Picture this: Your business launched an event last year and it was a resounding success, receiving 150 attendees. This year, your target is 200 delegates (about 30% increase), and senior management believe that if you "do some clever marketing" and "throwing some additional money at it" your could easily reach 300. That’s right; the boss has just raised the bar by forecasting a 100% increase in event attendees. Simply because there is a good feeling about it.

Salesforce recently published their 2015 report on the current state of marketing, and naturally it has given me plenty of food for thought. The report is a thorough and comprehensive overview of what marketers say about their budgets, priorities, channels, strategies and metrics for 2015. Yes, it goes into great detail, but there are definitely a lot of valuable insights in there for curious marketers. With a focus on the UK, and B2B marketing primarily, I’ve summarised what I believe to be the salient points.

If you read this blog, you know my view on how event marketers use and abuse email marketing, and I’m afraid to say it hasn’t altered just yet. If anything, I realise that there are several fundamental forgotten points that I just had to make. If you’re a B2B event industry insider, and you use email as your main marketing channel please listen up, because your approach so far is not good, not because I say so, just because click-through rates in our event industry are appalling!

Email marketing click through rates in the events industry range from 0.5% to 1.5%

Video for B2B events is a must, and any organiser who doesn’t think to budget for it and prioritise its importance will likely regret it when the sales and marketing teams come to sourcing or generating new leads next time around.

But how exactly do you make the most of that conference footage? And how can you tell its effectiveness as a lead generation tool? Well, I’ve been keeping an eye on one company in this arena that is driving the industry forward in a very innovative and cool way. CatchTalk.tv has built its own platform for event companies to showcase conference video on, and not only that, but it can demonstrate the ROI behind it too. 

Event marketers like to think they’re pretty savvy when it comes to all things email-related. However, from my experience, most of them seem to forget to leverage one fundamental (and free) marketing channel that could be put to use in growing awareness of their brand, their blog and ultimately their own profile. What is it, you ask? The personal auto signatures, of course!