Planning—the key to virtual event success

With each purple cork event, we learn a bit more about what it takes to put together a wildly successful event, from the theme to the logistics to the production to the follow up. In this blog post, we share how to define your strategy to ensure virtual event success.

Like any good marketing program, the first step in making your event shine is defining  your strategy, starting with the business goals you want to achieve. Determining your goals will help clarify your experience theme, promotional strategy and event format.

First, listen to Taylor from Snyk highlight how they execute their events:

DEFINE YOUR GOALS

Here are three of the most popular ways that our clients use purple cork events to meet and exceed their business goals: 

1. Demand generation/pipeline

When your goals focus on top of the funnel KPIs, you’re typically inviting prospects that aren’t yet in your sales funnel. Rather, you’re looking to drive them into the funnel and encouraging them to get to know you better. 

2. Deal/pipeline acceleration 

When your goals focus on deal or pipeline acceleration, you’re using your events to reactivate  prospect accounts already in the funnel, in the hopes of moving them to the next stage of your sales cycle.  

3. Community

Many companies today are using community as a growth level. While community events are typically thought to be more foundational, long-term strategies, they often lead to hand-raisers that want to learn more about the host’s business.

IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE

Once you have your goals defined, the next step is to identify your audience.

Are you looking to drive more business with current customers or build out deals with targeted prospect accounts? What vertical(s) are you focusing on? What business lines? As you answer these questions, you can begin to build out a targeted account list.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are some common account selections that we see at purple cork events:

Target accounts

This is an obvious starting place given the popularity of ABM/ABX programs. By focusing on accounts that are high priority for sales and marketing, you can drive sales buy-in and, therefore, bolster registrations.

Open opportunities 

Focus on engaging multiple contacts at accounts that are already in the sales cycle to accelerate and close deals. Bonus points for honing in on specific stages!

Accounts showing intent 

Virtual events can be a great place to turn website visitors and/or potential buyers seeking more information on your company into MQLs. You can leverage data from 6sense, Demandbase, G2 or other intent platforms to isolate your best personas.

Meetings booked that didn’t result in an opportunity

Virtual events are a great way to reignite conversations with contacts who are already familiar with your company. Perhaps the timing wasn’t right when you met the first time but enough time has passed now where it makes sense to re-engage.

Closed-lost deals

Deals that you lost to a competitor or status quo are prime for re-engagement with a virtual event. If they went with a competitor and contracts tend to last two years, invite them at the 1.5 year mark as they’re potentially thinking about a switch.

Looking for more best practices to ensure your next virtual event is successful? Reach out to brainstorm how purple cork can help take the work out of virtual events!