Events as lead generation
Using Events To Fill Your Pipeline
Events can be a superb way to educate, excite and generate new business enquiries from prospective customers. Discover how Twenty One Twelve drives commercial results for clients through carefully planned events.
Yet too few companies are prepared to take the risk and host their own events. And, of those that do, many fail to run events that achieve their wider business objectives.
The fact is, the work involved in creating and filling an event isn’t easy.
Driving real commercial results from your event is harder still.
That’s why so many companies use Twenty One Twelve Marketing to help structure and fill their events.
Underpinning our approach? You guessed it - collaborations.
Our event case studies all possess a theme of leveraging collaborations, whether they involve partnering a client with complementary brands, guest speakers or charities, the collaborations we create massively increase the success of our events - discover how below.
At 2112 we:
- Help you create a compelling angle for your event
- Make sure it’s full of target market individuals
- Create collaborations with complementary brands to share cost/marketing effort
- Help you drive as much value from attendees as possible
Selling high-ticket products or services?
Following our advice, many of our clients who sell high-ticket products or services use small, intimate events to help nurture and educate their prospects.
From round-table discussions featuring industry experts to Q&As with titans of industry, we’ve organised a wide range of compelling events and filled them with our clients’ ideal target market.
For example:
Twenty One Twelve has been involved in many events over the years, continually improving our processes for structuring each event to drive the best possible commercial results.
Below are a selection of some of our favourite events.
The Henley Coaching Partnership
Over the years, we’ve helped The Henley Coaching Partnership fill a number of virtual and physical events. One of our favourites was an intimate breakfast seminar with Nick Beighton, the former CEO of ASOS, who guided the fashion retailer from £200 million to £4 billion in turnover.
Unsurprisingly, this event was completely full: the 30 attendees convened at a five-star London hotel to enjoy networking, a sumptuous breakfast, and Nick Beighton in conversation with The Henley Coaching Partnership’s founder, David Haimes.
The event positioned The Henley Coaching Partnership as a real authority within the business coaching space, while giving their current clients a truly exclusive experience.
Based on the success of this event, we developed a new concept for The Henley Coaching Partnership called ‘Founder’s Club’.
Founder’s Club is a membership club for entrepreneurs which hosts four events a year. Each event focused on learning experiences and hospitality in fun environments; think Henley Royal Regatta, Cheltenham Festival or Goodwood Festival of Speed. Each member can invite a guest to each event, which helps prompt referrals into the club and towards The Henley Coaching Partnership’s main business.
Key learning:
Great, high-profile guest speakers can help you fill your event and build credibility.
Pavilion Foods, Henley-on-Thames
With summer fast approaching, Pavilion Foods in Henley-on-Thames asked us to help them build awareness and drive interest in their luxury hampers and corporate catering solutions.
To promote their services, we hosted an event for Pavilion at their deli. Firstly, we outreached to ideal target market individuals with an invitation. At minimum, you need to outreach to around 15 times the number of attendees you need to fill the event, which can be quite a challenge if you’re not a marketer.
Before the event, to ensure that people didn’t drop out, we required them to donate to a local charity, The Chiltern Centre, in order to secure their tickets.
The event also provided an opportunity to create compelling content around Pavilion’s offering. We then used that content across social media, on Pavilion’s website, and within communications, further promoting their offerings in the wake of the event.
This content included talking heads videos with recognisable attendees, as well as general event imagery and video, to help showcase Pavilion’s luxurious offerings.
Overall, the event was a success: Pavilion received numerous enquiries for both their luxury hampers and corporate catering services, and the event also served to increase their profile within the relevant circles.
Key learning:
Seeing is believing with many physical product or service-based businesses.
Lick Me Live’, Lick Me I’m Delicious
Total Signed Up: 327
Total Attended: 158
Lick Me I’m Delicious provides a plethora of wacky and wonderful contraptions for events – think flavoured bubble volcanoes, “tipsy” fountains and nitro ice cream machines!
After they approached Twenty One Twelve Marketing to help them engage event organisers who spend a minimum of £5k per event on entertainment, our team went to work.
Much akin to Pavilion Foods, seeing is believing with Lick Me I’m Delicious, and the Twenty One Twelve team understood that an event would be one of the best ways to generate interest in the business’ amazing contraptions.
With a goal of 150 attendees, we knew that we needed to attain over 300 registrations. We also needed to ensure those registrations were all target market individuals.
Our solution was simple: we asked people to “apply” to attend. Our application process used conditional logic which sent qualified attendees to a sign-up page, while politely declining applicants who did not meet Lick Me I’m Delicious’ criteria.
The result was a full room of event organisers and a very happy Twenty One Twelve client!
Key learning:
Don’t fill your event with just anyone! Careful qualification is crucial to ensuring that you generate quality leads post-event.
FOMO Mortgages’ Launch Party
Read the full case study here for how we helped FOMO Mortgages gain 15,000 new subscribers and a healthy pipeline in just 3 months.
To celebrate the official launch of FOMO Mortgages, we hosted a party to help drive awareness of the brand in the local areas of Henley-on-Thames and Marlow.
By collaborating with a variety of local brands, including Hobbs of Henley and Eight Ray Music, we created a launch event that was cost-effective, but also incredibly fun and memorable.
Hobbs kindly provided a gin and tonic to each guest and gave us complimentary use of their iconic steam boat, The New Orleans. Eight Ray Music provided a band for free, ensuring incredible entertainment for the evening.
These companies support FOMO because, woven into the heart of the brand, is a thoroughgoing commitment to philanthropy.
This included pledging to support local Henley-based charity, The Riverside Counselling Service, with the launch party – a commitment the firm has maintained in the years since, as Riverside Counselling receives a commission for every remortgage FOMO facilitates.
This charitable angle meant like-minded businesses wanted to support FOMO and collaborate with the brand.
By hosting a raffle on the boat and asking people to donate to attend the event, we raised nearly £3000 for the Riverside Counselling Service, all while promoting the FOMO brand to VIP individuals as we cruised the Henley Royal Regatta course.
Key learning:
Collaborations with like-minded brands, charities and individuals can be incredibly powerful in creating a successful event and reaching new audiences.
Beacon Software’s Events
Beacon approached us with a problem: their previous event had attained 50 registrations, but only 5 attendees.
Like many brands, Beacon hadn’t considered the fact that free events will suffer from an average dropout rate of 50%.
This means that you need to book twice as many tickets to achieve your desired amount of attendees.
By implementing a more robust pre-event marketing strategy, we were able to drive 150 sign-ups for Beacon’s next event, resulting in over 55 attendees
Other than simply increasing the number of sign-ups through adept marketing, we also focused on nurturing potential attendees in the weeks prior to the event, keeping them engaged with email reminders and calendar invitations – all of which worked to significantly decrease the number of dropouts.
Key learning:
Always aim for double the amount of registrations to attendees. Don’t worry, your event won’t end up being “too full.”
“Working with Twenty One Twelve was a great experience. Many thanks to Chloe, Henry and Georgina for all their efforts on our behalf and for overachieving the targets we set. It's been a pleasure working with you guys and look forward to doing so again sometime in the future.”
-Mike Townend, Beacon Co-Founder
BE Performance Coaching
BE Performance provide performance coaching to C-suite level executives, business owners, and major corporations. Their coaching staff is composed of seasoned entrepreneurs and elite athletes, including current Olympic champions and America’s Cup sailors.
BE asked us to create a lead generation strategy to both launch the new brand and fill the company’s first seminar at the Royal Automobile Club with relevant individuals – C-suite executives at major corporations, business owners with t/o above £2 million, and so on
As BE Performance had no clients and low brand-equity before we began to work with them, this required a strong outbound social media strategy
First of all, we helped BE create a brand narrative to ensure consistency through all external communications. After consolidating the brand’s tone of voice, refining their ideal target market and their origin story, we started to plan how to fill the initial seminar at the Royal Automobile Club.
Thanks to Twenty One Twelve’s strategy, BE acquired a major coaching account with one of the world’s largest companies, as well as several other strong accounts. For every £1 BE spent with Twenty One Twelve they received over £24 in return (lifetime value) as a result of their launch campaign.
The team decided on a five-part solution:
- Create thought-leadership content to build trust and engage the target market(s)
- Build specific audiences of “quick-win” corporate target markets that are active on Twitter & LinkedIn
- Utilise outbound and paid outreach to engage the audience in conversations on the above platforms
- Use Facebook’s advertising platform to reach business owners
- Use videographers & photographers at the seminar event to create instant testimonials from attendees, as well as a bank of content to be used across channels for future social media efforts. Such content would build social proof and trust within relevant audiences
Key learning:
Sometimes it pays to step back and refine other aspects of your marketing before embarking on a full campaign, this will ensure consistency in your communications.
“Twenty One Twelve have helped us with our marketing for over four years now. The team is not only a pleasure to work with but really gets us great results. I would not hesitate to recommend them.”
-David Haimes, BE Performance & The Henley Coaching Partnership
Henley Lockdown Fest
During Lockdown, Twenty One Twelve, alongside an enterprising group of businesses based in Henley-on-Thames, decided to create a virtual festival with the goal of raising money for charity while bringing some happiness into peoples’ homes.
There was no marketing budget for the festival, which meant the team had to get creative to reach as many local people as possible, while still raising awareness for the charities. To this end, our marketing tactics included competitions, interactive fundraising, influencer marketing and even the creation of an official Henley Lockdown Fest song
The entire event was streamed live and, due to social distancing, a small tech and broadcasting team delivered the events with former Olympic skier, Graham Bell, hosting the weekend.
Results:
- £23,000 raised
- Over 125,000 impressions from Henley Lockdown Fest’s social media accounts
- 36,100 data points collected for remarketing
- 21,000 unique website visitors
- Approx. 27,000 engagement actions driven from social media
- 36,960 3 second + video views on social media
- 2,000+ hours watched of the festival on social media alone
- Zero marketing budget
Key learning:
Budget shouldn’t determine the outcome. Guerilla marketing tactics and intelligent strategy can drive big results.
