Here are 10 thoughts on how you can create an effective and efficient event portfolio plan.

1. Collaborate: Ensure you have all the right people involved in the process: brands and business units; corporate headquarters and countries or regional offices; event marketers, advertisers, direct marketers, digital teams, PR and sales; agencies; business partners, etc. Having the right people involved at the right level from the beginning of the process with help you build an integrated plan that has a much higher probability of success. This will also facilitate buy-in and help things work much more smoothly as the year goes on.

2. Build Value: Relationships are predicated upon a mutual exchange of value. Remember this when working with your internal and external teams during the planning process. Understanding the inputs, outputs and roles of each and every team member will help make the process run effectively and efficiently. Respect for individual roles and establishing an environment of trust are critical. Success of the plan, and ultimately the company trumps individual needs.

3. Think of the Audience First: People do not live their lives via a media plan or event schedule. Most will only attend a few events per year. Who are your target audiences and what events are they most likely to attend? Event marketing portfolios should be built from an audience perspective first.

4. Give Every Event A Job: Some events and tactics are good for generating awareness and thought leadership. Others are better for lead generation.  Still others have strengths in nurturing and closing the deal. Don’t forget about loyalty events. While its true that few events have a singular purpose, consider the promary objective of each event in your portfolio, and ensure you have the right tactics in place at every stage in the sales cycle. Remember that large third-party events are best for the early stages of the cycle (awareness, lead generation) and smaller, proprietary engagements are most appropriate toward the end (nurturing, conversion, loyalty).

5. Act Globally And Locally: There are some industry events which have the power to attract audiences from near and far – destination events. Start with these. Otherwise, audiences tend to operate within a certain market. Execute proprietary activities regionally to nurture, convert or drive retention and expansion of your audiences. Its often a lot easier for someone to attend a local breakfast seminar than book a flight to Las Vegas.

6. Select Events Carefully: Create and adhere to a robust decision-making process. Use the right criteria. Are your target customers at the event? Can you drive the audeince? Does the event audience meet your target demographic? Is it a key industry event? Is there an opportunity to tell your story?

7. Use Data-Based Business Rationale: “We’ve always attended.”, “Our competition will be there.”, “What will the industry / our customers think if we don’t go?” Are not sound business strategies or reasons for exhibiting. Do the math. If the event has the ability to meet your marketing and business objectives, then go. Otherwise, leave it on the table.

8. Decide Which Activities To Add, Change Or Remove: Understand that some events are underperformers because they fail to deliver the right audience. Others deliver the audience, but the way in which you participated may need to be adjusted to take better advantage of the opportunity. There are also always new opportunities available to reach your audiences. These opportunities may be created by third-party producers, or you can create them yourself. Explore all options before arriving at a final plan.

9. Save by Zero: If you have an event portfolio that is filled with legacy activities and potentially frought with waste. Start from scratch. Build your plan from the ground up. Make no assumptions. Treat every event with the same scrutiny when evaluating it for inclusion in you plan.

10. Keep The Plan Alive: Remember, no plan is ever final. Event portfolio planning is a continuous process that must be monitored throughout the year and adjusted regularly based on performance, learning, the environment and your own pipeline.

Portfolio planning can be a complex and sometimes politically-charged process. The right alignment to marketing and business objectives, strong team integration and disciplined process, will help increase your chances at delivering a flexible plan built for success. If you have any additional ideas or challenges you’ve faced in creating your plan, please share!

Portfolio Planning: 10 Tips for Creating The Right Mix is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

Your job is also to make money, but spend as little money along the way as possible to accomplish your business objectives. This sometimes leads to a misalignment of the value chain to demand.

It’s easy to grab platinum, gold, silver, bronze or a la carte sponsorships off the shelf. However, it’s always better to negotiate for those opportunities that provide the greatest value to your audiences and your brand. Before you go gunning for gold or break out that purchase order, here are some things you should consider to ensure sponsorship success.

Involve the Right People: This is true when selecting and planning other elements of your event as well. Remember to include sales, PR, marketing and digital teams in the discussion when selecting which sponsorship elements to take advantage of.

Base Sponsorship Decision on Objectives: When evaluating sponsorship packages, or a la carte products offered by show producers, its important to think about which items would be most effective in accomplishing your objectives first. What are those things that offer the highest value? For example, if your objective is thought leadership, speaking opportunities are best, if you are looking to nurture relationships and close sales, private hospitality and one-on-one audience engagement is strongest. Anything else is largely unnecessary and should be left on the table.

Review the Audience: This is the single most important part of any sponsorship. Will the sponsorship draw the critical mass of targeted attendees required for you to earn the right level of return on investment or objective? Make sure the demographics and psychographics of the audience are right for your brand. Its also a good idea to insist on third-party audits to validate audiences.

Ensure Content Relevance: Examine the focus of program content to audience priorities and objectives. Ensure your content aligns well to sponsorship content, otherwise your brand will appear disconnected. Will audiences find this relevant and participate? If not, you’re in the wrong place, doing the wrong things.

Negotiate Sponsorship and Custom Opportunities: Look at the strength of sponsorship offerings and the Share of Voice offered. Gauge the producer’s willingness to negotiate, provide value-added services and entertain special requests, such as speaking opportunities. If the right opportunities don’t exist, create your own! Remember producers need you more than you need them.

Leverage Business Partners: Partners provide a powerful leverage point that few take full advantage of. How many of your partners are participating? What’s their scope? How have they used the sponsorship effectively in the past? Including your partners in the planning process can create a potent sponsorship opportunity and increase return on investment. If done well, you can spend far less and get far more than going it alone.

Check Out the Competition: While competitive presence is not a critical factor, it is still something that should be examined in your decision making process. How many of your competitors are involved? What is their scope of participation? Understanding how you compare to your competitors in the audiences eyes, especially in the early stages of a sales cycle can help ensure success. Use this information to plan your sponsorship strategy and tactics.

Understand Who You Are Dealing With: Look at the stability and past performance of the producer. Do they have a track record for delivering advertised event performance? Are there official, third-party audits available? Knowing the background and longevity of the sponsorship opportunity and the producer can give you solid ground to stand on in your decision making process and in negotiations.

As Carrie Urban Kapraun from IEG states in her post, Elusive Intangibles: They Are All Around Us “..intangibles are an important part of any decision-making process and are often not given the credit, thought and time they deserve. I think it is beneficial for everyone to develop metrics and criteria to quantify and compare intangible benefits, especially in a sponsorship context…” At the end of the day sponsorship is about real value, both tangible and intangible. Understanding what will bring true value to your audiences and your brand starts with your objectives. From there its about taking a strategic approach,  examining the opportunity with diligence and negotiating from a position of power to ensure success.

Evaluating Event Sponsorships? Consider This… is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

1. Make sure your event has clear objectives. You’d be surprised at major corporations who participate in events because “they always have” or “our competition is there”. Unfortunately, these are not sound business reasons for participation and there is often a great deal of wasted money and resources that go into events that yield no return as a result. Its important to have a business purpose to participate in an event, as well as established objectives. Remember objectives should be SMART.

Specific – Be specific about what you want to achieve as a result of the event.
Measurable – You should be able to measure performance against objectives.
Achievable – Ensure your objectives are achievable and attainable.
Realistic – You should have enough of the right resources to realistically achieve your objectives.
Time-bound – Objectives should be accomplished within a predetermined time limit.

An example would look something like this: “We will go to XYZ event to make 320 contacts which we will qualify into 100 leads by October 22, 2009.”

Its OK to have multiple objectives for a single event, but make sure you have a primary objective, and not many more to ensure you are geared for success. The key here is focus.

2. Create experiences designed to meet your objectives. Setting objectives is the easy part, doing the right things to accomplish them is another. Years ago I had a client who wanted to drive brand awareness with new prospects. This is a fine objective (although not SMART) however, they started by inviting only existing customers to a proprietary engagement, so there was no way to meet this particular objective. If your objective has to do with awareness, do things at your event that drive awareness. If your objective is about nurturing relationships with existing customers, do things that will engage and nurture them. One-size-fits-all events are far less successful than highly targeted, activities rich in experiences designed around objectives and audiences. An example here would be an objective like: “Drive understanding of XYZ product to 400 prospects by the end of XYZ expo.” Then, by creating an interactive, hands-on experience (perhaps a kiosk) to demonstrate features an benefits of a XYZ product to target audiences you’ve moved the needle.

3. Measure performance against your objectives. Measurement should always be based on objective, emphasize outcomes over outputs, and drive a culture of continuous improvement. If you’d like to drive sales, measure sales. If you’d like to increase awareness, survey your audiences before and after the event to see if their awareness of your company or product has increased as a result.

4. Do everything possible to generate the right audience. The most important part of any event is the audience. Its relatively easy to get an audience, but attracting the right audience is a different challenge altogether. Relying on show producers alone is fine, but their focus is to deliver as may people as possible to all sponsors and exhibitors. Its a good idea to supplement this with your own targeted activities. Use internal lists, alliances and business partners, purchased or rented media lists, social media, etc. Promote the event by communicating compelling reasons for your target audience to attend. Talk about those things which will activate their triggers and eliminate their inhibitors. What can they get at your event that they really want or need and cannot get anywhere else?

5. Follow up quickly and consistently. This is a big one. All too often, companies go into an event without a plan for how they will address leads afterwards. Have a process by which you will sort and manage hot, warm and cold leads. Establish different communications streams for each type of lead. Assign the appropriate resources to execute against this plan and make sure it happens. If a prospect is at an event looking for a solution and you do not address them, they will fill their need elsewhere.

6. Ensure there is appropriate funding for everything. Don’t run out of steam at the 80 yard line. Make sure you budget for audience generation, engagement at and around the event, follow up and measurement.

7. Invest in activities that offer the highest ROI. No one ever bought a multimillion dollar solution because of a sign at an event. Branded conference bags, toys, pens, t-shirts, etc. do not convince people to buy your product (unless that is what you are selling.) Once you have the right audience at an event, the most powerful motivators are those things that drive engagement with that audience. Conversations, case studies, networking, speaking, interactive workshops are great ways to engage and interact with your audiences. Invest in these things first.

8. Make your event part of a 360 approach. Remember, it takes more than one date to win the girl. The same goes with business relationships. Every event is important, but what’s more important is how you use that event in the overall marketing mix to court your suspects, prospects and customers. It is this cadence of touches and parts of the conversation which drive deeper, more meaningful relationships.

Eight Common Event Marketing Mistakes is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0