Acquiring Your C-Level Audience: Corporate Event Marketing in the World of Venture Capital

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Mar 19, 2013 Acquiring Your C-Level Audience: Corporate Event Marketing in the World of Venture Capital

At Wilsonwest, we’re just down the road from Silicon Valley, land of high tech innovations and the venture capitalists that fund them. So we’ve done a lot of corporate event marketing for venture capital events. And one of the biggest fears our clients face is: will they come?

It’s a rational fear.

The venture capital world represents a sophisticated audience. They’re in high demand. They’re senior people. And they’re flooded with invitations to corporate events.

How to get people like that to your event?

It’s simple. Make sure you’re delivering something that’s worthy of their time. And to do that, you have to know your audience. What do they care about? What will add value to their work and what opportunities will you deliver?

Once you’ve developed killer content for your venture capital event, you need to convey it to your prospective audience with an effective invitation. The good news is that in today’s digital age, an HTML-styled e-mail invite is perfectly acceptable, especially for the high-tech venture capital crowd.

The bad news? Most web pages only get eight seconds of attention before the viewer decides whether to click away or continue on – you can expect the same for your e-mail invite. [tweet this] So you need to quickly demonstrate that your event will add value for the invitees, or they won’t come. The invitation has to be short and sweet and convey the business proposition.

Why is yours a must attend event? To demonstrate value, here’s the information that needs to be prominently displayed in your invitation:

• Content is king :  Convey the speaker information
• And the high-level points they  will be talking about
• Include the usual time/date/place information and  remember:  convenience, timing are critical
• Please DON’T take up more of their time than needed.

Finally, sending out an invitation isn’t enough – for a premier event, you need to take corporate event marketing to a more personal level. [tweet this] At Wilsonwest, we also encourage our clients to have a relationship manager follow up with the invitees. This relationship manager should have a personal connection with the invitees, so they can connect what’s unique about that audience member to the content of the venture capital event. By going the extra mile to demonstrate knowledge of the customer and your desire to have them attend, you dramatically increase the odds of your potential guest appearing.

Know what your audience cares about, develop content that adds value, and convey it – electronically and in person. [tweet this]