Certification events are a great opportunity to take a customer relationship to the next level. Whether you’re turning awareness and interest into conversions, or existing customers into loyal partners, an event’s mutually beneficial face-time can go a long way for your certification organization.
Depending on what kind of event you’re putting on, you can likely target broadly across the certification buyer’s journey. For instance, showing off new offerings can appeal to new and repeat customers alike, and educational sessions can turn users into power users while strengthening their relationship with your certification organization.
Know your goal(s)
The first step to holding a successful certification event is knowing what success would look like to your organization. You can have multiple goals, but they should be clearly defined, actioned, and reported on. Let’s say you’ve updated your certification standard and want attendees to register for your updated training to get their questions answered. Or maybe you want them to sign up for a study kit so you can keep the conversation going. Notice that those are tangible, quantifiable goals. Early on, it’s important to establish and benchmark your goals.
Maybe you want to come away from this event with 20 strong leads for your updated certification training offering and 40 sign-ups for your study kit. It can be worthwhile to measure these as a percentage of actual, day-of attendees, but you should set a solid number too. You don’t want to let your marketing strategy off the hook if attendance is lower than expected, because that’s a valuable data point but why it’s also important to consider using a solid target number along with percentages.
One effective approach that may sound counterintuitive is to consider mapping your event to a specific offering. This can be a helpful way to ensure you always have a strong business case for your certification event while also providing a coherent throughline. While those are important to have, the most essential ingredient for a successful certification event is attendee value.
People need a reason to attend. There needs to be something in it for them. And “they get to learn about our great new product!” isn’t enough on its own. That said, “making our new product easier to navigate for greater ROI” is. These benefits are what you’ll want to lead within your marketing efforts, even for events that are explicitly tied to a particular product or service.
Once you know what your event is about and what it’s trying to accomplish, it’s time to get the right people there.
Getting Them in the Door
So how will people find out about your event?
If the event is larger, paid, and more top-of-funnel-friendly – with introductory sessions and potential discounts for attendees – you may want to do some traditional advertising. But for many events, the bulk of your outreach will be direct. Whatever way you plan to reach potential attendees, you’ll need to identify target audiences.
In most cases, you’ll want to invite people in roles that are either most involved with the implementation of your certification, or decision-makers who determine whether or not to enroll. From there, it’s important to ask: Which customer personas map to these roles? How do those personas’ common pain points and concerns map to your event’s ability to speak to them?
This leads us to the first mention of data quality (but not the last!).
With a robust data approach, you can target potential attendees more effectively. For example, if someone previously attended another event based on a safety certification you offer—but hasn’t earned the certification—this could be an opportunity to entice them to learn more about what’s new or different at this new gathering. Contacts and website visitors who have shown interest in the certification you’re focusing on could get a lot out of learning more. And your event just might be the perfect place for them to do so.
Here’s our tip: think about what makes for an ideal attendee, and then find ways to identify contacts who meet those criteria.
One criterion that you shouldn’t overlook—and that may not always be part of your email campaign considerations—is location. If your half-day event is in Seattle, you can leave your Berlin contacts off the email list. Your Denver ones, too, in most cases.
Many of the questions above drive toward the same marketing activity: Segmentation. You must know what about your event appeals to different segments of your audience. When you identify target customer personas for your certification event, ask what that persona wants to get out of attending. Consider creating or leveraging tokens to mark their reason for attending and what their desired outcomes are. Then, tailor your outreach to speak directly to what they need to get them through the door.
Using registration platforms like Eventbrite can help you keep track of registrants as they come in. With the right experts in your corner, you can sync Eventbrite with email marketing platforms like HubSpot to automate follow-up. This includes communications like date-and-time reminders and pre-event resources, along with any other necessary details that need to be communicated.
By having attendees register for specific sessions within your event – via Eventbrite or through onsite badge taps – you can keep track of who attended what and bring that data directly into HubSpot. This will be extremely valuable later on when we talk about following up.
HubSpot’s custom object tool can help make this process more robust for larger events. Through custom objects, you can create workflows to keep your HubSpot database automatically updated with information about which sessions attendees sit in on, their sponsorship level at the event, and even which booths they visited and “tapped in” at in an expo hall.
Knowing who attends your sessions can help refine your approach to events and improve your follow-up with individual attendees. You can even leverage personalization to build your relationships and speak directly to what they indicate they’re interested in. With data tokenization, you can protect attendee privacy while maintaining an incredibly useful, informative contacts database.
Follow-up and go-forward
Imagine this: All of your speakers showed up prepared, on time, and ready to wow. There were no PowerPoint issues, and everyone loved the lunch options you provided. Your event is feeling like an unmitigated, all-around success! Congratulations!
But the real test of success comes after the event. Remember when we talked about setting and quantifying goals? Now it’s time to make those conversions.
Sure, some attendees will buy in and take your preferred action immediately on-site. But you can pick up more conversions if you stick with it after your certification event. This is where the follow-up drip begins. Typically, this starts with an automated email thanking them for coming, but you have to make it one that’s worth opening. Just like you needed to make your event worth attending! Part of making your emails worth opening is anticipating questions the recipient might have and proactively answering them. Use your segmentation data from the event to provide resources relevant to what your attendees showed an interest in. For example, send them the slide deck from the session(s) they attended.
And, of course, be sure to include a link with the call-to-action that addresses your quantifiable goal. (TIP: Keep your database up to date, so when an attendee takes the desired action following your event, their entry is marked accordingly so they stop receiving follow-up emails.) Further follow-ups can include additional resources, such as links to relevant pages on your website. Those linked pages could include a slide-out call-to-action to schedule time with you or your team to discuss further enrollment in your certification.
Thanks to your efforts of collecting, understanding, and utilizing data, you’ll have a better grasp of what value each recipient is looking for you to deliver, and what kinds of calls-to-action appeal to them most effectively. That can help inform the cadence of your follow-up, showing when specific recipients are most likely to read and respond. A good rule to live by is your first follow-up communication should go out within 24 hours of the end of the event. Additional follow-up cadence depends on a variety of factors, but when in doubt, try a week out.
Don’t be afraid to “tier” your attendees for follow-up. When it comes to potentially major customers or long-term partners, the best approach may be to arm a sales rep with your event data and have them contact the attendees directly. This white-glove treatment can be a major difference-maker, especially when sales reps can work with data-driven insights.
Make Your Certification Conference Work for You
The information you collect before, during, and after an event can help you refine your approach to creating conversions after your event. It can also help you refine your approach to ones in the future as you get a stronger sense of what worked and what could be improved upon.
In the case of events where you targeted people who showed interest but decided not to work with you, these metrics can grant insights into the effectiveness of your approach to re-marketing—which will come in handy for your next event.
Setting goals, detailing your event’s value, setting up personas, and tracking attendee participation will help you build an event that will deliver on your customer’s expectations and hopefully grow your certification community for years to come.
