INOVIS  INSIGHTS

EVENT COVERAGE:
A Versatile, High-ROI Tool for the Competitive Marketing Toolbox

by Marc Limacher*

READ MORE INSIGHTS FROM INOVIS

How's the Selection in Your Competitive Marketing Toolbox?

From hands-on primary and secondary intelligence collection to AI-powered platforms, effective competitive marketers rely on a robust set of tools and techniques to improve product and sales outcomes.

Among the tools in the primary intelligence compartment of your own competitive marketing toolbox, event coverage provides a powerful method to hone your company's competitive edge. Solid preparation, execution, and follow-through can make intelligence collection at competitors' end-user and partner conferences, tradeshows, and other industry events an indispensable asset.

Think of event coverage as the Swiss Army knife among your competitive tools — packing a wide range of benefits into one spot:

• Efficiency: Tradeshows and other industry events are a true one-stop shop for high-yielding and unique primary research. Customers, prospects, partners, competitors, and industry and market experts are here. Everyone's ready to learn, network, and share knowledge, opinions, and best practices — so they're often at their most forthcoming. Paired with skilled elicitation techniques and strict practice of ethical gathering techniques, this opens your event coverage team's access to in-depth, well-substantiated insights from numerous qualified sources.
• Cost effectiveness: Covering a single industry event gives you more for less — pooling dozens, hundreds, or thousands of varied and relevant sources in one area for a concentrated period of time. In this encapsulated environment, your event coverage team may tap into a wide range of knowledge and perspectives on target competitors, market trends, customer and partner sentiment (product feature preferences, unmet needs, product/support disappointments, assessments of your offerings vs. those of your competitors, etc.), optimal sales motion tactics, and more at a modest cost.

REAL-TIME INSIGHTS: Events are an ideal spot to seek out immediate, authentic reactions to breaking announcements. For example, at a competitor's trade show, when your competitor rolls out new information via products, programs, partnerships, and strategy announcements, you can approach select attendees for real-time pressure-testing of their reactions to these points — delivering instantly valuable perspectives to inform your own initiatives.

LEVERAGED ACTIVITIES: Your event coverage team can leverage discussions with competitors, customers, partners of your company and those of your competitors, and other knowledgeable attendees to inform product marketing and management activities. As a few examples:

• Insights into competitors' likely upcoming new product functionalities / features, timelines, core differentiating messages, target markets and so on can help you define your product development plans and associated GTM timing.
• Informal, candid input from customers and prospects about your own solution's perceived position vs. competitors can inform your messaging frameworks and competitive plans.
• You can funnel the insights you collect about topics such as how competitors sell against you and recent deals won and lost into existing pre-sales intelligence, win-loss programs, or sales enablement processes in your organization.

To get the most from the budget and resources you invest in covering an event, you'll need a meticulously defined plan that addresses pre-event preparation, smooth coverage execution at the event, and effective communication and further leverage of your most impactful findings once the event is over.

In this webinar, Competitive Marketing Summit 2019 premier event sponsor INOVIS Inc. will share hands-on best practices for all phases of event coverage, built and proven over close to three decades of primary competitive intelligence (CI) consulting. Whether you're considering your first event coverage plan, or you're seasoned at event intelligence gathering, presenter Marc Limacher aims to reinforce important intelligence collection guidelines and arm you with new ideas for gathering impactful event intelligence and making your findings count.

PRESENTED BY
Marc Limacher
Founder & CEO, INOVIS
   

Marc Limacher started INOVIS, Inc. in 1992 as a boutique primary CI specialty firm in Palo Alto, CA, focusing on IT (software, hardware, and services across 12 industry verticals) and life sciences (14 therapy areas, medtech, digital health). As a 30-year veteran in the CI and counter-intelligence industry, he has grown INOVIS into a global leader in primary strategic & tactical intelligence and consulting services, counting a select group of global Blue Chip companies as loyal clients. The introduction of an expert regulatory intelligence practice as well as an innovative real-time scenario planning software tool are unique in the industry. Prior to INOVIS, he served as Director of Market Intelligence at a leading U.S. institutional investment firm, providing primary intelligence on small-/medium-/large-cap equities via a global employee network of 125 investigative analysts. Marc also delivers custom CI seminars, runs competitor simulation workshops, and is a frequent lecturer on CI and counter-intelligence topics at companies and to academia.