404. Events 🦞
An events matrix to help you organize your 2023 events strategy
Hi there 👋
Twice a year, I teach a university course about growth marketing, and I thought I’d share with you a few of the brand examples we’ve covered in class so far because the students think they’re pretty cool: Magic Spoon cereal, Liquid Death canned water, and Bombas socks. This week in class is social media week, so I will be cramming to learn TikTok and Snapchat so the class will think I’m cool!
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
How to design your 2023 events strategy
Events made a triumphant, mostly-Covid-free return in 2022, which means a lot of marketing teams will be spending a lot of marketing dollars on events in 2023.
Do you know your plan?
There have been many times when I did not have a great events strategy. In these cases, without a plan, the plan tends to be: sponsor the big stuff, show up in an authentic way, and see what you can measure afterward.
But with efficiency being such a key concept this year, it’s no longer possible — or advisable — for companies to spend on events without having a strategy.
The following is what I plan to do with events in 2023. How are you approaching events? I’d love to hear your ideas and where I can improve.
The events matrix
Not every event is created equal.
I tend to see events breaking down into a handful of variables:
Audience: Who the event is for
Outcome: What you’re trying to get out of the event
Strategy: How you show up
Let’s first start with the audience. This tends to be the easiest event category because you likely already have a sense for the main tentpole events on the minds of your core customer. At Oyster, these are going to be the main HR events on the calendar, things like HR Transform and Unleash World. (Pro tip: If you don’t know the main events on your customers’ calendars, just ask your team. For instance, I can go into our People Team slack and get the answer in a minute.)
Typically, I’ll find the Audience breakdown to look like this:
Events for our primary persona(s)
Events for our secondary persona(s)
But I don’t just stop there. In my experience, there tend to be soooo many more events that come on our radar each year and require us to have some sort of opinion on whether we should be there or not. So in addition to the personas, I also have labels for:
Category-adjacent events. For instance, if your category is Social Media Marketing, a category-adjacent event might be something like VidCon for video creators
Mission-adjacent events. We have some of these at Oyster with events that are about remote work, like Running Remote
Cool events. We’ve talked about cool marketing before, right? These are events like Web Summit or SaaStr or SXSW that are on your radar because you want to be perceived as a hip, cool, with-it brand
Breaking down events into these audience buckets is the first step toward building out your events strategy.
Next, you’ll want to determine the outcome you hope to achieve at the event. This tends to be quite a bit simpler. Are you there for
Brand awareness
Lead gen / pipeline gen
That’s it! Those are the only reasons you would ever want to be at an event (I think, let me know if I’m wrong).
Of course, it’s possible for you to aim for both outcomes at an event, but you will / should always have a primary focus for what you’re trying to achieve at the event.
Then third is the Strategy portion of your event plan, which is all about how you show up. Again, I tend to see a sort of menu of options here as well:
Major sponsor: >$50k sponsorship, title sponsor or category sponsor of event, booth presence, on-site activations, multiple attendees, possible speaking opp, possible satellite events
Minor sponsor: <$50k sponsorship, booth presence, booth attendees
Attendance: One or more staff will be in attendance to network and represent the company
Speaking: Staff with a speaking slot on stage, panel, fireside, etc. Comms support needed
On-site experiential: Marketing activities on-site or in surrounding area during event window. Not officially affiliated, e.g. OOH advertising
Satellite events: Owned or co-sponsored dinners, after-parties, drinks, etc. Not affiliate with the event itself
Once you’ve outlined all the different elements of your event strategy, then you can attach this to your list of events to see which ones you want to include in your annual plan. It’s likely that a picture will start to take shape.
But if it doesn’t, you can also apply a simple scorecard methodology. Assign points based on Audience fit, Audience scale (how many people will be there), your confidence in a good outcome either based on past performance when you’ve shown up there or from what you gather from your peers. You can also score based on whether it will lift your brand or your revenue (in case that’s an important consideration).
I’ve placed all this in a spreadsheet template that you’re welcome to borrow and use for your own event plan this year.
Feel free to grab your copy here.
And let me know what you think! Events are hard and confusing and weird, and I’d love to learn how you do them.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster. I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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