A recent report “Event Marketing 2019” which was a survey of 1,000 senior marketers, who managed $738 million in event market spend for that year. These marketers are focused on software, services and media.
These marketers said that the objectives of these events where
30% of these events were there to support lead generation and sales acceleration.
41% see live events as the most critical marketing channel in achieving business outcomes
63% plan to increase their budget by 22% in 2020
Unfortunately, events and conferences are being postponed, cancelled and moved to “digital”. The months of March, April, May and June and September, October and November are pivotal times for sales and marketing to create pipeline. This March, April, May and June 2020, will mean there is little or no demand generation / lead generation for companies to start their year.
For example a customer was going to DM EXCO 19 had the following metrics for the event:-
30,000 Euro Spend
4 Sales People
50 Meetings Pre-Booked
100 Leads Captured
500K Euro of Pipeline across 4 sales people.
This leaves a gap in pipeline generation, so how do we fill that gap?
Cold calling? Nobody is going to take cold calls when they are working from homes and the offices are empty. Or if the staff have been furloughed.
Email? I’ve just received an email from a company I have no idea who they are telling me they are thinking of me.
Advertising? I’m not sure images of an amazing world is something I will connect with right now. Report after report shows that advertising is dropping and traffic on social media has doubled.
And let’s be honest we didn’t care before Covid19, we certainly don’t care now.
From a sales perspective, you are up against the fact that you are probably selling something that people already have and unless you have a clear compelling event and a clear business case, people will defer sales right now. (Dropping your price by 50% for example will mean you are selling on price and not value, this is not a good place to be.)
So what are you going to do? Well you could move the event on-line and there is a massive rush to do this, but how long before this is just business as usual. I’m using “business as usual” as a derogatory term. You online event will use the same technology as everybody else and will look the same as everybody else. Of course you could leap frog everybody and move straight to social media.
What do I mean?
Actionable Solution;
There is a way to maintain a front of mind presence throughout this with a potential low cost - no cost lifeline that all businesses can leverage during and after this time of crisis.
If you employ just 4 or 5 people
(to employing thousands) yo can have them trained to create, produce and post authentic stories on relevant social platforms you will start to create a 'front of mind' presence greater than your nearest competitor who isn't doing what you do on social media.
The great thing is this is something they can do if working from home, or back in the office when this nonsense is over.
Social Media if utilised with the right skill based training, ongoing mentoring and support can be one of the biggest 'Superpowers' you can ever have as an SME, but no matter what you are told by those 'LinkedIn' gurus a 2 hour seminar will never make you an Social Olympic Athlete.
It's not just about "posting" on Linkedin but you need to understand the rules; How many hashtags can you use? Why posting that video will be throttled by the algorithm, why you shouldn't use emojis, etc.
Drop me a short note, let's set up a call to take you through how you can get this going TODAY!
Digital transformation journeys will accelerate during the global COVID-19 pandemic, moving from delivering personalised experiences to providing essential services says Shantanu Narayen the Chairman and CEO of Adobe.
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