Imagine, if you will, the (perhaps oversimplified) lifecycle of an event for the marketing team. You get the budget approved, the booth is built, sales is briefed, the event happens, and then everyone goes home. 

But the event doesn’t end there. This is where most event marketing strategy actually breaks down, and it's the focus of this episode of The Fix from Marketing in Progress. 

The fix isn't complicated, but it does mean rethinking what "event marketing" actually includes. If the plan ends when the booth comes down, you're closing the book before you've even measured what you gained.

Getting started: Defining event goals 

So how should event planning actually start? Get the marketing and sales teams in the same room 60 to 90 days out to build real marketing and sales alignment around one question: what is this event actually for? This doesn’t mean how many badges you'll scan. It means identifying the accounts you want to reach through target account marketing, and clarifying the business outcome that ties back to revenue marketing goals. 

If you skip this step, you'll spend your budget proving nothing beyond attendance.

Maintaining momentum 

With clarity around goals and purpose of the event, you need to build the campaign. This means developing your plans for before, during, and after the event to ensure nothing is missed. For many teams, this includes solidifying a post-event follow-up, and not leaning on a generic "thanks for stopping by" email. The relationships that start on a show floor need the same personal, specific follow-through you'd give any other high-value prospect in your demand generation pipeline.

Understanding pipeline attribution 

Then there's the part most teams skip: proving it worked. Without event attribution, marketing is flying blind, spending budget on events without knowing if they influenced moving deals forward. Pipeline attribution isn't about taking credit from sales. It's what lets marketing defend the budget and build the case for next year's event calendar.

That reframes marketing measurement too. Badge scans aren't a business outcome. The right metric depends on the job the event was supposed to do. Sometimes that's pipeline. Sometimes it's a new relationship or an accelerated opportunity that doesn't show up for months. Define the job first, then pick the metric that actually proves event ROI.

What this means for marketing leaders

The teams getting real marketing ROI from events aren't the ones with the biggest booth. They're the ones running events the way strong GTM leadership runs everything else: as one moment inside a longer campaign, with clear goals set before it starts and a measurement plan built around the outcome they actually need. 

That's what an executive marketing strategy looks like in practice: earlier planning, tighter alignment, and metrics that hold up in the boardroom. 

Listen to the full conversation: The Fix: Episode 2, Stop Treating Events Like One-Offs.

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Struggling with bandwidth to build the campaign around your next event? That's what we do. We work alongside marketing leaders to support event campaign planning to running sales and marketing alignment workshops. Learn more.