Why business events? Insights of +20 experts

Business events… An interesting marketing branch. It’s the most effective marketing tactics since every sense of your guests gets activated: taste, smell, everything is possible. According to extensive research, 74% of the people that attended an event, develop a more positive attitude towards the company organising it. An even more impressive number is that more than 90 % of the people that had a great experience at your event have larger buying intent.

But what exactly is it that makes business events so successful and appealing for marketers? We ran +20 in-depth interviews with “people who know”. We interviewed marketers & professional event organisers working in various industries that had one thing in common: they all use events as a part of their marketing mix.

We wanted to find out: what do they think the added value of business events are? Why do they love their job? And what are their frustrations?

Knowledge is power

Why do business events?

There are many types of business events, ranging from diner parties to large scale fairs. Every kind of event will contribute to different KPI’s a company could aspire to achieve. From this point of view, it’s a business event manager’s job to strategically plan and execute various events to reach the set goals.

The most common goals a business event contributes to are:

  • Building loyalty for both customers and employees – create a sense of belonging
  • Generating leads for sales
  • Creating thought leadership
  • Transferring knowledge and training skills
  • Developing new and/or stronger relations with the participants
  • Working on their Brand image
  • Increasing brand awareness – remain top of mind

It always gives me a thrill when we have managed to nail that perfect location or the perfect guest speaker to build an attractive offering. If you manage to let your guests have a fantastic experience, you know you have created a memory for life. This way event marketing makes a lasting impact

Natascha Van den Breen, Brand & Activation Team – Growth Marketing, Beobank

Unlike other marketing tactics, business events have unique characteristics to generate results through the power of shared experience between brands, companies and the participants. 

To give you some more context, the type of events that our interviewees were organising were:

  • product launches, 
  • webinars, 
  • celebrations, 
  • trainings, 
  • participations in fairs, 
  • and hospitality events.

Also worth mentioning, the formats were online, in-person and hybrid.

I love the challenge to re-invent our event marketing to stay fresh, come with new ideas and concepts

Muriel Bailleux, Renault

Get the most out of your business events

Running business events: a dream job?

Now, what exactly is it that is so exciting about running events? Why do these experts love their job? Well, it varies from one expert to another. But, everyone agreed that achieving your business objectives resulted in the biggest job satisfaction.

That being said, a big part of our interviewees really appreciate the creative aspect of organising events. Aspects they enjoy most are finding the perfect location, attracting surprising clients & colleagues, or developing a unique theme for each event. 

These aspects can be challenging but rewarding if you get them right. Especially when you get loads of positive feedback afterwards from colleagues or customers. And last but not least, their job offers the opportunity to meet many new interesting people: a big plus.

At the same time, there are some dislikes in their jobs. Having to cancel an amazing event at the last minute because of health & safety measures is, of course, a much-heard frustration. Next, people do not like to spend time on repetitive administrative tasks, keeping databases up-to-date or chasing colleagues to approve the latest invitee list. Luckily for most of these issues, there are solutions out there (check out InviteDesk 😉 ).

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