VIEWPOINT
Get your house in order The events industry has changed in the last two years, but are you still using the same event marketing techniques? Ed Norris, co-founder and commercial director of Mustard Media, shares his thoughts on the rising trend of outsourced event marketing and why he thinks it’s time to honestly assess your in-house marketing capabilities and rethink your marketing moves
Big launches are now even more important to get your events noticed
I
won’t teach you how to suck eggs, but as we all know, the events industry has changed dramatically in the last two years. One of the changes which I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere, is how event company structures have altered and what possible opportunities this brings. For anyone overseeing any kind of budget, you will have had to reduce costs to the business wherever possible. In many cases like ourselves, this included letting go of amazing staff to ensure the company survives whilst there are no (or few) events able to go ahead. However horrible, it’s an essential part of survival for both the business and protecting the remaining employees at the company.
ADAPT YOUR CAMPAIGN
Many event marketing departments have scaled back to a skeleton team, and use freelancers or agencies, to fill the gaps when they need to. We go into 2022 with optimism for events this year, however we’re not out of the woods quite yet. Whilst we recover, the shift to freelancers and agencies means you only pay for the work you have on, and tap into expertise you may not be able to hire in. Alongside your structural changes, comes a complete rethink in how you approach your marketing campaign. The yearly rhythms and usual marketing playbooks you used to use, need to be
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thrown out. No longer can you rely on the timelines and tactics you once did. There’s a huge number of new considerations never faced before. At any point, a news notification can drop, and ticket sales suddenly stop so reactivity and timing now are fundamental to success. If you get the timing wrong, you can say goodbye to a sell-out event. Gen Z and millennial eyeballs are ever more distracted amongst a world of screens and channels competing for attention. Big launches are now even more important to get your events noticed (and they were already critical to success) alongside scarcity tactics to ensure customers purchase instantly, safeguarding against imminent BBC News notifications driving negative waves of ticket purchasing. The yoyo-ing of customer confidence is an ongoing challenge too, one which needs to be tackled with live data to inform your next moves within your marketing campaigns. By having access to ticket sales, Google analytics, paid media analytics and marketing campaign data, you can adapt campaigns in the moment, ensure your budget is spent wisely and pick the correct time to drop your big moving pieces of content.
MONITOR DATA POINTS
Slimmed down marketing teams provide much needed relief for companies, but they come with a warning. Often, the
newly formed smaller marketing teams are expected to perform not just on par with the full previous team but better. They are supposed to navigate an extremely difficult period with completely new plans and challenges. Work then becomes reactive rather than proactive, and there is no strategy which is being followed, only overflowing jumbled to-do lists and unmanageable expectations. It’s likely you have tasks being done by either too senior or too junior employees or perhaps without the expertise required. In these instances, you need to provide back up to your team, when they need it most. You need specialists in any areas in which you are lacking the expertise and you need to ensure you are not getting too bogged down with too much on, it’ll only lead to burn out and employees leaving. You need to monitor data points daily, ensure the top-level strategy is strong enough to combat so many changes and have enough resources to implement the key big moments within a strategy sufficiently, along with the daily routines of running marketing campaigns. What do you need to outsource? You may already be thinking about specific expertise, such as paid media for example, however it’s not always so clear. For example, do you have a strategy which you are confident will take you to where you need to be? Do you have data and experience to back this up?
