simply asking for the business immediately following an event.

So, the next time you look at your B2B media mix, take a minute and think about how you can shake hands and have in-person conversations with your audience.  That’s always going to be your best way of engaging.