Where are you at with your events calendar for 2025? If you're not quite where you want to be, we have good news. It's still not too late to create a winning event strategy! (Technically, it's never too late, but we digress.)

To learn how other event marketers map out the coming year, Kelly Cheng, Goldcast VP of Marketing, interviewed Kayla Drake, Field Marketing Leader, and Megan McDonaugh, Senior Revenue Marketing Manager at Celigo, about best practices for 2025 planning and how to better plan and promote events and build a strong pipeline.

Read on to learn:

• Start from the top down
• Types of events to consider in your strategy
• What to look for in event partners
• Maximizing engagement across the event lifespan
• Watch the webinar for more examples of how to plan your year

Plus, you can watch the entire convo below!

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The best thing to do when you're mapping out your events for the year is to zoom way out and look at your overarching company goals. What do you want to accomplish in the next year?

Once you have that answer, then it's time to think about your ICP and target audience. Where will those people be over the next year? What events are they most likely to register for? What are the best ways to connect with them?

Starting from the top in this way gives you a North Star to work toward — your company goals, which should remain front and center as you plan individual events. You can always adjust course as the year unfolds, but you want your strategy to match the goals you identified, and this method makes it happen.

Depending on your goals, different types of events can help you reach your target audience. Here are some common event types to consider including in your strategy, as it makes sense:

• Webinars: The "Old Faithful" of virtual events, webinars typically run an hour or less and are great for bringing in attendees from across the globe.
• Field events: This could include in-person user groups, sit-down client dinners, and any other focused, high-touch event.
• Hosted events: These are the events you take full responsibility for, like an annual conference or summit.
• Partnered events: If you can find a complementary partner to go in on events with you, this can boost reach for both of you and help you connect with new audience members.
• Sponsorships: Celigo sponsors events like SuiteWorld and Shoptalk, meaning they financially support the event in exchange for visibility and access to attendees.

When you're deciding on what events to host, review historical data to find what's worked in the past. If you're seeing results from investing in a specific type of event, keep going with it! You can also build a heat map to identify where in the world your customers and prospects live, in order to come up with good locations for events.

There are obviously tons of potential partners out there, so how do you know who would be best to work with on an event?

First, you want to evaluate your strengths and expertise because your partner should have complementary skill sets. You never want to bring in a direct competitor, so knowing what you each bring to the table is key.

As an integration company, Celigo has many consulting partners who know the ins and outs of various integration challenges, which brings value to their shared audience.

Less is more when it comes to partners. You don't want to bombard your audience with a slew of companies that will also be following up with them after an event! Thoughtful curation is key; three or four partners for a Happy Hour event, for instance. (You also don't want to bring on competing partners so if you partnered with a company like Goldcast, you wouldn't also bring on Zoom.)

Finally, look for partners you want to grow alongside for the long haul. It takes time and effort to build relationships, and it doesn't make sense to put in that work if this isn't a partner you see a future with (solid advice for most relationships!).

To get the most out of your events, break the lifespan into three phases: pre-event, during event, and post-event — and be sure to give time and attention to all of the phases! Here are some things to think about, every step of the way.

Before the event, hone in on your internal stakeholders and amp up the resonance of your core messages. Is everyone aware of the message? Do you have stakeholder alignment? This is the planning phase where it's super easy to get swept away in logistical concerns, but be sure that fundamental messaging alignment is in place.

Megan assembles a cross-functional team of sales solution consultants, marketers, and partner relationship folks, and each of them gets a pre-event playbook that contains the following info:

Everyone hops on a call a couple of weeks before the event and talks through each item in the playbook:

• Logistics: Where is the physical booth? What things need to be taken care of to make this event successful? Plan meetings in advance whenever possible, and try to schedule on-site filming if you'll have people stopping by the booth that you can interview or get testimonials from.
• Roles & Responsibilities: Who will be scanning people at the booth? Who should different types of customers speak to? What about prospects?
• Messaging & Talk Tracks: If you have a new product, make sure that's in your talk track. Same goes for challenges that consistently come up; be sure you're speaking to those!
• Target audience: Who are you trying to connect with? What will you say to each segment of your audience? If there will be valuable leads at the event, equip your on-site folks with photos of them and background info to further those conversations.
• Partners: What is your channel partner message?
• Person in Charge (PIC): This might be your event manager, marketing manager, or someone else, but be sure everyone knows who to go to for questions and how to contact the PIC.
• Additional activities: These refer to client dinners you host with partners to connect with people in a deeper way.

You might also create a shared messaging group via Slack or WhatsApp so you can share each day's schedule with the group and proactively field off questions.

Another great tip is to reach out to the conference for a "blind attendee" list (which won't contain contact info) and use a tool like Apollo to enrich the data. Then, reach out to attendees and ask them if they'd like to get coffee or chat with you during the event, or just invite them to stop by and learn more about your brand.

If you're sponsoring an event, chances are most marketers you want to talk to are busy running their own booths. Megan makes it work by emailing people 1-2 weeks in advance and asking for their coffee/tea orders so she can stop by booths and drop it off. She calls this a "drive-by meet and greet" and it works well to lay the foundation for future convos.

If you're skeptical whether this works, Kayla is living proof that it does! She was working a trade show once and a vendor gifted her a "survival kit" filled with mints, Ibuprofen, and other items, and she reached out to them after the conference because the gesture stayed with her.

We mentioned this once, but get that on-site footage while you can! You can use testimonials and case studies for social media, paid ads, email marketing, website pages, and so much more. Try to set up brief interviews with people before the event, but you can also walk around during the event or grab impromptu footage when folks stop by your area. You can even just film event footage to use in a highlight or sizzle reel! Check out our Hot Takes series on YouTube for examples of how we did this at INBOUND.

PS: Not a pro videographer? No worries — Goldcast Content Lab can take your full footage and find the top moments for you! The tool is powered by AI and absolutely free to use; sign up below and give it a spin.

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Ideally, most of your post-event follow-up process is laid out before you even go to the event. Now, it's time to make things happen. Who is following up with who? What are the sales team's next steps after the event?

Here's how Kayla approaches this:

The actions differ based on whether the event was sponsored or hosted, but you can see that it's very clear what happens to a lead after an event.

Everyone receives an email within one day of the event, and then there are additional actions that take place in the following week, depending on the temperature of the lead. (Don't wait two weeks, or the leads will be cold.)

Remember that most people get a lot of emails after an event, so the more personalized you can make your messaging, the better. Have the on-site folks take detailed notes (or even video content!) you can use when crafting those messages to increase the chances people will open them and keep reading

Your event leads are gold, so don't let them sit untouched. This is the culmination of all of your investment! Be sure that every single person is followed up with in a timely manner and with personalized messaging.

We've covered a lot of helpful information surrounding event strategy, from using your company goals to guide everything you do to maximizing engagement before, during, and after your events. We hope you're inspired to dive more into the details of your own event strategy!

Don't forget to catch up on the full replay to get even more tips about planning your events for 2025 — including advice on how to navigate slashed event budgets. Visit the on-demand page below to catch up!

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