Event Excellence and Authentic Activation – How to Drive Results from Your Events

At TicketManager’s Partner Summit in New York City this fall, sports and brand marketers joined a panel covering multiple aspects of maximizing opportunities to relevantly engage with fans and customers. Below, you can find the full panel video and highlighted remarks from the discussion.

On the topic of strategy…

Kady Stoll, Vice President of Global Partnerships, 3M

Our mission for our sponsorships at 3M is to fuel opportunities for growth. We do that in three ways, first by showcasing the breadth of our products, innovation and technologies, second by nurturing customer relationships through hospitality and third is elevate our brand awareness.

How are able to do that? One, we do that by creating memorable experiences where we are able to show how 3M empowers the modern life. The fact is that Post-It Notes and Command hooks are only about 20 percent of our business, so how do we infuse our other products and technologies into our partnerships and their different platforms? Two, hospitality—engaging with customers and potential customers on who we are and building trust with them. Three is the community aspect. All of our sponsorships have a community aspect, whether we are investing dollars into well-deserved nonprofits or giving them a platform to share the great work they are doing.

Cody Sims, Senior Director of Field Marketing, Cox

Cox Enterprises has multiple brands, including Cox Automotive—Autotrader, Kelly Blue Book and Mannheim—and Cox Communications, which offers internet services and cable. Most people think of Cox as internet, phone and cable TV, but we have moved far away from that. Our predecessors did such a good job of establishing that brand that in the markets we serve, 97 percent know the Cox brand, but they think about it incorrectly.

We have moved toward cloud services, private and public cloud integration, information as a service, etc. We have to teach our constituency and our customers about these new technology services.

We look at it from a brand positioning perspective. We are always looking for how we identify the exceptional value we are providing to our clients and what is the exceptional value they are providing to me. That is the alignment that we need to make sure we are getting the most value out of.

Our objective when it comes to events and ticketing is to ensure that we are maximizing the most valuable connection between those relationships which is people. If you can’t have a real connection with people your brand is going to dissolve. That is where we feel the events and hospitality space is critical to building those relationships.

We have created a strategy that says, “here are the top priorities in ranked order of what we are trying to do with the assets. First and foremost is to build revenue. If we can’t build revenue there is really not a return. Second, we are looking for influence, sometimes with government officials or other influencers within each of the markets we are serving, such as a president of the chamber of commerce or someone in economic development.

Carin Anderson, Senior Vice President, Corporate Partnerships and Retail Management, Minnesota Wild

Our team is empowered to take the time and sit down with our partners to find out what they need, why they need it and how we can best deliver, because the more we know the better we can do in making sure an activation works for the partner and for us. The more you do on the front end, the easier it will be to maximize the results.

That’s a differentiator for us in a crowded entertainment marketplace

On the topic of hospitality and entertainment…

3M

We have three different levels of customer. The Influencer, which would be the C-level. The Decision-Maker, which ranges from a manager to a director to a vice president. And the End User for our B2B products. A big thing for us is how to meet those different customers around their passion points. We have done everything from fishing tournaments and NASCAR to golf to technology-focused events like CES.

With the 3M Open, a PGA Tour event in July in Minnesota, we have created a fully immersive experience. We use our products to actually put on the PGA Tour event, showcasing the breadth of what we do.

We bring in our top six key stakeholders to the 3M Open: customers, suppliers and partners, government officials, media, community and employees.

It’s a “home game” for us, in our headquarters city of St. Paul. That allows us to engage internal key stakeholders across 3M and have customers meet with our product engineers, scientists and business leaders. We are able to bring them to our innovation center and have business meetings and cultivate relationships.

Cox

We have segmented all of our target markets similarly to 3M. We have the C-suite, vice presidents, directors and front line. We have a lot of B2B that we put into the event and hospitality space. But from a brand perspective, there are many things that our business units can do based on their different value propositions. We have to make sure that we have an event lineup that aligns with that.

For executive events, we have done things such as fly fishing in Scandinavia, hunting in Spain, Formula 1, Super Bowl and other top-tier experiences that are targeted to the C-suite. Then we have our sponsorships with teams like the Minnesota Wild and others, where we ensure we have bowl seats, club seats and suite seats so that we can stratify our target audience based how they are part of the buying committee and how they are helping us to move the brand forward.

On the topic of key components of a successful event strategy…

Cox

It starts with people. You have to understand their needs. If you don’t understand who your customer is or who your audience is, you’ve already lost. If you start there, it is much easier to understand what it is you are bringing that has value to them and how am I getting things out of the way that could impede the relationship, such as making sure you are always on time, that your information is accurate.

At one time, we would build large PDFs that had all of the detailed information about an event, which we would send to the guests. We have flipped that into TicketManager so that we have more dynamic content. When something changes, we can communicate that immediately to clients.

Another thing that has helped us a lot is the nomination process working through TicketManager. We now have an evergreen nomination site rather than trying to hurry up and get nominations in for a particular event. We have loaded into that insights and intent signals that are coming from some of our other CRM partners that allow us to see the hobbies of people in our buying committees, or other things they like to do. That allows us to recommend who we think should be invited and the reasons why, rather than having the salespeople tell us who they want to invite.

Minnesota Wild

I tell my team, don’t assume that the person you are working with to create an event strategy, whether that be a partnership activation, hospitality, etc., has done it before or knows how we do things. Ask a lot of questions and clarify to make sure everyone is singing from the same song sheet. That will get you off to the right start.

3M

Internally, it is very important to sell and educate your business leaders on what you are trying to do and how they can utilize the platform to drive opportunities for growth. Also, timing is critically importance to getting your acceptance rate up. Calendars fill up very fast. Invitations to C-suite individuals have to be sent at least eight months ahead of time. Finally, providing business value to the invite. It’s not about just coming to the 3M Open. We want you to come so that we can collaborate, we can connect with you, we can understand how we can help solve your problems and how we can grow together.

On the topic of challenges…

3M

Getting the right customer to the event. That is how you are going to extract the true business value out of the sponsorship, especially regarding hospitality.

Cox

We were seeing non-utilization of tickets in the 40-50 percent range. That is just throwing money out the window. The ability to sell tickets through TicketManager when we haven’t had anybody internally raise their hand for them by a certain time prior to the event has saved us so much money that it helps us to pay for all of our licensing.

On the topic of measuring success…

3M

We measure in five different areas. First is hospitality and activation—usage of the tickets, etc. Second is social media—impressions, engagement, views and sentiment. Third is media value—earned media impressions, placement, TV, radio, signage throughout the venue, etc. Fourth is brand health. We do brand intercepts before an event, so that we know how well someone knows 3M before they come to an event. And then we do post-event brand intercepts to see if they know us better or think of us more favorably. Fifth, and most important, is business return—the dollars both directly and indirectly associated with the partnership. We measure leads generated, stakeholder feedback through surveys sent one to two days after the event to our internal key stakeholders and to our customers who came. We also measure every customer touchpoint that we are able to get through that partnership. Not only is this crucial for our recaps that we send to our executive leadership to show the ROI, but as partnership contracts start to expire, it helps you to realize whether it is something that is worth the investment.

Cox

The question we need to answer is what behavior is attributable to a particular event or the use of a ticket. With our CRM tool, we are tracking all of our ticket use. We do a six-month prior and six-month lag to say what were the behaviors leading up to this and after this, including social media activity, LinkedIn posts and engagements and also anything that has to do with the opportunity—from top of the funnel awareness all the way down to conversion. Seeing what is happening to move them to the next step in the marketing funnel.

If I can prove those things, the ROI is actually happening. It’s hard to go from awareness all the way to revenue return. But if we can at least go from each step down to the next, then I know where my bottlenecks are and where I need to work to get to the next level.

Minnesota Wild

It’s critical for our long-term success with partners to be part of the ROI discussion. It goes back to understanding what their objectives are. That’s the first step in helping them be successful. And we are not successful unless they are successful.

We look to see if we have done something similar with another partner and whether we can share that knowledge and best practice, especially if it is a partner’s first time with a particular activation. Or we look to see what tools we have in our toolbox, whether it’s a mascot visit, swag or contact with our owner. What is it that is going to make a host or marketing partner shine to the people they are trying to be successful with?

That’s how we can directly impact their ROI or ROO. Also critical is the follow-up. Asking how things went, how we could have done better, what we should try next time, etc. If we are not part of the ROI conversation, it’s probably going to be a partnership that sunsets earlier than we want.