Owned Event ABM Playbook
Mason Cosby builds an ABM playbook for owned events, using Goldenhour as an example.
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I wonder if there's a way to ABMFI a micro event for SaaS companies.
Hello and welcome to this episode of ABMFI. Today, we're actually going to be
talking through how
you can ABMFI your events. Events are no small way, a large time investment, a
financial investment,
and one of the best ways to really get the most bang for your book out of
specific events is to
ensure that you've got the best audience in the room. And to do that, you can
actually just
think about who am I inviting? That would be our best fit potential customers.
AKA inviting right off your targeted countless and turning your event into a
high touch, high
engagement ABM program. I've done this actually a few times myself and helped
quite a few of the
scrappy ABM clients do it. So today we're actually going to walk you through
our exact framework on
how you would do that using actually golden hour as the example of how we could
have
ABMFI'd golden hour. So let's go ahead and dig into it. So for those of you
that don't know,
golden hour was this one of a kind first time event that was done by Audience
Plus to gather
people that were really passionate about owned media. And what I loved about
golden hour, having
the opportunity to attend is they just had so many right fit people in the room
. And as I think through
the opportunity to ABMFI an event like this, because what Audience Plus did
well is they got
all of their customers there. They got influencers in the room that were
thinking about how do I
build an owned media program? And admittedly, I don't know about how many
people were in the room
that were potentially target accounts. So as I think through the idea of how do
you take an event
that had great content and great people and just great information that was
easy to rally around?
How do you take that and monetize it in such a way that you can drive even more
revenue for your
company? Well, I think it starts with specifically identifying what are the
stages that our accounts
would actually go through as they're thinking about attending our event. And it
really starts with
the event progression also. We think about all of our programs are through what
are the stages
people are going to go through. So in the context of any event, it's going to
be an invitation. And
then they're showing some form of initial engagement. They may not actually
register me. They may just
start to look around and see what's going. So how do we keep people engaged? So
they actually
inevitably do hit that registration list. And then once they've actually
registered,
what is the pre-event nurture to keep the momentum high? I mean, in the context
of golden hour,
people were registering months before the event. So how do you take the
excitement of,
"I'm going to this event and keep it rolling so you can get even more people to
join?" That's
why I really love events for an ABM program. Because if you can get one of your
target accounts to attend,
it is highly likely that, again, they know people that your other target
accounts. And if you can
then use that information in your marketing, you have a higher likelihood that
even more of your
target accounts would attend. So again, the more we can build that momentum, it
actually helps to
build this invitation and initial engagement stages to drive you more
registrations. And then
you have the event. And the event is a lot. There's a ton that goes into it.
And then from there,
you've got all of your post-event communication that should have different
tracks based on the
levels of engagement. And then inevitably, all of these different things should
lead to some form
of a booked call. And depending on the organization in and of itself, it could
be a founder average,
it could be a direct sales outreach, just to say thanks for booking the meeting
. So again,
the thought process here is really beginning at who do we even bring to the
event? And yes,
you shouldn't absolutely invite your customers. Getting your customers all in
the room
is a great way to do a lot of things. But specifically, help those that are not
your
customers understand the value of your product. But the other thing that I
found often is when
your customers start talking to one another, they build the value of your
organization and your product
to one another. And I've actually seen it often happen where when customers
start talking,
they learn new things from one another about how to use your products or your
services.
And I actually end up tending to get upsells whenever customers talk. So again,
bringing customers
together is one of the absolute pentacles of how to use these events for an
account-based approach.
Nexus and then the influencer play. And the influencer play people are thinking
that's not
really account-based. And what's really interesting is if you were to go into
LinkedIn, for example,
and I'll show you how to do this real quick right now, if you go to LinkedIn
and you actually type
in the search bar. So you just click search, you press enter. And then let's
say for example,
I really want to get some people to this event. I'm not exactly sure who I
should invite. But
let me think about a couple of potential influencers. Who is a follower of in
my world that would be
probably a Sangrum Vergé, who is really the godfather of account-based
marketing for me.
Well, I can do that and then potentially even look at, okay, why don't I throw
in a couple of
companies that I'm trying to break into. So let's just say, for example, I'm
trying to break into
Microsoft. So I can then look at how many people are followers of Sangrum and
work at Microsoft?
Perfect. 41 people. So if I were to invite Sangrum, there's a high likelihood
that if you were to
post about the event that people in Microsoft would see it. Now you can
actually do this as a quick
gut check. But this is one of my favorite ways to actually validate that the
influencers that
we're inviting don't just bring a good perspective and good content, but
actually bring the right
audience with them through their promotion of the event. So that's just a great
way to
to gut check specifically the influencer plan. And then last but certainly not
least is obviously
going to be your target accounts. So the goal of your target accounts is again,
how do we get the
right fit people in the room? This can often also look like if you're trying to
get executives
inviting them to be speakers at your event, so that you can ensure they're
actually there and have
more incentives to come. So as I think through the different invitation
approaches, again, at the
highest level, you want to bring the customers that getting ton of value from
your product so that
they can be essentially selling on your behalf and talking to another and
actually increasing the
value. As you look at the influencer playing, it's not just inviting people
that could bring great
content, but ensuring that they actually bring the right audience that you're
trying to break
into specifically as you look at your influencer plays, looking at their
LinkedIn networks to
understand the existing companies that they have following them is right where
to validate,
are we inviting the right influencers to the event? And then lastly, as far as
your target
account list, right fit potential customers are the people you're trying to get
to the event.
And when you think through this, most of these people will ideally say yes,
especially if it's
virtual. If it's virtual, it's a much lower commitment, but you're going to see
far less
engagement, whereas if you do an in-person event, like we did with golden hour,
golden hour had a
virtual component and an in-person component, but the in-person component was
really where they
drove the most engagement because people are there. And that's how you end up
actually developing more
and more conversations. As I also referenced though, people like to go to
events with people that they
already know. So let's say hypothetically that you're starting to see lots and
lots of engagement on
these outreach emails and you're starting to see content engagement for the
landing page.
But these accounts that you're trying to break into just aren't registering. At
which point,
I would then actually do what I refer to as an event invite multi-threading
where you start to
not just invite the specific people that may be the economic buyers. So think C
-suite or VPs,
you'd also start to invite some of their team to the event. And as a result,
you actually get
more people from the accounts that you're trying to break into to actually
attend because they can
attend with their team and learn together. So you actually see a lot more
success when you can
essentially use this as a plus one strategy. So hey, who would you bring along?
I'm not just saying
say that to the person you're inviting in the first place. I'm actually saying
go ahead and
invite plus ones for them that are from their same thing. All of that gets you
into the registration
list. And from the registration list, you end up doing pre-event nurture. The
primary goal here is
again, how do we keep people aware of all the different content that's coming
and all the various
ways that they could engage in the event before the event day? So that all
these in the event day.
A couple of things about the event day, just from a thought process on how to
potentially structure,
you want to ensure that you have an understanding of exactly what content
people are engaging with.
Now, there's a variety of ways that you can do this. You could do this through
badge scans at every
session that somebody joins. And again, there's lots of pros and cons to that.
The other thing
that you can do is have a survey that goes out in the pre-event nurture to
understand what topics
people are going to be looking to actually engage with. So you can frame this
as, hey, we've got
limited seating for every room. So we just want to make sure we've got enough
seats for everybody.
What sessions are you planning to attend? Not everyone will fill this out, but
you will
have a noninvasive way of gathering some of this information. The other thing
that you can do is
post event have an NPS survey that asks people what were the most engaging
sessions for them.
And what this will help you to understand is if they say that these specific
sessions were the
most engaging and the most helpful and informative, the likely also give you
some feedback on exactly
why. And you can use that in your post event follow-ups. So again, there are
three various ways
that you can do it. You can do a pre-event to just frame it as we need to get a
head count for the
room. You can do it during the event through badge scans as a way of
understanding who's actually
engaging in the content. And then lastly, as a post event survey, the goal of
that is so that
after the event through your follow-ups, you can create highly personalized one
-to-one follow-ups
for every single attending that was highly engaged in specific content. So
again, the more
information that you ask for in such a way that is logically going to add value
to the attending.
You don't want to just ask on the front end what are the problems you're
struggling with. You want
to make the registration relatively simple, but you want to continue to ask for
more and more
information based on the specific topics because whatever they're most
interested in are generated
problems that they're experiencing and trying to solve for the most. So that
leads into these
various post-event follow-ups. So if they attended and they gave you not a ton
of information,
you should have a generalized follow-up approach. That is, hey, thank you so
much for attending.
I hope you enjoyed this content. And a lot of the themes from today were on
these specific
aspects. And then what I end up loving to do is following up with further what
I refer to as
Next Step Content. So one of the best things that we did with one of our
clients is we actually had
all of the speakers submit their content about six weeks before the event. And
then what their
content writing team ended up doing is taking the following six weeks before
the event to actually
write original Next Step content. So everything was, hey, if you attended this
session and you
understood all the information in that, you would actually need to understand
this next. And the
goal of that was to ensure that we're driving that first party engagement and
showing and really
taking them step by step by step how to solve their problems. Because
eventually their problems do
need solutions. And it's more than just, hey, investing your time. It might be
headcount,
it might be technology, it might be an outside consultant that helps them
develop a new process
from beginning to end. But at some point, there's only so much information that
they can gather
where they eventually just have now built the trust with you that they need to
just buy from
you. So again, the more that we can provide the Next Step content that leads
into them trusting
you the better. So again, that's a generalized follow up sequence that's just
based on you attended
the event. We assume you probably engaged in some content. We're not actually
sure what that is,
but here is what we would like to give you as some generalized content. Next is
fairly similar,
the framing is just slightly different. I would focus more on replay content
because they didn't
attend. And once they've actually started to engage in that replay content, you
can follow
up with the Next Step content that you've already created for your attended as
a generalized thank
you. Next is in the attended and they've specifically requested follow ups.
This is going to be your
your greatest opportunity. So at some point, you actually were so valuable that
they said,
hey, I'd love to learn more. Whether that be a direct sales conversation or not
, that's a separate
component, but they requested more information in some specific capacity. So I
would specifically
give them as much information as humanly possible over the course of a few
touch points. You don't
want to create this massive one mail. So if they're asking for numerous
resources, I would break that
out over a couple of emails and help them and guide them through the process of
actually consuming
information. And then lastly, a specific content engagement. So again, if you
got this before the
event and you know generally what they were interested in before the event, I
would follow up
around that. The flaw in that plan is that they may have ended up attending
other sessions. But
again, you know, at least pre event, this is what they were interested in. If
you gathered the
information during the event, fantastic, you know, it got what they attended.
And as a result,
you can follow up very specifically. And then if you've got the information
after the event,
so you send out an NPS survey the very next day and said thank you so much for
attending, we just
wanted to get some information. You should see some solid reply rates, probably
in the range of 30
to 50% of people tend to reply to an NPS survey. So again, if you end up going
that route,
you'll get information on these people that you can then use to segment them
out effectively.
And you might be wondering, I don't get that information until the day after
the event,
how am I supposed to effectively segment these things out? You should have a
general idea
of the topic cohorts. The easiest way to create topic cohorts would be during
the event day,
you create specific tracks, which then means if you have specific content that
is based around
content engagement, you create three separate communication cadences that are
specific to
each one of those topics. So again, as you see, people are most interested in
one of those specific
topics, you enroll them into that communication sequence. That is the thought
process for how
you actually create that personalized approach that is specific to them. And it
's done in an
entirely manual lift. You should manually do the first or second email that is
highly personalized
and well researched based on the fact that they're showing this much engagement
. But at a certain
point, a lot of this can be standardized and templatized from there. And the
goal is that you
actually, and this was where some people have a varied opinion on this run,
with all of these
the primary goal in your communication at first is not book a call with us. I
love the framing of
sell with your signature. What I have found is the more helpful I am and the
more information I give,
inevitable people will just book the call. So again, by leading with specific
content and doing a
content let outbound approach, you ensure that you keep in contact with them,
you continue to add
value to their life. And when they are ready to book the call, you end up
scheduling the meeting.
Now, what that function looks like is inevitable, you will ask for a meeting,
but it's just not
the day after the event. It's likely a few weeks after the event where they've
already started to
engage with some content. And you can then have the framing of, hey, it looks
like some of our
content has been super helpful. I didn't know if you're still struggling with
these problems that
they've already probably told you through some of the information that they
provide in. Just didn't
know if you knew that we actually solve in the next way these ways. Didn't know
if it made sense
to put in a book a call. And if you've provided a value driven event with tons
of great content before
the event, and then lots of great content after the event, they are likely to
not be frustrated
with you. But to actually either say actually we don't have the budget for that
, or I am interested
in having a conversation at which point you booked the meeting and then you get
the sales outreach
as a thank you. So that is the high level thought process on how you would do
all of this. Now,
to get a little bit more tactical, what we want to do is then actually organize
every single one of
our programs by a 4D framework. And the 4D framework is again data distribution
, destination, and direction.
What that functionally looks like is that you will pull your data from
somewhere. So for your
invite sequence, let's say that you want to do figure out what cost per should
I invite. Well,
you would look at your CRM. In this example, it's going to be HubSpot and you
would look at your
lifecycle stages of evangelist or customers as the viable segment. From there,
you then look at
distribution. And if you don't have any other outbound sequencing tool or email
marketing capabilities,
HubSpot sales sequences are just fine for outbound emailing, which can be very
targeted and specific.
And then again, the beauty of this is if your sellers are doing the outreach on
your behalf,
or you have a marketer or a CSM that is doing the outreach, they can personal
ize the emails
based on the individual. And then the rest of it can be a fairly standard, tem
platized approach.
That's why I like sales sequences for this purpose. The other thing is you can
create manual LinkedIn
tasks to go and invite them to a LinkedIn event that you could create. You can
also just shoot
them a message over LinkedIn as a way of engaging more directly. Depending on
who you're inviting
and where they'd standardly live, sometimes they'll live more in email,
sometimes they'll live more
in LinkedIn. Regardless, this is a great approach. The other thing is,
depending on your industry,
there are many industries that operate in other channels like Twitter or Slack
or Circle, because
we're seeing more and more private communities pop up. So I've put LinkedIn
here as an example,
but you can just engage where your audience engages. So I recommend email plus
some other
channel. And then depending on the resourcing, additionally, cold calling is
not a bad approach.
I've seen many events start to actually do calling for event invitations. And
it's working really
well as a way of gathering that first party engagement. So that's distribution.
And then from
there, you've got destination. So the destination is fairly simple. What you
would look to do is just
have an event registration page that can be done in WordPress, it could be done
Webflow, could be
done in HubSpot, any number of places, but you've got an event registration
page where the primary goal
is to give all the information of what the event is about and have people
register. So it's a very
standard approach. And then from there, the other thing that you can do is have
a LinkedIn event
where you will actually gather first name, last name, company, title, and email
address that's
associated with LinkedIn account. I've loved a relationship with this because
the information
that you can gather through a registration form is very standard, but it's very
easy to get the
information from these people. And then you would just need to export that data
from LinkedIn into
your CRM. So you can actually do the rest of the account progression model. So
I would frame LinkedIn
as a secondary, but if you want to derive that registration opportunity, it's
an easy way to do
it. Once you've gotten a guess on your event registration, they're just added
to the registration
list at which point you then have your pre event nurture programming. They end
up saying no,
or they don't respond and don't have any form of engagement at all. I would
just unenroll them and
know, all right, this event they're not going to engage with and that's totally
fine. So they start
to show engagement, whether that be through opening emails and clicking through
and actually
showing up the landing page, I would then go that approach of event invite
multi-threading,
where the goal is I couldn't get the VP to register for the event. Let me start
to go after some
director level people and see if we can get more of them actually coming to the
event.
So that is the thought process and approach for how to actually do the invites.
And then from there,
again, you just follow the same framework for your data. Next would then be the
registration
list. Or if you're going after the initial engagement phase, you would base
your
re-engagement around those that had shown specific content engagement, which is
relatively easy to
segment depending on how you set up your tech stack. Again, registration list
then directly correlates
into the pre event nurture. Once you've done the actual day of the event, you
should have four separate
segments and I'll walk you through how to then engage the various segments in
the next stage.
But you can segment those audience bases on those who attended, those who didn
't attend,
those who specifically requested follow-ups, which your sellers should be aware
of and then
should specifically note those down. And then those that gave you specific
information around
content's engagement. The last audience you're going to engage are those that
didn't attend,
or those that attended and you have no real specific personalized information
on. You should
first engage, request it a follow-up, and then specific content engagement. And
then by segmenting
those audiences out, you're left with the other two audiences. So again, that's
how you just think
through what is my data so that I can effectively segment and then personalize
the outreach through
different distribution channels that all send them to different destinations
that is ideally
follow-up content of some kind to further educate and help them solve the
problems that they're
trying to overcome today. And then lastly is direction, which is just how do we
track it,
which is largely going to be in this context some form of specific content
engagement or a
book meeting after the event. Speaking of post-event, what you're going to want
to do is once they've
hit the registration list, again, you've got the pre-event nurture pushing
persona-specific content.
So if your event is large enough and you've got multiple different content
tracks, I would not
just push, we have this speaker, we have this speaker, we have this speaker,
but I would actually
personalize it based on the content that would be most relevant for those
various personas.
And then again, depending on how you've set up the capture of content interest,
if they are
telling you the kinds of content that they're interested in, then you set them
up into different
pre-event nurtures that specifically pushes those types of content assets. Plus
, your bigger name
speakers are any kind of influencers that are specific to the event that you'd
like to see there.
If they're showing significant engagement, and significant engagement means
they're actually
opening up emails, they're actually clicking through, if you even start to see
them, share on social,
you then create opportunities for window-in-follow-ups. So again, this is not
the standard, but if you
see significant levels of engagement, and this is past just even the event
itself, but they're
starting to show up on other content pages on your website. They might be
showing up on product
pages, they might be showing up on your pricing page, or they might be showing
up on your schedule
a call page, but not yet have booked a call. You can track all of that pretty
standardly within
your tech stack. You just need to set up the appropriate filtering criteria.
From there,
I would do one-to-one follow-ups from a seller to saying, "Hey, it looks like
you were super pumped
about this event, and we're pumped to have you." I just didn't know if you were
coming to this event
to solve any specific challenges, and if you are, would it make sense for us to
maybe meet while we're
there to chat through some things? You can work through that exact messaging,
but if you're seeing
this level of engagement from a specific account, the goal would then be to be
specifically to segment
those out through your sales teams can book one-to-one meetings at the day of
the event. Once you're
actually at the event, you likely have some form of a speaking engagement.
There may be a booth,
but regardless, what you're going to want to do is then have specific follow-
ups that are based on
how they engaged. So let's say they attended, but they didn't come to the booth
at all, then you're
going to want to offer, again, some form of content. This is your generalized
thank you for attending,
but you didn't do anything, so I don't really have anything to personalize
around. Could be a
content download, could be just generalized content. This is a whole
conversation around
gating versus ungating. You want some form of interactive content. For content
downloads,
again, lots of conversations to be had around whether or not it makes sense to
even do a content
download, but I would give away some form of free content that has a kind of
follow-up that is a
content download offer. So you can think about this as here's a bunch of
information around how to
execute a specific task. So for example, for audience plus, if you were to have
a strategy,
that is a bunch of information on specifically how to develop an owned media
strategy,
and then a download offer that is a specific template for organizing the own
media content
plan. That is a content download approach. Again, lots of pros and cons you
give away for free,
depending on the text that you have, but the goal is to capture some form of
information that
indicates, hey, these people have been engaging in some capacity. Now, let's
say that they engage
with the booth, but they never actually requested a specific follow-up, at
which point you would
then give them a light offer that's a some form of a taste of your product.
UserGIM says this super,
super well, because they actually give data analysis to actually showcase some
form of champion
transitions within your current available data. So that's a light offer that
they do for most of
their events every single year. And if they requested a follow-up, then you go
directly to book to meeting.
Now, let's say that you have a session and they attended your session, but they
didn't show any
form of engagement. And again, depending on how you set this up, you might be
able to see pre-event,
hey, they were interested in this offer. You could see during the event, hey, I
scan their badge,
and they actually showed up. Also, depending on how you set up the event, there
are lots of events
to now actually have an app where you can see all people that have registered.
One of my
favorite places to just go and message every single person that registered for
a session where I was
speaking. And following up that way, one to one with some form of an offer. Now
, if they didn't
engage in any way and they just registered, awesome, then I can send them this
offer. And often it's
for me, a podcast, which I can track through the YouTube tracking that I set up
within HubSpot.
It's not a content download, but it's a content offer that keeps people
actively engaged with
my brand. So again, if I'm ABMifying an event program, I would figure out how
do I specifically
engage those that attended the session, but didn't maybe come up to me or ask
an engaging question.
Next, we those that intended and engaged. Now, light offer here would be, hey,
thanks so much.
Again, you could go to the user gym drought, which is we'd love to actually
analyze your data,
just scan this and I'll happy to help you. What this functionally looks like is
your speaker is
just aware and knowledgeable of the specific offers that they can make. And
then they follow up or
they have an SDR that's there or an AE that's there to support post event. And
then your speaker
can say, Hey, go talk to so and so and let them know that I sent you and we'll
give you XYZ offer.
And lastly is again, they request to follow up. All right, we need to
immediately book the meeting.
So again, depending on how you've actually structured the day of the event,
there's a ton of different
ways you can actually do various follow ups from there. Now, last and most
certainly not leases again,
post event. So again, your data source will likely still be your CRM to some
capacity because even if
you do NPS surveys or you analyze the data in another place, it should be
uploaded into your CRM.
So your data source will likely be your CRM and you can segment effectively
based on,
ideally, some form of specific engagement on content topics. From there, your
distribution is
going to be likely largely the same. You're just following up through how it's
not likely through
some form of an outbound sequence or a marketing sequence with some form of
LinkedIn tied N.
From there, you're going to be specifically going to next step content. So
again, that is
driving people to the CMS that could be blog content could be video again, in
the context of an
audience plus, if you look back at specifically golden hour, there were tons of
resources.
You've got things like no sleep till Brooklyn, you've got easy mode. You've
actually got content
from the day that you could actually just send people to that is next step
content.
Because I can also guarantee that there was so much content during the day that
people missed
some of that. For example, if someone was super interested in a lot of the
content that was spoken
about during the event, like how to build a show strategy in B2B, you could
then easily have
next step content that is around specifically three types of podcasts and how
to use them
or how to get executive buy in for owned media. These are great next step
assets that drive the
engagement even further. So in the context of an audience plus, that's what I
would have done
to further drive engagement with our target accounts after some form of a
massive event like golden
hour. And again, from there, you sell it to signature. So your signature should
say,
want to talk further about own media book a meeting to talk through how
audience plus can help.
That's your signature in every single email. And again, from there, your
direction,
did you have success? Did they actually book a meeting through the signature?
Or if you engaged
long enough? And again, engaging long enough is if I send five specific
tangible personalized
resources after an event that tie into what you engage without the event, and
then say,
hey, just wanted to see, doesn't make sense for us to have a conversation to
help you solve
your problems on owned media and how you can actually X could known media
strategy. Again,
if I'm audience plus, and this is golden hour, even if they don't say yes, they
're not upset
because you've provided so much value, it makes sense contextually, because you
've been following
up over and over and over again with specific tangible, actionable value for
them. So that
should result in some form of a book's meeting. If the answer is no, that's
okay. Reengage a
quarter later, because generally speaking, if the answer is no, the answer will
be no, because
either I don't have budget, this is not a priority right now, or we're going to
try this internally
first. Great. Following a recorder later to say, hey, how's it going? Have made
the progress that
you expected to make is a great way to continue the conversation because nine
times out of 10,
they haven't. And now they're actually probably ready to talk, or they can give
you a clear
timeline on when they're ready to talk. Again, if they've been opening your
emails and they've
been showing some form of content engagement, this is where you do the same
thing as the pre-event,
and you now do content led multi-threading where you're sending the same
content,
but to lower level individuals so that you can have them take it to their
leader.
So that is the thought process for how you would ABMFI an event like golden
hour.
And this has been helpful. And you want more content just like this, go ahead
and subscribe.
We're going to be doing this every single week and working through step by step
by step exactly
how to ABMFI your programs. And the other thing is if you want this template,
you're actually welcome
to download it by subscribing to this show. So again, thank you for joining us
on this episode
of ABMFI and we look forward to seeing you in the next one.
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