Ways to Optimize Third Party Event Spend and Engagement

Four years ago, event budgets dropped significantly when the world shut down due to the pandemic. But now that events - and money spent on events are back in full swing - let's make sure we are optimizing that spend, along with the attendees' experiences.

Having spent a large portion of my career in field and event marketing, my customers know I always get excited to talk about using 6sense to help with their events so I thought I would share some thoughts here as well. While there is also a lot that can be done with 6sense on the post-event side, I really want to focus here on what Marketing teams can do ahead of an event.

So often, teams want to try and set up meetings with prospects during events, and don't get me wrong, those meetings and face to face interactions are incredibly valuable. However, just like with all of our other channels with 6sense, let's make sure we are reaching out to the right people, at the right time, and with the right message. Just as someone in the top of the funnel is less likely to fill out a form on your site, they are also less likely to want to have a 1:1 meeting at an event.

Typically, as part of your sponsorship of an event, you get a pre-event attendee list (typically, just company name and sometimes title but rarely, if ever, names of attendees). Take that list of companies, create a segment in 6sense by uploading that list and then dig into the 6sense analytics. If you have the predictive model, look at the predictive analytics and tailor your outreach and calls to action depending on the account's buying stage.

If accounts are in Awareness or Consideration, think about promoting a session where your company is speaking, perhaps promoting it via LinkedIn or a display campaign. If they are in Decision or Purchase, think about some more personalized outreach to try and schedule a meeting or attend a VIP event you are hosting. This outreach may be done via an email campaign through your MAP, working with reps to have them do personalized outreach, or, if you have 6sense's Conversational Email (CE) product, this is a great place to run a CE campaign and leverage the AI Assistant to get those meetings booked.

Everything mentioned above is focused on driving engagement at the event but even ahead of that, when you are in the early stages of planning details such as speaking session content or messaging for your booth - leverage 6sense for this planning! If you have a list of accounts that attended the event last year - create a segment of those accounts and see what keywords they are researching. This will give you great direction for your messaging at the event.

I hope this post has given field and event marketers some ideas on how to leverage 6sense with events and I'd love to hear in the comments how you are using 6sense to optimize your event spend and engagement.