Event Marketing
Work done as Manager of Marketing at Catchafire
Objective
Webinars and events are a large component of the marketing strategy I helped devlop at Catchafire, and had two main types. The first are co-hosted events with leaders in the philanthropy space, and were promoted to new audiences to capture leads for potential customers. The second are educational webinars that are a benefit of nonprofit membership to Catchafire. Both required unique messaging and strategy to meet our goals.
Solution
I worked closely with the Director of Community Engagement to develop the marketing strategy for each lead generation event, including ideal audience, segments, outreach strategy, and marketing budget. For each event, I created the registration pages, wrote the emails to promote the event, designed advertising for the events, and bridged relationships with new media partners.
For nonprofits, I drove nonprofit staff to sign up for webinars using triggered automations and emails that were a component of the larger onboarding strategy.
Strategy and Software
- Demio for webinar hosting and registration
- Eventbrite for in-person events and registration
- ActiveCampaign and HubSpot for email marketing
- Graphic design for event collateral and advertising in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Figma
Key results
30%
RSVP rate
For webinars from 2020-2023
100+
RSVP average
For lead generation webinars in 2023
200+
Events promoted
From 2019-2023
Content Development
In 2023 alone, Catchafire hosted over 25 events geared toward prospective customers. I developed the outreach strategy to promote each event, and devised a personalized outreach strategy before and after the events to nudge prospects along the sales funnel. I combined paid advertising, email marketing, and social media, to drive thousands of webinar RSVPs yearly.
This email created in ActiveCampaign was used in a paid newsletter to promote a collaborative webinar with Patagonia. Working with a limited budget meant I had to measure the effectiveness of advertising to justify the money spent; I found sponsored newsletters an effective way to drive event RSVPs.
Catchafire's events were not meant to explicitly sell the company to prospects – they served as think-pieces and valuable educational moments for the industry we targeted. Registration and attendance varied greatly between events; regardless of the topic, my event marketing strategy had an average of 100+ RSVPs across events.
Our target audience included C-Suite Leadership, Program Officers, HR Professionals, and Grantmaker roles. I wrote hundreds of personalized plain-text style emails to promote events and provide a connection point for the sales team and the prospect.
To scale webinar marketing I developed automations in HubSpot for each event with custom content that spoke to specific segments of prospects.
