Felicia AsieduEuropean Marketing Director Cvent shares key takeaways from the session '“How marketing and event teams can work together to achieve success and drive impact” was presented at this year’s international conference.
Marketing and event teams share a vested interest in ensuring event success and impact for the organization. Traditionally, these teams operated in silos, each focused on their own mission with minimal interaction beyond surface-level coordination. This traditional approach resulted in the events team being primarily responsible for building the in-person program, while the marketing team focused solely on the digital side. However, the rapid digitalization of the industry has consolidated the functions of these teams and evolved events into an essential channel for successful marketing campaigns.
According to the latest 4th report, Event planner annual survey report According to In-House Corporate Events (ICE), a global community for in-house corporate event planners, 71% of corporate event teams are involved in marketing (up from 55% in 2022). Because events play a central role in most marketing strategies, the need for collaboration between marketing and event teams has never been more critical to business success. Whether it's generating leads, increasing your sales pipeline, or building brand awareness.
Here are three tips I discussed during my session at International Confex. It can be used to enable alignment, foster a culture of collaboration, drive impactful campaigns, and drive meaningful engagement.
- Rethink traditional team roles
Break down silos by rethinking traditional roles. First, discuss each team's responsibilities and their contribution to the success of your event and marketing. Event teams often convene at the time of execution, when marketing stakeholders have already decided the why and what. Please reverse this thinking. Think about cross-functional collaboration and work together from the beginning to ask the question, “Why are we doing this event?” Where does my role fit in the participant journey? How will I measure success?
- Shared purpose strategy
All strategy starts with a goal or objective, but without a common purpose there is little reason to collaborate. Therefore, by discussing each team's responsibilities and contributions, and then adopting a shared purpose approach when developing strategy, foster an environment that fosters collaboration and communication. Both teams must work together to identify goals, determine where they intersect, align on goals, and establish shared metrics to demonstrate ROI.
- Leverage event technology
Integrated event technology can help enrich the overall event experience, streamline processes, and facilitate data sharing to optimize future strategies. By working with technology experts, you can gain access to digital engagement tools to track participant behavior and provide insightful analysis. Integrating insights from these events with your marketing data can help you measure ROI, prioritize leads, and create targeted messages.
By breaking down silos, prioritizing collaboration, and adopting the right technology, you can create a successful event marketing strategy with better engagement, deeper insights, and greater impact. In the words of Henry Ford, “To unite is a beginning, to unite is progress, and to unite is success.”
