Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, and New York Times best-selling author Jay Baer gave a presentation at the PCMA Convening Leaders conference this week on “The 365 Day Event - Using Digital Content to Drive Year-Round Engagement.”

Baer spoke about the intersection of technology, social media, and customer service, and how this convergence relates to events.

“Experiential marketing” is a phrase that has been thrown around quite a bit within the events industry over the past ten years.

According to Wikipedia, experiential marketing is a marketing strategy that directly engages consumers and invites and encourages them to participate in the evolution of a brand or a brand experience. Rather than looking at consumers as passive receivers of messages, engagement marketers believe that consumers should be actively involved in the production and co-creation of marketing programs, developing a relationship with the brand.

For years, event industry accreditation has been based on mastery of logistics. However, corporations today are increasingly focused on marketing strategy, and no matter how well executed an event is, if there aren’t enough attendees and sponsors it will be deemed a failure. To ensure success, event managers need to become event marketers.

Innovation. Inspiration. Diversity. Inclusion. Equality. Giving Back. Those were some of the pervasive themes at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference, held Nov. 6-9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Attendees of corporate events fall into two camps, those who are a “captive audience”—employees or clients of a particular company - and those within a particular industry or interest-area that a company wants to attract to register or buy tickets. Therefore, there is a wide disparity in corporate event marketing.

A strong roster of expert speakers leading sessions is critical in an event’s appeal to attendees. In addition to events promoting their speaker lineup, speakers promoting the events they participate in can help push attendance growth.

While not all show organizers are utilizing this grassroots effort, many have found it to be a critical tool and likewise, many speakers are eager to contribute to an event’s success.

For event planners and marketers, analytical reports can be gold mines for driving registrations, adoption of tools and calculating ROI. However, the true potential of analytics remains underutilized in testing the effectiveness of marketing efforts, testing new audience segments and creating impactful cross-promotional efforts. This is mostly because there are a plethora of options and features available, as well as disconnected channels that add significant complexity to the analytical process and make accurate attribution extremely difficult.

Corporate events range in formats, styles, locations and objectives, but they all have one thing in common—they need to maximize the people participating in order to advance the brand’s goals. Two corporate event planners—Stephanie Heishman, principal at Freya and Christy Lamagna, founder and master strategist at Strategic Meetings & Events—share insights about how they make their marketing plans works.

Corporate event professionals are often viewed as the people behind the scenes who are good at operations, but not taken into consideration where strategy is concerned. There usually is another marketing or sales group making the decisions on which events to host or participate in and what the strategy should be – then the program is handed off to the event manager to execute.

Increasing outreach is an ongoing challenge in event marketing.  How do you get more attendees to come to your event?  You’re putting in significant time, effort, and money to design and deliver a great program but if nobody attends your work is all for naught.