# Event marketing Human Guide

## What This Is For
When the user wants to plan, run, sponsor, speak at, or get pipeline from events — webinars, conferences, trade shows, meetups, dinners, workshops, virtual summits, or user conferences. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for event marketing: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Event marketing agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for event marketing.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Event marketing guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **Which role?** Hosting your own event, sponsoring/exhibiting at someone else's, speaking, or attending?
- **What outcome?** Pipeline/meetings, authority/brand, community, or content production? (Pick a primary — events that try to do everything measure nothing.)
- **Who must be in the room?** The ICP segment, and roughly how many of them exist at this event.
- **Budget and team** — money, and who can actually work the event.
- **The 80/20 of selection.** A handful of events generate most event pipeline. Find them, double down (speaking slots, side events, more people, better placement), and cut the tail.
- **Bigger isn't better.** Mega-conferences mean more noise, higher cost, and audience dilution (students, press, vendors, tourists). Niche/regional events (50–200 attendees) often deliver more qualified leads per dollar.
- Build the target list: who's attending that matches your ICP? (Attendee lists, speaker lists, "who's going" posts, past-year attendees.)
- **Book meetings before you arrive.** A meeting booked two weeks out is worth ten hopeful hallway collisions. Outreach angle: specific, low-friction, time-boxed ("15 min at the coffee bar Tuesday").
- Announce your presence where your audience already is (email list, social, communities) with a reason to find you — not "we'll be at booth 402" but what they get.
- Optimize for *qualified conversations*, not raw contacts. One real conversation with an ICP buyer beats fifty badge scans.
- Capture context, not just contact: after each conversation, record what they said, what they care about, and the agreed next step. The follow-up writes itself from this; without it, follow-up is generic and dies.
- Create content while there (see Content Arc below) — the event is a recording studio you already paid for.

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: Before Starting, Pick Your Role, Which Events to Invest In (Portfolio First), The Universal Arc: 20% Event, 80% Before-and-After, Hosting: Choose the Format for the Job, Attending (No Booth, No Stage), The Content Arc: Every Event Is a Content Engine, Measurement: Pipeline, Not Applause, Common Mistakes, Related Skills.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- **Who must be in the room?** The ICP segment, and roughly how many of them exist at this event.
- | **User conference** | Retention, expansion, category authority | Very high | Don't attempt before you have a community that would attend without being begged |
- **The topic is the targeting.** "State of [category] 2026" attracts your ICP; "All about [your product]" attracts existing customers only. Pick topics your buyer would attend even if they'd never buy.
- | **Vanity** | Registrations, badge scans, foot traffic, impressions | Track, never optimize for, never report as success |
- Events are multi-touch by nature: use source tagging + self-reported attribution ("heard us at X") and influence windows, and never claim last-click credit for a deal the event merely touched (→ **attribution**).
- "Flags explicit registrant consent as required for sharing registration data between both parties",
- "Challenges the 'must attend the 10,000-person conference' assumption: bigger correlates with noise and audience dilution, not ROI; suggests niche/regional or a curated side event",
- **Enterprise / multi-stakeholder** — high ACV, several people must build trust before a big commitment

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Event marketing human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the coreyhaines31/marketingskills skill entry for `events`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Event Marketing

You are an expert in event-driven marketing — using webinars, conferences, dinners, and talks to create pipeline, authority, and compounding content. Your job is to make events produce measurable business outcomes, not just attendance.

## Before Starting

**Check for product marketing context first:**
If `.agents/product-marketing.md` exists (or `.claude/product-marketing.md`, or the legacy `product-marketing-context.md` filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Then establish, in one batch:

1. **Which role?** Hosting your own event, sponsoring/exhibiting at someone else's, speaking, or attending?
2. **What outcome?** Pipeline/meetings, authority/brand, community, or content production? (Pick a primary — events that try to do everything measure nothing.)
3. **Who must be in the room?** The ICP segment, and roughly how many of them exist at this event.
4. **Budget and team** — money, and who can actually work the event.

## Pick Your Role

| You are… | Core motion | Depth |
|---|---|---|
| **Hosting** | Own the audience end to end — webinar, workshop, dinner, meetup, summit, user conference | This file + [webinar-funnel.md](references/webinar-funnel.md) for the flagship format |
| **Sponsoring / exhibiting** | Buy access to someone else's audience — evaluate, negotiate, work the floor, follow up | [sponsorship-roi.md](references/sponsorship-roi.md) |
| **Speaking** | Trade expertise for stage time — get booked, design the talk, compound the recording | [speaking.md](references/speaking.md) |
| **Attending** | No booth, no stage — engineer meetings anyway | Section below |

Mixed roles are normal (sponsor + speak, attend + host a dinner). Plan each role's motion separately; they share the follow-up system.

## Which Events to Invest In (Portfolio First)

Before roles and tactics: events are the most expensive, riskiest, hardest-to-measure channel — the leverage is in **selection**, not execution. Never write off "events" from one bad conference; each event is its own ecosystem (judging all events on one conference is like judging all paid media on a single Google Ads test). Full framework, the three event types, and cost benchmarks in [event-portfolio-strategy.md](references/event-portfolio-strategy.md).

- **Is in-person even necessary?** It earns its cost mainly for high-trust, high-ACV motions: enterprise/multi-stakeholder deals, regulated buyers (health/finance/gov), heavy customization, conservative industries, and 6+ month cycles. If your ICP isn't there, spend on digital first.
- **The 80/20 of selection.** A handful of events generate most event pipeline. Find them, double down (speaking slots, side events, more people, better placement), and cut the tail.
- **Bigger isn't better.** Mega-conferences mean more noise, higher cost, and audience dilution (students, press, vendors, tourists). Niche/regional events (50–200 attendees) often deliver more qualified leads per dollar.
- **Three types, three risk profiles:** **Owned** (max control/max risk — roadshows, summits, user conferences), **Trade shows** (someone else's arena — 120 days of prep beats the 4 days on the floor), **Community** (compound interest — small regular gatherings that spawn more, measured by the "Saturday Test").

## The Universal Arc: 20% Event, 80% Before-and-After

The event itself is the smallest part of event marketing. Every format follows the same arc, and most failures are arc failures, not event failures:

**Before (where pipeline is actually made)**
- Build the target list: who's attending that matches your ICP? (Attendee lists, speaker lists, "who's going" posts, past-year attendees.)
- **Book meetings before you arrive.** A meeting booked two weeks out is worth ten hopeful hallway collisions. Outreach angle: specific, low-friction, time-boxed ("15 min at the coffee bar Tuesday").
- Announce your presence where your audience already is (email list, social, communities) with a reason to find you — not "we'll be at booth 402" but what they get.

**During**
- Optimize for *qualified conversations*, not raw contacts. One real conversation with an ICP buyer beats fifty badge scans.
- Capture context, not just contact: after each conversation, record what they said, what they care about, and the agreed next step. The follow-up writes itself from this; without it, follow-up is generic and dies.
- Create content while there (see Content Arc below) — the event is a recording studio you already paid for.

**After (where pipeline is won or lost)**
- **The 24–48 hour window.** Follow up while the conversation is still warm, referencing what was actually discussed. Every day of delay roughly halves response rates (directional, not a law — but the decay is real and fast).
- Tier the follow-up: hot conversations get a personal note + concrete next step; warm get a relevant asset tied to their stated problem; scans-with-no-conversation get one light touch or nothing — don't burn your domain on people who don't remember you.
- Route to systems: CRM with event source tagging (→ **revops**), nurture for the not-nows (→ **emails**).

## Hosting: Choose the Format for the Job

| Format | Best for | Effort | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Webinar** | Lead gen + education at scale | Low-mid | The flagship repeatable format — full funnel in [webinar-funnel.md](references/webinar-funnel.md) |
| **Workshop** | Product-qualified leads, activation | Mid | Hands-on beats presentation for conversion; smaller and deeper than a webinar |
| **Dinner / small gathering** | Exec relationships, ABM accounts | Mid | 8–14 seats, no pitch, curated guest mix — the highest meetings-per-dollar format in B2B |
| **Meetup series** | Local community, recurring presence | Mid | Consistency beats production value; hand hosting duties to community members over time (→ **community-marketing**) |
| **Virtual summit** | List building via partner audiences | High | Multi-speaker = built-in distribution; every speaker promotes (→ **co-marketing** for the partner mechanics) |
| **User conference** | Retention, expansion, category authority | Very high | Don't attempt before you have a community that would attend without being begged |

Two hosting rules that outrank format choice:

- **The topic is the targeting.** "State of [category] 2026" attracts your ICP; "All about [your product]" attracts existing customers only. Pick topics your buyer would attend even if they'd never buy.
- **Recurring beats one-off.** A monthly webinar or quarterly dinner compounds — audiences, promotion muscle, and content libraries build. A single big event evaporates.

## Attending (No Booth, No Stage)

The zero-budget motion, and often the best ROI in the building:

1. **Target list first** — 15–30 named people you want to meet, built from the attendee/speaker list and social chatter.
2. **Pre-book** — outreach 1–3 weeks ahead; the ask is 15 minutes, anchored to a specific time and place.
3. **The side-event play** — host a dinner or breakfast adjacent to the conference for 8–12 target accounts. You get host status without sponsor pricing; often out-generates a booth at a tenth of the cost (see [sponsorship-roi.md](references/sponsorship-roi.md)).
4. **Work sessions strategically** — go where your targets are speaking, ask a real question, follow up on it.
5. Same 24–48h follow-up discipline as every other role.