Anchored Events Drive Attendance, Revenues
By John Failla, CEO, Tesoro Events
Reprinted with permission from min's b2b - July 14, 2008
As a strategic weapon in your arsenal, events should be produced when they are the best product to meet an audience need and they can be produced in a profitable manner. This focus on audience need and profitability is critical as the competitive landscape expands to include events produced by other publishers, conference and trade show organizers, newsletters and Web pure plays, associations, consulting firms and, in some cases, your largest customers.
Publishers can get mediocre results in the challenging events business if they treat their events as a peripheral business, without the requisite experienced leadership and savvy execution in the core functional areas of product development, sales and marketing. Events should not be produced simply to sell ad pages, satisfy your big customers or hand out industry awards—that indicates a lack of a focus and discipline required for success. Audience need and profitability should be your motivators.
Based on my experience in turning around unprofitable events, you can quickly identify profit improvement opportunities by running your existing events against this checklist to ensure they have the proper focus on audience need and profitability:
1) Ensure your events are anchored to meaningful audience needs. As each section of your magazine and Web site address different reader needs, any event you produce must address a well-defined audience need. Whether that need is to be brought up to speed on a timely topic, network with peers to understand best practices or source new products and suppliers at the right time of the year, every event in your portfolio must be kept freshly tuned to a specific audience need.
2) Insist that each of your events establishes a unique position. Publishers who produce events targeting their broad reader base are missing the opportunity to leverage one of the distinctive characteristics of face-to-face media. While it is difficult to target a magazine to the unique needs of any individual audience segment, events allow you to develop focused experiences that deliver high value to audience segments in a targeted manner effectively. Think in terms of your events as serving special interest groups of readers. They can be viewed as newsletters or vertical 3D Google searches.
3) Deliver a compelling value proposition for both attendees and sponsors. The commitment to meeting reader needs, which is key to success in magazine publishing, is needed with events. Content and the audience need to drive the agenda for events. Once the value proposition for attendees is in place, you can develop a meaningful value proposition for exhibitors and sponsors. The road is littered with events that have failed because the value proposition they sold to sponsors was not embraced by attendees.
4) Deliver benefit-driven messaging in an integrated manner. Good event marketing messaging is like good direct marketing copy. There is a specific promise of tangible benefit and a call to action that is repeated again and again. Take a look at the marketing materials for your events. Do they speak to specific attendee benefits associated with the event or do they simply describe where, when and who will be at your event?
5) Plan to maximize revenues from the start. Are the financial models for your events being run after the events are created? Or is every variable in your event being evaluated based on its impact on profitability? Are revenue models for your events developed at the outset or do you find yourself trying to figure out how you are going to monetize an event after it has already been developed?
John Failla can be reached at (914) 819-0693 or at john@tesoroevents.com.
