At a manufacturing industry roundtable during our last Eloqua Experience event, a major electrical component manufacturer shared their experience with mailing components as part of a very successful campaign. The part was inexpensive to manufacture and quite useless on its own but it appeared that allowing the buyer to actually touch the product increased marketing effectiveness by an impressive amount.
A large industrial equipment manufacturer was quick to point out that this was impossible for them so this got us thinking about the use of in-person and virtual events as a way to allow buyers to experience products. We already knew that the Software industry and the Services sector with their immaterial products would rely heavily on virtual events but we wanted to see how Eloqua customers in the manufacturing industry would compare.
The chart shows the use of Event related marketing programs by all Eloqua customers, irrespective of their use of the event module, for the period of Nov 2012 to October 2013 – Only the top 10 industries are shown and Nov and Dec results were moved to the right of the chart for readability.
Seasonality is less significant than we would have expected and it appears somewhat constant across industries. While the chart does not look at attendance, one would assume that most organization would avoid running events when audiences are less available as is the case for example with holidays and end of year activities in December.
We were pleasantly surprised to see how manufacturers compared to other industries with an average of nearly 2 events per month for High-Tech Manufacturers, not that far behind software manufacturers.
The overall averages are however still low and there is plenty of evidence from Eloqua Markie ‘Event Nirvana’ finalists and winners of the great benefits of running events. In fact nearly half (7/15) Event Nirvana Markie finalists have been manufacturers with most of them running over a hundred events per year.
As a manufacturing marketer, have you looked at how events can be used to bring your customers and products closer?
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