Making Money On-line: Why You Are Losing Leads by Not Integrating Events with Marketing Automation

Friday 3 June 2016

Why You Are Losing Leads by Not Integrating Events with Marketing Automation

Did you know that businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads? According to the State of B2B Event Marketing study, events are the most effective tactic for B2B marketers to increase their sales pipeline and generate revenue.

So, how can events and marketing automation work together to bring in more leads, increase their sales pipeline, and ultimately generate more revenue? And, why are marketing and event automation essential lead generation tools for marketers, and why are these systems integral parts of any effective marketing strategy?

Here’s an overview of how event management has evolved, how marketing and event automation work together, and why the two are integral components to any modern marketing technology stack.

Why Is Marketing Automation an Essential Part of Any Effective Marketing Strategy?

60% of companies with revenue of 50 million or more currently use marketing automation. Being an effective marketer today means having access to rich and insightful data and having the ability to use this data to personalize customer engagement, automate lead nurturing, and drive up-sell and cross-sell activities. Marketing automation enables marketers to qualify and nurture large quantities of leads, capture customer intelligence across channels, and analyze the results of cross-channel marketing. With marketing automation, marketers eliminate operational inefficiencies and become more effective contributors to revenue in their organizations.

What is Event Automation?

63% of marketers use in-person events as lead generation tools. Event Automation takes event management a step farther, by fully integrating marketing and event management systems together. Event Automation allows companies to automate, personalize, and measure event management and marketing activities, so they can increase marketing leads, sales pipeline, and revenue generated from events. Despite the growth in digital marketing, in-person events continue to play a critical role in enterprise marketing and make-up 28% of the total B2B marketing spend.

Why Are In-Person Events Often Missing from the Modern Marketing Tech Stack?

Marketers are no longer merely responsible for building creative brand campaigns. Success for the modern marketer hinges on credible revenue generation, and this requires a much more systematic approach to market engagement and a deeper understanding of technology. When the integration of marketing and event automation is not a part of the marketer’s modern marketing tech stack, it is because in-person events have been treated as “offline marketing" and not integrated with online efforts and event objectives have not been fully developed in corporate marketing goals.

But in order for today’s marketers and event professionals to deliver more measurable goals from events, today’s marketing tech stack must be designed accordingly. Integrating marketing automation and event automation helps event planners and marketers deliver personalized experiences for attendees, sync attendee data into marketing automation platform to send them follow-up material, and deliver credible ROI from events.

Once you have a solid marketing automation platform, you need to have an enterprise-level event automation system that is capable of easily integrating with your marketing platform. Events no longer need to be left on the sidelines of the marketing automation and marketing analytics world.

When we take our marketing activities offline through events, we shouldn’t lose sight of our customers. Instead, the goal for marketers should be to create a fully immersive and engaging customer experience with their brand, messaging, and activities at an in-person event, and to capture all of this rich data within the systems we use to analyze and leverage it.

To learn how to increase your sales pipeline and generate more revenue from events, download The Deep Dive Guide to Integrating Marketing Automation and Events.