All that planning. All that hype. One massive flagship event … and then it’s over (until next year).
What if instead, that one big moment became the spark for an always-on engagement engine your teams could run together, keeping the momentum alive all year long?
If you’re on a corporate events team, not only are you pulling off your organization’s Superbowl, but you’re also on the hook to prove and maximize ROI of your flagship event program. At the same time, you’re looking for ways to extend the value of all your hard work well beyond the event itself, and build demand for next year before this one’s even wrapped.
If you’re in field marketing, your world looks different, but the pressure’s just as intense. You’re likely trying to connect your smaller, territory-based events back to a corporate marketing strategy, while also needing repeatable, corporate-approved content so you’re not spinning up something new every single time. You’re trying to keep audiences engaged year-round and ensure your regional efforts help fill the flagship event every year.
No matter which side you’re on, you don’t have to tackle this alone. By working together, corporate events and field marketing teams (and anyone else in the mix) can turn your flagship event into a year-long engagement engine.
One that solves for every single pain point above.
This guide will show you exactly how to make it happen.
We’ll share 10 activation ideas you can steal to keep your audience engaged all year long, plus practical tips for collaborating across teams to turn your flagship event into a true year-round growth engine.
Use these event plays and ideas to transform your flagship event into a year-long engagement program that fuels pipeline, community, and next year’s attendance goals.
Bring the best of your flagship event to your key regions with half-day or full-day roadshows. Start with the same theme or opening keynote to keep the brand story consistent, then localize with region-specific breakout sessions, customer panels, or roundtables that address the priorities in that territory.
Corporate events teams can package everything into a roadshow content kit: pre-built decks, talk tracks, microsites, leave-behind content (like a one-pager or guide to take as they leave), and even suggested venues and region-specific swag budgets.
This way, field marketers can run faster and focus on execution — booking the space, inviting attendees, pulling off the actual event — while the corporate events team maintains control over the brand, the message, and the event experience.
When it comes to follow-up, create a “build once, use many times” approach for sales enablement around what to do with the leads from these regional events. Provide guidance on a consistent follow-up process with assets deployed to sellers, rather than one off, inconsistent event follow-up strategies that are spun up regionally.
You likely are hosting your flagship event in a location and time zone that make sense for the largest swath of your customer and prospect audiences most likely to attend. Consider a one-day version of your flagship event in key international markets to extend your reach without needing to commit to the cost of another full-scale production.
Run a smaller, localized version of your flagship event with translated content, or, depending on your regional marketing coverage, even just a “greatest hits” webinar in the local language.
Consider proactively which translations you’ll need for which presentations; for instance, if you’re running your big event in Vegas but know that France is a key growth market, plan to translate to French in your workflow.
Your session data and post-event surveys are a treasure trove. Find out what sessions resonated most at your flagship event, and then spin those into a monthly or quarterly webinar series.
Not only will this help you reach audiences who might not travel to your flagship event, but it’s also a great way to pull your content further up the funnel for prospects who don't know enough about your brand to commit to attending an in-person event with you just yet.
Invite the original speakers back, or co-host with partners or customers for added reach or a new perspective. Continuing the conversation in this way can also surface more ideas to reformat into different content formats.
Turn your flagship event’s top workshops into intimate lunch-and-learn sessions on the road. Invite customers, prospects, and even partners to join for a workshop plus networking time.
Tie this into sponsorship packages for your flagship event. If an exhibitor sponsors your flagship event, they get first dibs on lunch-and-learn sponsorships too. This creates year-long partner value and makes it easier to fund the series.
It’s difficult to get senior executives to attend big conferences. They’re busy, they’re picky, and travel is a hurdle. Bring the conversation to them with an executive dinner tour in top cities.
Your executive team is busy too, but they’re likely your ideal hosts for this audience. Commit your own leadership team to a sprint: hosting 4 to 7 dinners across key markets in a single week or month. For instance, you might try to hit key cities in the eastern seaboard within a week or two. Keep it VIP-only, small-group, and in upscale venues to maximize quality interactions.
You might choose this to be a content-free, networking-only dinner to simply bring industry peers together. Or, you might bring some light content built around executive-level insights.
Despite being your main decision-makers and budget-owners, this audience of executives might not be as “in the weeds” with your product or service as their teams are. Help these executives connect their own team members with you via your follow-up content after the supper club.
Perhaps this is a free pass to your next flagship event that they can pass to someone on their team, or an offer for a content kit or virtual workshop to help their team get more value from your product or service.
Many prospects and customers typically send just one or two people to your flagship event. But what if you brought the event to them? Offer to run a workshop or session inside their organization for broader exposure, and invite many more teams and individuals than you would’ve been able to meet otherwise. This becomes a strategic event-based ABM play.
Identify top accounts and offer a customized version of your most popular content from your flagship event, either virtually or in person. The number of accounts you take on might vary widely based on your team’s bandwidth to execute.
When working on one account, invite multiple teams from that account to attend your workshop. This allows you to reach way more people within that account, than you would with your flagship event.
If you have an ABM team within your organization, this is a great way to connect the dots between corporate events, field marketing, and ABM. You could also consider packaging up content as an “event-in-a-box” solution for account teams to execute these themselves in an on-demand way, owned by a mix of sellers, account managers, customer success managers, or field marketers.
Follow Atlassian’s lead: use your flagship event to funnel attendees into year-round community engagement, much of which is tied to learning.
“We also see our events as a way to establish and nurture community. We use our events to push to the next step that continues to add value for the customer: webinars, group forums, engaging in Atlassian Community, and Atlassian University.”Josh Shepherd, Head of Event Technology at Atlassian
Invite your flagship event attendees to engage with your brand’s training modules, certifications, or community forums.
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Your keynote speaker or influencer partner doesn’t have to be a one-and-done investment. Work with them to host or co-host smaller activations at other points in the year. Get creative and brainstorm other ways you can partner with them as you build these relationships.
Consider negotiating this upfront as part of their contract: a keynote plus one or two follow-on engagements, like a fireside chat or regional happy hour.
In fact, because many keynote speakers travel a ton, you could make it easier for them to say yes by suggesting an event in their home city. They can pick the place, and you’ll pick up the tab.
Your flagship event is likely a goldmine of customer success stories: panels, fireside chats, breakout sessions where customers share how they use your product or service. Don’t let those stories collect dust.
Take the best customer-led sessions and repurpose them into a quarterly storytelling series. You could turn panel discussions into small regional meetups where those same customers speak to local audiences, repackage breakout sessions as virtual “customer spotlight” webinars, or invite those customers to join roundtables with prospects in similar industries or roles.
Close the loop between your regional roadshows and your flagship event by incentivizing roadshow attendees to register early for your next big event.
At your roadshow event or other field marketing activations, offer attendees a special discount off your next flagship event. If they do register, prepare a personalized gift as a way to make them feel seen and valued. There are a couple ways to execute this:
Get aligned with sales, marketing, and C-level executives to implement conditional logic and ask specific questions based on attendee information. This will help you provide a personalized registration experience for different attendee types; you can also use this data to inform unique experiences on the day of the event.
Turning your flagship event into a year-round engagement engine only works if everyone’s rowing in the same direction internally: corporate events, field marketing, campaigns teams, sales, and even marketing ops and tech teams. Otherwise, you end up with silos, mixed messages, and random acts of marketing.
Use these tips to make sure your teams aren’t just running events here, campaigns there, and field marketing activations over there…but actually designing programs that fit together.
In large organizations, field marketers are often the “face” of the marketing team to their sellers. Consider giving your corporate events leader the spotlight during QBR season to help connect the dots between regional field programs and flagship event priorities.
With a standing slot on regional QBR agendas, your corporate events leader can:
This simple step turns your flagship event into the heartbeat of your entire event strategy, not just a one-off showpiece, and helps emphasize the marketing-wide commitment to your flagship event program.
In that same vein, instead of relying on busy field marketing teams to relay flagship event details to sales, host a live Q&A session where sales reps and leaders can ask questions directly to corporate events. It’s faster, clearer, and ensures everyone hears the same message at the same time.
Be sure to record it so anyone who couldn’t attend live can still get the inside scoop.
Your sales team is your secret weapon for boosting attendance.
Make it worth their while:
When sales sees event attendance as part of their success metrics, they’ll help fill the room.
Once or twice a year, do the internal-planning exercise of putting your entire revenue-driving event portfolio on a single page. Yes, the whole thing: flagship events, regional roadshows, webinars, partner activations.
This forces everyone who owns revenue-generating events to see how the pieces fit together cross-functionally. You can still have team-specific readouts and detailed plans, but the one-pager becomes the internal cheat sheet that shows how every event ladders up to bigger company goals, and identifies gaps and opportunities for better alignment.
Field marketing might be using Marketo. Corporate events might be on a separate event platform. Webinars might live in yet another tool. If your systems don’t talk to each other, you’re flying blind and missing huge opportunities to simplify operations and create a better prospect and customer experience.
Schedule a cross-team event tech health check:
This is also where that “event portfolio on a page” comes in handy. You can see the big picture and spot where tech or data silos might be slowing you down.
Your flagship event shouldn’t fade when the lights go out. With the right activations and tight collaboration across corporate events, field marketing, and campaigns teams, you can turn that one week of energy into 52 weeks of engagement, pipeline, and community that extend the value of that event to new audiences, while seeding interest in attending your next big show.
Steal these ideas, make them yours, and start building a year-round engine that keeps your brand buzzing long after the big show ends.
