Nearbound Daily #484: Enhance Your 2024 Events Strategy

Ella Richmond 4 min

Enhance your event-led growth strategies with micro events

If you’ve been to an event in the past two years, I’m sure you’ve attended a micro event.

They’re those company-sponsored cocktail parties, lunches, dinners, breakfasts, yacht parties, etc. used to bring together a target ICP.

These micro events are a subcategory of event-led growth.

(If you missed last week’s edition of the daily: Event-led growth is a GTM motion focused on establishing trust and inspiring meaningful engagement with your buyers at every stage of the funnel.)

Here’s why micro events are important for partner leaders in the nearbound era:

Micro events are an easy partnering opportunity: Join forces with one, two, or even three partners to create an experience for your joint customers.
Micro events work great as mini partnership tests: Use small events like this to test out partner fit. It’s easier to commit to one night of fun than a huge cross-functional campaign.
Micro events are useful to gather information: Gather firmographic and demographic data from attendees as they register, or even run a quick survey at the door. You want to create a great experience, but why not tap into insights while you’re there?

Sure, events normally fall under marketing, but this is green space for partner pros to multiply value.

Nearbound tip: Look for opportunities to bring partners, enhance the events, and do more with less.

Read more about event-led growth here and if you want to follow a thought leader in event-led growth, Mark Kilens (CEO and Co-founder of TACK and ClubPF) is always sharing great information!

An event-led gem among stones

99% of the time, the only thing my hundreds of email subscriptions give me is a cluttered inbox. But every once in a while I’m surprised by a gem—some piece of information that makes the clutter worth it.

A week ago, I got a gem.

Ayush Poddar, founder of Startup GTM, posted a substack article on Event-Led Growth where he shared questions CMOs and Founders should ask, highlighted some notable event-led examples, and outlined four decision-making frameworks.

Today, I’m going to highlight his decision matrices but check out the full article here.

Each framework has been built to help you decide what kind of event to run based on the impact you’d like to have.

Event type versus funnel stage

Event type versus audience type

Event type versus business goal

Event type versus business stage

Events aren’t about the coolest swag (sorry, nearbound Nikes ) or even the amount of people you brought together.

Events are one of six GTM motions you can leverage to build trust and drive revenue. So, the best events are determined strategically and leveraged completely.

Recommended next steps:

Get an overview of event-led growth here,
Read the rest of Ayush’s article here,
And use these matrices to help you decide which events to run in 2024 for the most impact.

How to plan for owned media in 2024 (PDF)

A little while ago, the folks at Audience Plus released a great resource—How to Plan for Owned Media in 2024.

I read it and realized, this isn’t just a resource for marketers.

There are two reasons this information is valuable for partner pros in the nearbound era.

Macro market trends
Better partner marketing

Macro market trends

Buyer indifference, an evolving understanding of the buyer journey, and efficient growth are trends
everyone is paying attention to.

When you have a pulse on industry trends and take the time to read how different roles talk and think about those industry trends, you become capable of pitching nearbound in their language.

Better partner marketing

Partner pros need to be experts at the motions every other team is running so they can initiate and execute on partner overlays.

Oh! Partners could overlay here, here, and here!

Most marketers aren’t thinking partner-first. You need to have a pulse on their marketing activities and be proactive in getting partners inserted where possible.