We announced in a previous blog post that the marketing team at Event Farm is kicking off an event series! We’re using our own event tech every step of the way and documenting the entire experience. This is your front-row seat to our planning process and inside look into how we’re thinking about the strategy and details.

Last week, Lauren stepped through how our little event idea (born at 5:30pm on a Friday over some beers) quickly turned into a bonafide series. We settled on a series topic idea (that we’re all wildly passionate about), brainstormed how to recruit panelists, and let the creative juices start flowing on our branding and promotion strategy.

With the foundation laid we were ready to execute! There was just one little (major) detail we still had to work out… How would we ensure that the event series would benefit our business?

Initially, it felt hard to answer this question. It’s worth reiterating that no one on the Event Farm marketing team has a true background in event marketing. None of us has led the charge on producing large scale events, and what we thought we didn’t know made it hard to set the “right” goals.

That was until we took a step back and remembered this:

We might not be event marketers, but we are marketers. For every single initiative we manage, we must be able to attribute its impact on pipeline and revenue. Why should events feel any different? Short answer, they shouldn’t.

If you’ve ever struggled with answering the question “was my event successful?” keep this in mind: Businesses rely on revenue. Every project, produced by any department should help drive pipeline and revenue. Just like every other effort, an event’s success should be measured by what it does to propel the business and generate dollars.

Not sure how to get started with event attribution? Here’s how we’re thinking about our event goals.

When I analyze my team’s marketing funnel strategy, I always come back to the top and find myself thinking (and then overthinking, and then overthinking some more) about how to continuously generate leads. But the thing is, I don’t just want a lot of leads, I want quality ones. Vanity metrics, especially in marketing, are all too easy to come by, and the more reliance we have on surface level data, the more we’re hurting our businesses. The better aligned leads are with our business mission, the higher likelihood of closed business and retention. So, we need to use the event to not just drive leads, but drive good leads.

When we started thinking about what a good event lead is, we approached it the same way we do with other marketing efforts. We analyzed who our current customers are, what their buyer journey looked like, and took an aggregate look at attributes they have in common. Based on those trends, we were able to search for people in our area who are similar to our current customers, and who we hadn’t been able to connect with yet. We created a campaign in Salesforce, put our lead list in the campaign, linked the campaign up to our event in Event Farm, and clicked import. With literally the click of a button, we produced a new set of people that we could now interact with and nurture through the sales process.

Another way we ensure good event leads is through ticket segmentation. Since we were really thoughtful with the kinds of leads we put into our Salesforce campaign, Event Farm was a perfect complement due to the platform’s ticket technology. We weren’t going to unleash this event into the wild with public registration and cross our fingers and hope for the best. Thanks to a feature we call “ticket types,” everyone in our event Salesforce campaign was assigned to a specific ticket type, meaning we could deliver personalized invitations to our most strategic leads, and ensure they would hear about the event and therefore, our company.

Even better than that? Event Farm’s guest list segmentation capabilities gives us a running dashboard to track audience composition. I can keep track of how many of our attendees will be prospects, and because of that, we’ll arm ourselves with an on-site sales presence accordingly.

Build brand awareness for our company

Events are a stellar way to build brand awareness, and let people know what your company does both in business and in the community. As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, nobody wants to feel like they’re actively being marketed to or pressured to buy. So we decided that in order to get, and keep, the attention of our good event leads, we need to deliver a valuable, distinct experience that they’ll associate with our brand.

For us, that distinct experience starts with eye-catching, innovative designs for save-the-date emails, invitations, and registration pages. Our marketing team is comprised of three brand junkies (we do a lot of Instagram browsing), and we fall in love with brands that feel fresh, personal and approachable. We wanted to create the same vibe for our event series. We drew inspiration from our favorite brands, and had the flexibility in the Event Farm platform to put our own spin on it.

The end result is amazing looking event assets that have received serious praise from our leads and customers. But beyond praise, the great design has also returned awesome results. On the first day we sent out event invitations and made our registration website available, we hit guest capacity. The event subject matter and panelists are stellar, but in order to get people to read the details, you have to first grab them with design.

In addition to not being event marketers, none of us is a dedicated graphic designer, and aside from dabbling in HTML here and there, we also don’t code. But with attention to detail (and passion for great aesthetics), our event’s website and email designs are totally attainable.

Closed Opportunities

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “How many deals actually close at an event?” I don’t have exact numbers and it might be rare for someone to sign, seal and deliver immediately on-site, but closed business is still a goal and success metric we’ll be using for this event.

Just like any other marketing activity that we can attribute (think email, social, ads), we can track the influence that this event series has on a prospect further engaging with us and ultimately converting to a customer.

The kickoff to our event series is in a little less than two weeks! We’ll continue to post updates here about progress toward our goals, both for this event and for our overall business.

The Museum of Ice Cream is not a museum. And despite its gift shop—which sells everything from pink journals to $149 “self-love pinky rings”—it’s not a store. It’s also not a confectionery, even though ice cream, cotton candy, and other treats are available to visitors as they wander through the exhibits.

So what, exactly, is the Museum of Ice Cream?
According to Maryellis Bunn, MoIC’s co-founder and creative director, it’s an experience.

Bunn is pushing boundaries and blurring lines. MoIC doesn’t fall into any pre-defined categories about how square footage, time, and money can or should be used. Her goal is not to push a tangible product or provide an interactive history lesson. The Museum of Ice Cream’s mission is “to design environments that bring people together and provoke imagination.” It’s a new kind of goal—one in which the experience is not a means to an end, but the end in itself.
Businesses and organizations will, of course, always run experiential and event marketing campaigns in order to reach larger goals that drive business results. But regardless of the purpose, size, or scope of our events, there’s something for all of us to learn from MoIC’s success.

The first major takeaway is that people crave experiences. The Museum of Ice Cream doesn’t have a permanent location, but instead has opened extended pop-ups in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, all of which have been wildly successful. Their first exhibit, for which they made thirty thousand tickets available, all priced between $12 and $18, sold out in under a week. They’re now in San Francisco and on their third iteration of the “museum,” and tickets are selling—quickly—for as much as $38. Demand is so high that they just extended the duration of their San Francisco pop-up.

But people aren’t clamoring for a ticket because they crave any experience. The MoIC is setting a new standard for what experiences can and should be, and Bunn is clearly onto something. Whether you’re on a shoestring budget or have the ability to go big, anyone running an event or experiential marketing campaign should aim to incorporate elements or ideas from the Museum of Ice Cream into their own projects. Here are the MoIC takeaways I found most compelling for marketers:

Appeal to people’s emotions first.

The Museum of Ice Cream isn’t about ice cream. There might be a few Google-able, one-off facts about the treat scattered throughout the museum, but MoIC is less about ice cream as a subject and more about ice cream as a feeling. As Bunn told NY Mag, everyone “has an ice cream story… Ice cream is just a way to get people in the doors and feel safe.”

Everyone loves ice cream—but more importantly, everyone has nostalgic attachment to their memories surrounding ice cream. Bunn and her co-founder settled on ice cream as a broader theme for their exhibit in order to appeal to the ubiquitous emotion and nostalgia surrounding the frozen treat and get people in the door—and it worked.

The point isn’t that marketers should arbitrarily choose something unrelated to their organization and build an event around it—but we can’t make events (or any marketing content) just about our product. As Simon Sinek’s popular TED Talk and book makes clear, we have to start with the why. People are immediately drawn into the why of your company or product than the what or how—and this is something Bunn and her team have drawn on to build their success.

Create an immersive experience.

The walls at MoIC are plastered in various shades of millennial pink, and exhibits feature everything from pools of rainbow sprinkles to unicorn sculptures.

In a feature about MoIC, a reporter at Mercury News explains that guests “wander through the technicolor maze into rooms like the Gummi Bear Garden, the Cherry Room with cherry sculptures the size of small hippos, where you’re handed a wisp of cherry-flavored cotton candy. There’s a rock cave, where ‘Ally Mode’ passes out strawberry Pop Rocks: ‘Freshly mined from the cave!!’” And it goes on and on.

Again, the point is not to create an experience as outlandish as MoIC—but anyone hosting an event should aim to create an immersive experience. There should be a noticeable difference in atmosphere when people step into a venue. The more senses you’re able to engage, the easier it’ll be to do this.

Little things like background music, lighting, and any food or drink you’re offering (and how you serve it) can go a long way. You want your attendees to feel like they’re part of an experience, not just standing in an event venue. The more you’re able to accomplish that, the more likely it is that you’ll create an experience people will want to talk about, and one that they’ll remember.

Remember that people have short attention spans.

I was surprised to learn that a visit to the Museum of Ice Cream is designed to last 45 minutes. Some people probably spend more time waiting in line than they do inside.

But Bunn was extremely intentional about creating a shorter experience—it’s part of her plan to optimize MoIC for today’s world where everyone feels busy and attention spans are short. Remembering her day-long trips to Disneyland as a child, Bunn told NYMag that her “generation doesn’t want to spend six hours doing anything. I love Disneyland… but it’s not for today.”

The takeaway for marketers: Don’t feel pressure to create a longer experience simply to make it longer. Make sure your attendees will get the most out of each minute spent at your event, but don’t make it longer than necessary. If you’re hosting a longer conference, keep people engaged by breaking up the day into small chunks.

If you want people to share their experience, give them something shareable.

So many events today hope to generate social media impressions simply because they tell people to share their experience on social media.

Unless it’s gimmicky, encouraging social shares probably won’t hurt, but it also won’t go very far if there isn’t anything interesting to share.

The Museum of Ice Cream has mastered the art of creating shareable experiences. On Instagram alone, #museumoficecreamhas over 87,000 impressions and #moic has over 25,000. Everyone from Gwenyth Paltrow to Jay Z and Beyoncé have Instagrammed their visits to MoIC.

It makes sense—built into the nature of MoIC is that it’s optimized for Instagram. Where else would someone find a pool full of rainbow sprinkles to take a selfie in? But they also don’t make a gimmicky play to encourage visitors to share their experiences. People want to share them because MoIC is different, and the exhibits make it easy for them to create their own engaging content.

Not all events have to be optimized for Instagram, though, and you don’t need crazy installations for people to want to share their experiences. As long as your event’s content—whether it’s an art installation or a panel discussion—is high-quality, people will want to share it. People want to be online and offline. If you give them the opportunity to share something unique across their social media channels, they’ll do it.

The Event Farm marketing team is getting ready to host an event series. As our CRO, Chad, likes to say, it’s an exercise in eating our own dog food. The marketing team prefers to think we’re sipping our own champagne.
Either way, we’re using our tech to build an event marketing campaign, and we want to share our process and give some insight into how we’re thinking about our own events. (PS—we’d love to hear how you’re thinking about yours.)

We’ve got a marketing team of three, and none of us is a dedicated event marketer. Even though our jobs require that we think about event marketing every day, the idea of actually hosting an event has seemed like a huge undertaking in the face of our other responsibilities.

But we’ve experienced firsthand the impact events can have on building and growing a business, so we wanted to seriously ramp up and expand our own event marketing strategy. A few weeks ago, we finally set a date and turned the idea into reality—and so far, the most difficult part of the process was taking the initiative to just start.
We weren’t initially planning to host a series, but we quickly realized that our broader event theme lent itself well to a multi-event campaign. Once we settled on the idea of hosting a series ourselves, I started wondering why anyone would host a single, one-off event.

Yes, more events might mean more overall work. But on average you’ll put in less work per event if you do it right. And you won’t sacrifice the quality of your events or the impact they’ll have on your business. I think the opposite is true—each event will become better because you’ll be able to refine your strategy, and a series will build the kind of momentum for your business that a single event simply can’t accomplish (unless we’re talking about a huge, industry-leading conference like Dreamforce or INBOUND).

Even if you’ve never hosted an event, planning a series of small-to-medium sized events is completely achievable. Making the commitment to get a series up and running will probably be the most difficult part of the process. Once you’ve done that, you can go through the steps I’ve outlined below to make sure you’re laying a solid foundation that you can leverage for all of the events in your series—not just the first.

Step 1: Decide who you want your audience to be.

Marketing teams already have established audiences, but your event series will be most successful if you build it around a specific subset of your audience. Whether it’s a blog post, an email, or an event, people respond best to messaging and content that’s highly relevant to them. Planning an event is so time-consuming that you might be tempted to build them around broad topics relevant to large groups of people. But unless you’ve got the resources and bandwidth to host large conference, it’s better to choose a smaller, more specific group of people and build an event series that is highly relevant to them.

How we’re doing it: At Event Farm, we build event marketing software, so our broad target audience is mostly made up of marketers. But a good chunk of our customer base and audience is millennial women, so we’re catering our series to them.

Step 2: Choose a broad and timely topic for your series, then break it down into specific subtopics.

Once you know who you’ll be talking to at your events, you can decide what you want to say to them. Ideally, you’ll choose a broad theme or topic that appeals to your audience and is also timely and contextualized within larger industry or cultural conversations. Once you’ve defined that topic, break it down into more specific subtopics that’ll guide the content for each of the individual events.

Choosing specific subtopics for each event will help you in a couple of ways:

• 1) The content of each event will be different and fresh. The goal of hosting an event series is not to spew the same content over and over again; it’s to explore differnet questions with in the context of a larger topic of interest.
• 2) You’ll be able to cater each event to an even more specific subgroup of the audience you’ve already defined. This’ll help you take a more strategic approach to event marketing, and will make the event experience more relevant and enjoyable for each member of your audience—which will ultimately leave them with a more positive impression of your brand.

How we’re doing it: To cater to our audience of millennial working women, we’re building our series around the theme of women crushing it at work—and we’re calling the series Women Crushing It Wednesday. The theme is highly relevant: it has (unfortunately) taken centerstage in recent cultural conversations that have required women (and men) to defend the value of contributions that women make at work.

But the goal of each event is not to rehash the larger conversations taking place. We want to champion women, give them a platform to share their ideas and expertise, and create a space where they can learn from each other so they can continue to crush it at work. By contextualizing our series within the larger cultural conversation, however, we’re drawing on the energy that already exists around this topic, and bringing our own spin to it.
For each individual event, we’re choosing a different topic to focus on in order to create content that is more targeted and specific. For our first event, we’re focusing on the intersection of community-building and technology—which is still a broad topic, but one that will produce intersting discussion among our attendees and panelists, most of whom work in different capacities in customer-facing positions.

Step 3: Find badass panelists.

For our series, we’ll mainly deliver content through panel discussions. Each event will start with a 45-minute happy hour that’ll lead into an hour+ of panel discussion and Q&A—so for events like ours, panelists can really make or break the attendee experience.

We’re going to write another blog post about how we managed our panelist outreach (which will also include a Q&A with one of our awesome panelists), but for now I’ll briefly walk through some of the main things we thought about as we were forming our panel:

• 1) This is obvious: We wanted to make sure each woman had a proven track record of success so she could share her expertise with our audience.
• 2) This was more difficult: We wanted our panelists to be similar enough that they could each expertly speak to the event’s topic, but different enough that they wouldn’t all have the same perspective. We don’t want our panel discussion to become an echo chamber; we want to create room for debate around questions that really don’t have one right answer.

Step 4: Start creating everything you’ll need for event promotion.

When you’re creating email invitations and the registration site for your first event, create something that you’ll want to repurpose for each of the events in your series. This’ll help your events stand together as a cohesive series in the minds of your attendees, and it’ll also save you time. For our event, for example, we might tweak our marketing material, but we’ve set it up so we can simply hit a “duplicate” button within the Event Farm platform and quickly be up and running for the next event in our series.

Also, don’t be afraid to create a brand for your events that stands apart from your company’s brand. If you’re targeting a specific subset of your overall audience, brand your event in a way that will best speak to them.
For our WCW event series, we used bold, feminine branding for all of our event outreach—and it looks nothing like Event Farm’s typical branding. We did this to create a more personalized and relevant experience for our target audience, and we still included our logo across all of our event materials so people still know that it’s coming from us.

Step 5: Segment your guest list.

We’re huge proponents of guest list segmentation, and I don’t think enough marketers think through this crucial step. I recently wrote an entire blog post about it, but here’s the short version: If you’re not segmenting your guest list, you’re not setting yourself up to collect accurate or actionable event data, you won’t understand the holistic impact your event has on your business, and you’re not approaching events as strategically as you should be.

Within the Event Farm platform, we were able to set up several specific guest lists that feed into our overall list for the event. This is how we divided it up:

• Customers
• Prospects
• Public registration
• Friends and family
• Specific guest lists for each of our panelist

Here’s why we did it: We will be able to quickly and truly understand the impact our event has on our business. And by the way—we’re also able to create more customized event invitations and registration processes for each group on the list.

For this specific event, we’re hoping to engage with customers, influence prospects, and generate leads. We already have the contact information for customers, prospects, friends and family, and each of the panelists’ guests. Because we have their email addresses, they’ll receive email invitations and will go through a more customized registration process. As they RSVP to the event, we’ll not only see a running total for the number of registrants, but we’ll also be able to see how many people from each segment are registering. We’ll know which group the event resonates with most, and we’ll have data to tell us who might require more outreach if we want each group to have a presence at the event.

As for the leads we’re hoping to generate, we obviously don’t have their contact information and cannot send them an email invitation. But for anyone who uses a URL link to land on our registration site—and not an email invitation—a public registration form will show, and we will be able to clearly see how many new leads are making up our total event registration count.

All of this segmented data will not only be useful before the event, but will become extremely valuable during and after. As we check people in, our check-in app will give us real-time updates about how many of our attendees are from each specific segment of our guest list, and the post-event data will allow us to analyze how each specific segment helped us reach a particular business goal.

If you’ve made it this far reading about guest list segmentation, you’re a champ—but it’s a super important topic if you want to be data-driven.

Step 6: Send invitations, and immediately start planning your next event.

Go back to the second step and start planning the next event before the first one is over.

Technology is shaping the way we do business, and smart tech relies on good data—the more the better. As I outlined in the first post of this series, event marketers need to ensure that they have processes in place that will make them smarter today and simultaneously set them up for success in the future. The best way to do that is to collect data.

As a marketer myself, I realize that the push to become data-driven is much easier said than done. On a day-to-day basis, I’m lucky if I think about how being data-driven today will help me next month, let alone next year or the year after. And the campaigns I’m creating seem so qualitative in nature that it can be difficult to know the best way to assign data points to them.

Planning for the future and collecting data is especially difficult for event marketers. It’s difficult to plan for the future when that future relies on technology and event marketing tech is rapidly changing. And it’s difficult to tie event campaigns to something quantitative—because how do you assign data points to experiences and in-person interaction?

But technology is shaping the way we do business. As consumers become digitally fatigued and innovations in event tech continue to bridge the gap between the way we track online and offline campaigns, event marketing technology will become an increasingly important piece of the marketing stack. Event marketers need to become comfortable with tying their campaigns to data, and organizations need to understand the impact events can have as a marketing channel.

But what exactly does it mean to tie an event to data, and where should you start? Events require so much planning and detail-oriented work as it is—it’s difficult to add an additional step (or steps) that will allow you to put in place the processes necessary to capture event insights.

There’s a lot of advice I could give about how technology can help event marketers glean data from their in-person campaigns, but for now I want to focus on the necessary, foundational steps that will lay the groundwork for robust, data-driven event campaigns.

The first step is a shift in perspective. Marketers and event producers alike need to change the way they think about events if they’re going to make the most of them. The second step—and this is really important—is guest list segmentation.

A shift in perspective: events as a marketing channel, not one-off initiatives

The term “event marketing” is thrown around a lot, but I’m not convinced the broader marketing industry recognizes what event marketing is or could be for their organizations. Many organizations host events but often think of them as one-off initiatives that are siloed from the rest of their campaigns.

This isn’t the marketer’s fault. Given the innovations in marketing automation platforms over the last 10 years, a lot has quickly become possible for digital marketing initiatives. Streamlining processes and tying campaigns to data is easier than ever. Event marketing platforms are several years behind traditional marketing automation, but event tech is following the same blueprint—what’s possible to track with online campaigns will soon be possible for in-person events, and I think more is possible today than most marketers realize.

So given the breakthroughs in event marketing tech, how should we think about events? At its best, event marketing takes the creativity of event production and marries it with data-driven business strategy, much like content marketing has married the creativity of writing and design with marketing strategy. Events are the medium through which you market your business, and you can now measure the success of your events with the same metrics that you use to measure other marketing initiatives.

When you start to think about events this way, it’s easy to draw parallels between events and the rest of your marketing channels. What are the fundamental best practices you stick to with the rest of your marketing campaigns that can be applied to events? How can you integrate events with other marketing initiatives so your online and offline campaigns reinforce each other? How can you weave events into the buyer’s journey as high touch-points that will serve as indicators of how interested your prospect is? I’m not sure a lot of marketers think about events this way—and if they do, they’re not sure what initial steps they should take to start treating events the same way they treat other marketing channels.

Marketing best-practices and events: segmentation

Without guest-list segmentation, you won’t be able to build data-driven event campaigns, and most (if not all) of your event data won’t deliver the actionable insights you need to make your events and overall marketing strategy smarter.

Let’s say, for example, you host an event and invite a group of 1500 people. 1200 register, 800 attend.
When you’re not segmenting your guest list, you’re treating all of your invitees, registrants, and attendees the same. But that’s not how marketing and sales teams operate. Customer-facing teams spend most of their days finding the right people to talk to in order to drive business, and they also spend countless hours refining their messaging to find the best way to talk to those people.

If events are a high-touchpoint marketing channel, why aren’t organizations diligent about creating personalized and targeted outreach, in-event experiences, and post-event follow up for different types of invitees and attendees? Marketers and sales reps would never send a generic email to 20,000 contacts because they know different groups within their contacts care about different things—so why aren’t they thinking about event outreach the same way?

Let’s go back to the hypothetical event and this time imagine that you did segment your guest list. Of the 1500 people you invite, 500 are prospects, 500 are customers, 400 are your sponsors’ invitees, and 100 are friends and family. Wouldn’t you want your messaging for these groups to be different for your event outreach? Prospects and customers, for example, are going to come to your event for different reasons—and you’re going to have different goals for each of those groups. You’ll likely want to gauge interest among your prospects and teach them about your product, whereas you might want to provide a more VIP experience for your current customers and also educate them about the specifics of your product (and potentially drive upsell opportunities). Delivering targeted messaging to those groups will help generate more interest in your event and will like produce better results.
But the benefits of segmentation are far greater than simply delivering personalized messaging and registration experiences. Guest list segmentation serves as the foundation for all actionable data insights you might want to glean from your event.

Let’s pretend again that you don’t segment your guest list and invitee 1500 people, 1200 of whom register and 800 of whom attend.

Without guest-list segmentation, that’s the best data you’re going to get: 1500 invited, 1200 registered, 800 attended.

If you’re measuring the success of your events based on your ability to fill a room with 800 people, then this would be enough data for you. But marketers want to know a lot more than that. Businesses don’t run because they successfully fill a room—they run because they successfully fill a room with the right people.

If you segment your list of 1500 people into prospects, customers, friends and family, and sponsor guests, you’ll have much better insight into whether or not you filled the room with the people who will help drive business results for your organization. If conversion and attendance rates are highest among customers and prospects but low among your employees’ friends, you’re probably okay with that. If the opposite is true, then you’ll know that you need to change part of your process in order to do better next time.

Attendance rates, of course, are just the beginning. If you want to know, for example, the percentage of prospects who purchased your product after attending the event, you wouldn’t be able to pull this data if you hadn’t segmented your guest list. You’d likely be able to find the number of people who purchased after attending your event, but without knowing the total number of prospects who actually attended, it’d be impossible to understand how well your event influenced purchasing decisions.

When you start to think of your events as a high-touchpoint marketing channel, guest-list segmentation is an obvious first step to start treating them that way. A segmented guest list serves as the foundation all actionable event insights—it will not only make your event strategy smarter, but will make your marketing smarter as a whole.

The need for segmentation was the central pain point that Event Farm’s tech was initially built to solve, and it’s something we continue to build our platform around today. Get your segmentation right, and the rest of your data-driven event marketing strategy will follow.

Marketers seem puzzled by how to effectively market to millennials—or, at the very least, people are telling them they should be confused.

Forbes recently published an article with the headline: “Reaching the Unreachable: How Experiential Marketing Targets Brand-Savvy Millennials.” As a millennial myself, I don’t agree that we’re unreachable, but I do agree with a basic tenant of the article: that millennials have conditioned ourselves to ignore traditional forms of advertising—even online ads—and experiential marketing can help break through the noise.

The online world is cluttered with articles suggesting tips to reach millennials with experiential, a lot of them simply reiterating and reframing the same idea that hosting in-person experiences is a way to stand out among a deluge of online ads. While they’re not wrong, their advice is too vague to be actionable, too obvious to be helpful. Recognizing that experiential can reach millennials is the first in a long series of steps to building a successful in-person marketing campaign, so what comes next? Hosting just any event isn’t enough. What are the characteristics of an event that will not only draw millennials in the first place, but will also keep them coming back for more?

As a marketer, a millennial, and someone who regularly thinks about experiential and event marketing, I don’t think there are any quick tricks that will revamp the way organizations engage with my generation overnight. The idea of quick fixes and clickbait got us into this mess in the first place—so much online content over-promises and under-delivers that millennials are weary of everything. If you really want to grab the attention of millennials, experiential is a good place to start, but you also need to spend time to ensure that the in-event experience is meaningful and engaging. Making an event “instagrammable” is not enough, and making a campaign “authentic”—the catch-all word that seems to describes everything millennials care about—isn’t a bad idea, but what exactly does it mean, and how do you actually do it?

My guess is that marketers are overthinking the way they approach millennials. We may like our new tech toys and have more intuitive digital literacy than other generations, but what we’re really craving is substance in the content we consume, whether it’s online or offline. We expect technology to be an integrated part and facilitator of the experience, but we do not expect that it always take center stage.

Creating meaningful and informative experiences is not easy, but millennials see through anything that hints of gimmick. There is no one-size-fits-all approach marketers should take with their events, but to dig a little deeper into the underlying trends that draw millennials to certain events over others, I’m going to take a marketing lens to my own experiences at live events and think about what it is that draws me to them —and keeps me coming back. My goal is to make the advice specific enough to be actionable, but general enough that it’s applicable to a variety of experiential campaigns. Here we go.

On the last Monday of every month at 10:25 am, my calendar reminds me that at 10:30 I need to register for the upcoming Creative Mornings event. I watch my clock flip from 10:29 to 10:30, refresh my browser, and quickly enter my credentials to register. Four days later, I leave my apartment earlier than usual so I can spend two hours of my Friday morning at the event before going to work.

Long story short: the fact that I’m scheduling time in my calendar every month to register for an event and then wake up early on a Friday to attend means that Creative Mornings is doing something right. And by the way, these events are always packed—mostly with millennials—so it’s not just me.

If you’ve never heard of Creative Mornings, it’s a morning lecture series for the “creative community” with 175 chapters in cities around the world. On the last Friday of every month each city hosts a free event where they provide breakfast, coffee and a 40-minute talk. It’s not that every event blows me away, and I’ve even attended a couple that flopped. But I trust their brand enough to know that a flop is an anomaly.

Creative Mornings is not marketing a product or a service, so their morning lecture series doesn’t necessarily fall into the realm of experiential marketing. Nevertheless, they’re reaching and engaging with a large audience across the world, and they’re doing it consistently; any organization, regardless of size, industry, or experience with hosting events, should take a few plays from their playbook.

Here’s what I like most about Creative Mornings and the top takeaways for experiential marketers:

1. Create consistency, but deliver the unexpected.

How CM does it: Creative Mornings has a structured framework from which they do not stray: each city’s event takes place at the same time on the last Friday of each month, and the events all hold to the same format.
But each month they also feature a new speaker, at a new venue, in front of a different audience. By pairing consistency with the curiosity that comes with learning from a speaker with a different perspective, CM makes me feel like I know what I’m getting myself into while simultaneously allaying fears of boredom.

Takeaway for marketers: You don’t necessarily have to do anything crazy to get the attention of a millennial audience. The pairing of the familiar with the unexpected holds weight for a generation of people accustomed to the inconsistencies of reacting to whatever comes across their Twitter feeds or floods their inboxes.

There’s even evidence that this is part of the psychology behind what makes something popular. In Hit Makers, a book that uncovers the psychology behind why we like what we like, author Derek Thompson writes: “Attention doesn’t just pull in one direction. Instead, it is a tug-of-war between opposing forces… the love of new versus the preference for the old; people’s need for stimulation versus their preference for what is understandable.”
That doesn’t mean that you should follow the exact format CM has in place. Most organizations will not be able to host events on such a consistent basis, but events can and should play a more regular role in marketing campaigns. Once you set up a cadence for how you promote your event, the format of your event, and how frequently you host them, your audience will become more comfortable with and understand what to expect from the logistics of your event—which will, over time, help them focus more on the actual substance and content that your event offers.

2. Supplement the event experience with online content.

How CM does it: Creative Mornings records the talks at all of their events and uploads them to their website. They also have a blog and a podcast that features content similar to what you’d hear at one of their events, and they create email campaigns around all of their content to consistently engage with their audience and stay top-of-mind.

Takeaway for marketers: Most organizations already have an online presence that marketers should fully leverage to bridge the gap between online and offline content.

Since digital marketing channels have become the mainstay of most organizations, marketers often think of experiential campaigns as one-off events and don’t fully integrate them with their other marketing efforts. But when marketers start thinking of experiential as part of their holistic marketing strategy, they get more out of both their online and offline campaigns.

The team behind HubSpot’s INBOUND—an annual, multi-day event that hosted over 19,000 people last year—has realized the power of marketing initiatives that leverage both online and offline channels. During last year’s event, the team launched INBOUND Studios, a campaign in which they hosted 15-minute Facebook Live interviews with featured speakers. The live interviews not only helped the INBOUND team further engage with attendees, but also helped them reach a larger virtual audience.

Once the event ended, they continued the INBOUND Studios initiative by frequently posting interviews to their Facebook and YouTube pages, helping them keep the annual event top-of-mind throughout the year. “It’s become a way to engage with our own social network groups and one that we can use to grow the engagement there, and grow the presence of the event in people’s world beyond just those four days,” Laura Moran, INBOUND’s PR Manager, said.

Your event doesn’t have to be as big as INBOUND to pull off a similar strategy. Bridging the gap between online and offline content will consistently keep your brand and experiential initiatives top-of-mind, especially for a millennial audience that spends a significant amount of time in front of screens.

3. Consistently create high-quality content.

How CM does it: Creative Mornings invites a new speaker each month to present on a different universal theme—like “Happiness,” “Connect,” or “Chance.” Each speaker approaches the theme from her unique perspective and within the context of her specific creative discipline. But because of the universality of each theme, the talks remain applicable to an audience with a wide array of interests, and each talk combines the specific with the universal in a way that consistently results in high-quality and engaging content.

Takeaway for marketers: You can apply a specific lens to a universal theme for any discipline or type of content, and doing so often helps you offer a new perspective to a conversation that might be getting old. Rather than contributing to an echo chamber of ideas, create in-event content that contributes to a larger, relevant conversation in a fresh and interesting way. An honest and unique perspective will go a lot further than the reiteration of ideas that are already floating around online.

4. Create a local community that feels connected to a larger one.

How CM does it: Each month, all 175 of the Creative Mornings chapters adhere to the same universal theme, but the speakers at each event offer perspectives that often stem from their experience as part of their local community. As part of their online campaigns, Creative Mornings features talks from around the world, allowing their worldwide audience to compare how different communities approach the same universal topics.

Takeaway for marketers: Don’t be afraid to celebrate the city in which you’re hosting your event. Social media platforms make it possible for people across the world to connect with one another, but even millennials have reacted to the acceleration of globalization with a desire to celebrate their own community.

Whether you’re hosting a traveling roadshow series or a one-time event in your own headquarters, tie your event to the community in which you’re hosting it. Invite speakers or panelists who work locally, source catering from businesses founded in the area, or host the event in a well-known venue unique to the city. A millennial audience will appreciate feeling connected to a smaller community while discussing ideas that apply to a broader one.

5. Get the right people in the room.

How CM does it: The Creative Morning attendees are all connected through their broader interest in creativity, but everyone’s specific interests and disciplines vary widely. CM attendees are able to meet and interact with people who get excited about the same big ideas that they do, but each attendee approaches that broader interest through their own lens. In other words, the group is diverse enough to spark stimulating conversation, but similar enough to keep the conversations focused.

Takeaway for marketers: Getting the right people is important for two reasons: making sure your attendees can glean interesting insights from their conversations with each other, and making sure that your audience makes sense for your larger business goals. (To learn more about how Event Farm’s platform helps event marketers get the right people in the room, click here).

A millennial audience will especially appreciate being in a room full of attendees with whom they are excited to interact. They may spend a lot of time online, but that doesn’t mean millennials they prefer screen time to stimulating in-person interaction. If you can gather a group of people that feeds off of each other’s energy, you’ll create a loyal audience that will want to come back for more.