Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

126 BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKETING
Manhattan, New York City—where most seminars seem to do poorly—
or it could be that the product being promoted is a dog, so even a great
speaker or an action-packed agenda will not save the day.
The Typical Seminar Series
Today, b-to-b companies are scrutinizing their participation in live seminars.
They need to justify that seminars are worth the investment because
the expense associated with a seminar program can be significant.
Let us put this into perspective by examining a breakdown of estimated
costs and the anticipated results for a ten-city seminar series. We will
make the following assumptions:
The seminar will be a live, half-day event with free admission,
held in ten U.S. cities at hotel meeting rooms.
The sponsoring company will have to prepare a presentation, hire
one or more guest speakers, and send a marketing coordinator
and one speaker from corporate headquarters to every seminar.
Handouts will need to be produced for an anticipated audience
of about 500 people.
A direct mail invitation will be sent to 3,000 prospects within 50
miles of each seminar site (30,000 prospects).
The invitation will achieve a 2.0% response.
Fifty percent of the respondents will not attend the seminar, even
though they signed up for it. (This is a fairly typical no-show
rate—the percentage of individuals who say they are coming to a
seminar but do not show up.)
The accompanying chart (Figure 5.1) shows the costs and results
for this ten-city live seminar program.
Depending on the costs and results of other qualified lead generation
activities you might conduct, this may or may not seem to be a
reasonable cost. To get a true read of any event’s marketing value, you
should track not just “cheeks in the seats,” but also: