Project: Growing SaaS company wants to move from sponsoring events to hosting their own user conference, believing it will be a more effective method to increase brand awareness. They lack an internal member who has the knowledge to develop an effective event strategy to meet their goals, and bring on a fractional event lead to create conference growth strategies for them.
Approach:
This project begins with the event lead learning the overall goals of the marketing strategy and understanding why a pivot to own-label events is desired. It continues with conducting research on conferences and events in this space, developing a master list of competitive events with detailed information about each one. Information from the client is also included, such as whether they had attended and/or sponsored, details of their marketing booth, what the ROI of their sponsorship had been, qualitative experiences of the event, and more. This provides a competitive landscape that allows the event lead to identify gaps, understand which programs are more successful for the client, and determine how to plan and structure their own events.
Some key aspects to analyze include location of events and conferences, target audience, content analysis, and volume of sponsorship. The client has provided their key targets for audience and sponsorship, and mapping this to similar events helps determine favorable locations and time of year to hold a new event.
After the analysis, the event lead shares their findings for an effective event strategy with the client, including recommended locations, time of year, and content angles to pursue. Each of these aspects of event and conference development are presented with the pros and cons for each, with three suggested events, with full details, presented at the close. Additionally, an analysis of the workload they will require, rough timelines and preliminary budgets are also provided.
The client has final decision-making on which event(s) to run, and they select two of the three to include in their event strategy. These are now fleshed out in full detail with complete timelines, workloads and staffing needs to achieve these. Synergies with overall marketing strategy are highlighted. A budget is developed for each event, as well as mapping out sponsorship inventory for each program. A detailed list of required materials to be developed is created, including items like sponsorship prospectus, logo and branding for the events, and more, and included in the timelines. Where appropriate, tasks are assigned to departments or specific people to give clarity to who is responsible for each aspect of the event.
This client extended the event lead’s contract and kept them on as a project manager throughout the development of the events. With weekly meetings, they kept the project on track and coordinated details between disparate teams. They helped build a process that could be replicated by the internal team going forward for future events.