Last weekend, like most weekends, I started Saturday at my neighborhood coffee shop. This is how it usually goes: I walk in, set my stuff down at an open table, then order my Americano.

This weekend wasn’t too different. Except by the time I was ready to order, the barista had already placed an Americano on the counter with a post-it stuck to it: “Lauren :).”

Made my day. I paid for my Americano with an extra big tip.

If I described this story in marketing buzz words, I’d say I had a personalized experience, which is true. But the problem with buzzwords is they’re used too generally and in different contexts, and it becomes difficult to understand what, exactly, someone means when they use them.

I think my coffee shop experience should be the gold standard of a personalized experience, so it’s what I’ll use to define the term. Anyone hoping to create something similar should:

• Understand the context
• Anticipate the need
• Add a human touch

And because we’re talking about marketing and sales, the goal should be that all of these things add up to more revenue.

So what happens when we take a personalized experience and try to deliver it at scale?

The whole thing falls apart. Not only logistically, but emotionally, too.

But that’s what marketers are being asked to do right now: deliver personalized experiences at scale.

It’s a trap—because when we try to scale something, we don’t rely on humans. We rely on technology. And you cannot take something that relies on a one-to-one human relationship and turn it into something that technology does for us.

Personalization at scale is an oxymoron. Some are accepting it as a challenge.

Part of the problem is that we use “personalization” too broadly and freely. If we agree to the definition of a personalized experience that I attempted above, we can also outline a number of things people might mean when they talk about personalization:

• Participation
• Humanization
• Customization

When we about scaling within each of these categories, things start looking up!

• We can encourage participation at scale, whether it’s polling attendees at an event or encouraging people to start a conversation with a chatbot.
• We can do humanization at scale. Think about this as the inverse of personalization: instead of trying to wrap each member of your audience in a cocoon of personalization, invite them to understand you as a human. You’re more than the company you represent. Your audience knows that, so let them experience it.
• We can create customization at scale. This happens all around us. Think about Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, or the products you can customize with Nike ID, or brands like Care/Of that invite you to take a quiz so they can recommend a specific product that best fits what you need.

Thanks to technology, all of this is possible at scale.

This isn’t to say that we should ditch the idea of creating personalized experiences, but we have to be more accepting of the limitations that come with personalizing anything. We can’t do it at scale—but we don’t have to do everything at scale.

We can and should spend time creating high-touch, high-engagement experiences for the people in our audience who will benefit from them the most and help us reach marketing and sales goals.

At Event Farm, we think the channel that most effectively enables personalization is in-person events. There are stats that back up our inclination, and we make tech to help you enable it—but we don’t pretend you can fully automate an event or rely solely on technology to host one.

On the surface, event marketing sounds fairly straightforward: you host an event to promote your business.

It’s kind of like pulling a good shot of espresso or making a salad as well as sweetgreen does—except on a much larger scale. It sounds super doable, and then you try it and quickly realize it’s difficult. To help marketers think through (and potentially explain to others) what a successful event is, we created this guide. In our experience, event markers often have too much to do and not enough time for anything but the bare minimum—and we want to help make the case that they might need more resources, more help, more time.

So what is event marketing? Here’s our one-sentence answer:

Event marketing is the practice of hosting in-person experiences that communicate the value of your organization to influence marketing goals.

We’ll unpack (and greatly expand on) that definition throughout this guide. And as you’ll see, building muscle around a solid event strategy is worth it. The guide gets a little lengthy, so here’s a birds-eye view of what it’ll cover:

1. Breaking down the event marketer’s role
2. Benefits of events vs. other marketing channels(
3. Event size, your audience and “the funnel”
4. The connective tissue: experiential communication

Let’s get to it!

Breaking down the event marketer’s role

In case you’re so down-in-the-weeds that you need a big-picture reminder. OR you’re trying to break it down for people who just don’t get it.

Event marketers oversee every aspect of an event: logistics planning, audience development, topic development, partnerships, experience production, influencing marketing goals, and more.

That’s a lot! We can break these tasks down into three broad categories:

1. Logistics management: This is the stuff you simply must do for an event to happen. You have to find a venue, a date, maybe hire caterers, and make sure you have signs that tell guests where the restrooms are. You need a registration site and invitations. These are the necessary details for the event to just work.
2. Experiential: This is the connective tissue between event management and event marketing. You’re not just thinking about the fact that you have a venue, but you’re thinking about how guests will experience that venue. You’re thinking about how you’ll communicate with attendees. (Event app? Texting?)
   Just like digital marketers focus on creating a positive website experience, event marketers need to think about a good event experience. You take the bare minimum and make it better so your guests get something out of the event—and are, in turn, more likely to help you reach marketing goals.
3. Marketing and influencing business: You focus on experiential so you’re attendees have a positive branded experience—they associate good things with your company and are more likely to buy from you. This doesn’t just happen with a good experience, though. It has to be strategic. How are you laying the groundwork leading up to, during, and after the event? What information are you giving guests, what story are you telling them, that’ll help them understand the value of your product/service?

Benefits of events vs. other marketing channels

A bunch of convincing stats, in case you need them.

Everything I just explained means events are a lot of work. So what’s the upside?

First of all, let’s think about the obvious:

• Your attendees didn’t come to your event by accident
• Your audience comes to your event prepared to give you their attention for an extended period of time — without the typical workplace distractions

There is no other marketing channel that simultaneously accomplishes those two things. And there’s evidence that it pays off:

Events create positive brand sentiment and foster product understanding

• 80% of attendees said that live demonstrations help define their purchasing decision.
• 65% of attendees said live events helped them have a better understanding of a product or service.
• 84% of attendees say that they have a more positive opinion about the company, brand, product or service being promoted after the event

Events increase and accelerate sales

• 98% of users feel more inclined to purchase after attending an activation
• 70% of users become regular customers after an experiential marketing event

Events contribute to other marketing initiatives

• 75% of content marketers say that in-person events are the most effective content marketing strategy

Event size, your audience and “the funnel”

Talkin’ bout audience and ROI—so, marketing.

Biggest is not best

The best type of event depends on your business, but for most companies, small-to-medium sized events are probably the smartest way to go. Large conferences can be great, but they require huge budgets and months of planning. Smaller events are more accessible and are equally (if not more) impactful per attendee.

As long as you’re being strategic about who you invite, the number of people you’re inviting becomes less important.

So, who should you invite?

If the most impactful events are smaller ones, don’t “cast a wide net” with your guest list.

Instead, take a targeted approach and invite people who:

• Your company already has a relationship with (i.e., isn’t a “new lead”), or
• Data tells you would definitely be a good fit for your product or service

Your event and the funnel

The funnel! Marketing and sales’ favorite metaphor.

Smaller, more targeted events should sit somewhere between the middle and bottom of the funnel. You’re probably not going to close deals at the event itself, but the event should serve as a launchpad for closing deals with attendees.

The connective tissue: communication

Let’s take a quick pause to reorient ourselves to our central question: What is event marketing? So far we’ve established that we absolutely need event logistics to make an event happen, and we know that events can 100% influence marketing, sales, and business goals.

But how do you jump from an event that’s got solid logistics to an event that influences revenue?

The answer: Communicating through experience.

How do you communicate through experience?

There are a lot of ways to do this. We can’t cover every possible example, but here are some ideas:

• First, the OG methods:
  • Human-to-human conversation! Events make this possible—which is part of the reason they’re such a powerful marketing tool.
  • Panel discussions and speaker sessions
• The tech-powered methods:
  • Encourage attendees to take and share photos. People love taking pics and posting them on social media. Events not only encourage attendees to take photos—they also serve up IRL content for your attendees to capture and share. This not only creates a positive brand experience for your attendee, but it also extends your social footprint. #2birds1stone
    With Event Farm EFx, you can take photos for your attendees, apply custom event filters, and text photos to the attendees in the picture.
  • Create attendee teams to break the ice and start the conversation. Depending on the size of your event, you can manually group your attendees. EFx Teams makes it possible to do this at scale. With the touch of a button, EFx will place your attendees in groups of 3-4 and text each attendee the names of their teammates.
    The teammates might not (and probably won’t!) know each other, but that’s part of the fun: they’ll start asking around to find their group. Once they’ve found each other, you’ve helped them break the ice and can then post questions relevant to the event topic for them to discuss.
  • Make speaker sessions and panel discussions more interactive with polling. You can poll your attendees whenever—but it’s especially powerful when you’re trying to make a speaking session more interactive. Polling turns a traditionally passive experience into something that’s more active. It also allows you to understand how each attendee responds to a poll, which is marketing data that’s something powerful beyond the event itself.
  • Create interactive experiences through wearable tech*.* Wearable tech activations can do a lot. You can—and Event Farm customers do—get really creative. A popular activation that’s used across the board, no matter the event type, is content delivery.
    Here’s how it works:
    Attendees interact with content on kiosks set up around the venue. If there is content they want to save and reference later, they scan their NFC-powered wristband at the kiosk and have the content delivered to their inbox.
    (If you’re interested in learning how wearable tech could work for your specific event, we’re happy to talk about what else is possible. Reach out to us here.)

The experiential component of your event is where you tie the bare bones of the event to the stuff that matters. It’s arguably the most important part. What I just laid out is important—but it’s a template of tactics you can use. Ultimately, what you’re communicating through these channels is the most important part, and that’s up to you.

We often equate VIP events with the doling out of goods: dinners at a fancy restaurant, front-and-center seats at a baseball game, a VIP lounge at a conference.

If you’re hosting a VIP event, there’s a good chance it will come with a heftier price tag. But to make that price tag worth it, you have to put time and energy into creating value that can’t be tied back to the number of dollars you’re forking over. Take these hypothetical events as examples:

Hypothetical Event #1: Your guests like the event

Let’s say you’re renting out an entire restaurant to host a dinner for 40 high-value prospects and customers. The restaurant is fancy and staffs its own sommelier—so the restaurant itself is compelling enough to entice your guests.

You send out invitations—free dinner and drinks at a private gathering. Delicious food. A room full of industry peers. You hit your registration goal and spend the rest of your time making sure event logistics are spot on.

The event comes, everything goes smoothly, and your guests really like the event. Great!

Except you want them to like more than the event. You want them to like you and your company.

Hypothetical Event #2: Your guests like the event and like you

Imagine the same setup, except this time you also do something extra—you treat your guests better than they expect to be treated, even though you’re already treating them to a nice dinner with smart people.

What does that look like? It could be a lot of things, but Event Farm is an event tech company—so we like to use technology to anticipate and cater to what our guests need and want. Here’s an example of what that might look like for your VIP dinner:

• When guests RSVP on your event website, you’ll ask them the standard questions: Name, email, etc. But you’ll also ask about their drink preference from a menu of cocktails.
• When each guest arrives, you’ll activate an NFC-powered wristband that knows each guest’s drink preference.
• As guests make their way to the bar, they’ll scan their wristband at EFx Smart Bar, a kiosk that takes orders and queues them for bartenders. Smart Bar will verify that the guest still prefers the drink they selected during registration, and the order will be sent to the bartender.

Smart Bar adds a touch that exceeds your guests’ expectations. It’s personalized and streamlined, and your guests know you set it up—it’s not something the restaurant did for you. The end result is that your guests like the event and like you.

Sweet. A step up from Event #1. But if you want your event to lead to more business for your company, your guests have to like you and understand the value of your product or service.

So…

Hypothetical Event #3: Your guests like the event, like you, and understand your company’s value

Imagine the same set up as Event #2. You’re hosting a nice event, taking care of the logistics, and exceeding your guests’ expectations.

But for this event, you’re going to add one more layer: Your guests have to know why they’re at your company’s event. They have to understand the value of your product or service.

Now, you’re probably thinking, this is a lot. I hear you—just taking care of event logistics is a lot, and I’m skimming right by logistics. But your guests’ attention is valuable. People might end up on your website by accident, but they’re not walking into your VIP event by mistake. A VIP event is full of the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Making the most of that does require a lot.

Your guests’ attention is valuable. People might end up on your website by accident, but they’re not walking into your VIP event by mistake. A VIP event is full of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

So how do you do it?

The specifics will be different depending on the goal of your event and the product/service your company offers. In general, though, you can think about it as preparing the humans.

Preparing the logistics doesn’t pay off if you don’t also prepare the people who are coming. In the days and weeks leading up to the event, encourage attendees to engage with the narrative your event will tell—this is where you start incorporating value that goes beyond the dollar amount you’re spending.

For something like a VIP dinner, you might invite guests who hold similar roles at different companies. They’ll probably get a lot out of talking to each other, which means you might want to set up attendee groups and introduce group members to each other before the event begins. You might also send articles relevant to your event and ask attendees to discuss the article’s ideas once they’re in person.

For our own events at Event Farm, we sometimes text attendees an article during the event using EFx Texting, or we’ll introduce attendees to each other using the EFx Teams module.

Whatever conversation you facilitate and however you do it, help each guest think through the problem they have that you might be able to help them solve. If you’re able to weave that into an experience that exceeds expectations, you’ll set up guests to like you and understand the value your company provides—which makes the energy and price tag worth it.

Get Real! That’s the name of our weekly newsletter, where you’ll get reminders about posts like this and links to things we’re thinking about. Subscribe here.

The internet, it seems, has set a low bar for networking events. Do a few googles and you’ll see what I mean:

• 15 Ways to Overcome Awkwardness at Networking Events
• Stop Feeling Awkward, Nervous, and Lonely at Networking Events
• 17 Tips to Survive Your Next Networking Event

All of the articles are aimed at giving attendees a pep talk so they have enough gumption to take control of their networking experience. Even if someone uses all the tips the articles offer, the best they can apparently hope for is something tolerable. Networking events are good for you, the articles say, even if the experience itself kind of sucks.

As the people planning events, this should make us uncomfortable. We can and should aim higher—because I don’t think we want to host the experiential equivalent of a rough kale salad.

Hosting is active, not passive

To make any event better, we have to focus on what attendees need. For networking events in particular, attendees need hosts to take control and influence how attendees interact with each other. To give you an idea of what I mean, let me take a quick detour—I promise it comes back to networking events:

I recently “binged” The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I mostly liked it (8.5/10, FWIW), but something about it also made me a little uneasy.

If you haven’t see it, here’s the gist of the series (without spoilers): Midge Maisel, an uptown Manhattan housewife, launches a secret career as a stand up comic after her marriage falls apart. Midge is smart, pretty, and a standup genius. She encounters some setbacks—she’ll occasionally bomb a set, and she frequently runs up against sexism. But more often than not, she doesn’t just overcome the setbacks. She confidently turns them on their head and transcends them.

A club manager is hesitant to hand over the mic because she’s a woman? Midge makes a point of talking about it during her set. An audience member heckles her? Like any good comedian, she takes them on and beats them with her wit. She commands attention. It is about her.

She’s good, she knows it, and she takes control of her environment in a way that most of us don’t want to take control. It reminds me of… the reason people don’t like networking. The idea of taking control of a group of people makes most of us uncomfortable.

Hosting an event is about more than gathering a group of people and letting them figure it out. If you’re going to host an event, host it.

That’s going to be true of anyone in any group, including both the host and the attendees at a networking event. No one wants to be domineering, but everyone wants someone else to take control and give the group some direction. The event organizer needs to be that person.

That doesn’t mean a host needs to be exactly like Midge or any standup—a host doesn’t need to take center stage and keep it. But hosting an event is about more than gathering a group of people and letting them figure it out. If you’re going to host an event, you have to host it.

Real advice for making networking better

For networking events in particular, the general goal is for attendees to meet people with similar interests and have conversations with those people.

The host’s job is to make sure each attendee—even the quieter, younger, or less experienced ones—is set up to reach the goal of the event. Every event is different, but there are a few broad guidelines we’ve found useful:

• Introduce attendees to each other. It doesn’t really matter how you do this, as long as you do it for everyone. If your event is small, maybe you introduce guests via email before the event begins and ask them to find each other once they’re in person. At our Connection Makers series, we use EFx Texting to group attendees. Each guest receives a text message with the names of their group members and are asked to find those people. We intentionally don’t give them any other guidelines—they have to talk to each other to figure out what to do and find their people.
• Supply guests with a prompt they can use to start the conversation. Again, this can be anything, as long as it starts conversation. If you’re hosting a happy hour after a panel discussion, maybe you prompt attendees to talk about what they found most interesting during the panel. Or maybe they have to play 20 questions to determine what each person in the group does. Whatever! As long as it helps attendees begin a conversation with one another without having to talk about the weather.
• Remember that people appreciate guidelines. All of this might cause some self doubt. What if they don’t want to break into groups? Or don’t want to talk about the prompt? Honestly, maybe some of them won’t want to do it at first, but there’s a reason they came to the event. They signed up and and showed up because they wanted to be with a group of people; they wanted to meet new people. They will be happy to have done it, and they will appreciate the fact that you gave them the guidelines to do something that can be difficult.

“Networking” is a nebulous term and activity. You can’t control everything that happens when a group of personalities convene, and you don’t have to overthink it. But you can and should put up some guardrails—for the benefit of you and your attendees.

Get Real! That’s the name of our weekly newsletter, where you’ll get reminders about posts like this and links to things we’re thinking about. Subscribe here.