Transforming Events based Marketing to a Community Strategy.
Most channel partners focus on one type of marketing – events. Occasionally these are followed up by webinars. Most claim that when it comes to events they are good at the them and usually spend a lot of time explaining to me how much they get from them. No issues with this at all. However when I ask them questions about who participates, what effect it has on the business etc etc I don’t get clear answers.
So here are a few things to think about with your event strategy:
1/ Map your events to the desired audience. Most partners work out their calendar with individual manufacturers and don’t take a look at their overall picture. Doing this can be as simple as getting a white board with 3 layers of audience: CxO, Director and Technical and then putting sticky notes on each area.
2/ Realize that the wider you cast the net in trying to drive attendance, the lower level the audience will be. I, and my CxO colleagues, rarely if ever attend events greater than 5-15 people and usually only if we know the other people attending. The topic must be interesting but so must the attendee list.
3/ Focus on your objective rather than attendance – they are not a substitute for each other. Most marketing people especially inexperienced and junior people focus on attendance because its the easiest to measure and report – but they usually also have the sneaking suspicion that people are just coming for the food/drink.
Next……turning events from presentations into discussions……watch this space…
Duncan's Professional Blog 
Great points, all of them. I find that I’d rather have one key person attend an event then 100 of the wrong type of attendee. To enable just that I went from trying to promote a large crowd to more intimate CxO dinners. If I can get 5 decision makers, 1 industry expert and a couple of my executives around a table at a 5 star restaurant the networking/collaborating/brain storming is much more productive and relationship forming!