Event Marketing Strategy: 31 Templates to Sell Out Your Events

Event marketing is promoting a brand, product or service through in-person, virtual or hybrid events: the events you host, sponsor or attend. For a B2B company, a live event pays off when you set one business goal (usually sales pipeline), pick the format your buyers will actually attend, fill it through your own list and partners, and follow up with every attendee until you can count the opportunities it created.

Key takeaways

• In Bizzabo’s 2025 State of Events survey (1,558 responses, November 2024), 78% of organizers called in-person conferences, summits and conventions their organization’s most impactful marketing channel.
• Sales pipeline growth was the top priority for 24% of organizers’ in-person B2B events in the same survey, up from 16% in 2023, and 70% said they had difficulty proving event ROI in 2024.
• Goldcast’s CEO said in a 2022 Top Founders interview that about 90% of the customers it closes attended an event before talking to sales.
• Growth Marketing Conference registered 7,437 people for a 2020 virtual summit with no paid acquisition ads, only about $200 of retargeting, and over 2,500 of them attended live, its CEO said in May 2020.
• 59% of organizers in Bizzabo’s 2025 survey saw more last-minute registrations for in-person B2B events, so plan a promotion push for the final weeks.

What is event marketing?

Event marketing means one of two things, as Cvent’s event marketing guide puts it: the marketing you do to promote an event, or the use of events as a channel to promote your company, mission or product. A B2B company usually needs both. The event is the channel that puts buyers, customers and partners in the same room, and the promotion is what fills that room with the right people.

Here the focus is the second use for a software company: hosting a live event that produces conversations with buyers, not just a full room. If your event is online only, the webinar marketing guide goes deeper on registration and attendance tactics.

Choose the event format that matches your goal

The format decides who will show up and what it will cost you. Start from the goal: reach and list growth favor virtual events, relationships with a few valuable accounts favor small in-person rooms, and category leadership favors your own conference. Most organizers combine them: in Bizzabo’s 2025 survey, 64% host multiple local field events to support their larger conferences.

Format	Best for	Watch out for	Example in this guide
Virtual summit or webinar	Reach, list growth and first conversations at low cost	Many registrants never attend live	Growth Marketing Conference: 7,437 registered, over 2,500 live (2020)
Dinner or city meetup	Relationships with buyers or customers in one city	Small reach per event, so you need many	Sales reps hosting local dinners (Jeff Schwartz’s example); Top Summit city meetups
Side event at a big conference	Meeting an audience that has already traveled to one place	Competing with the main program for attention	Fello’s party for 200 people at a conference
Your own conference	Category leadership, sponsorship and ticket revenue	Upfront venue and production costs	Sales Hacker, June 2016: close to 2,000 attendees
Retreat or mastermind	Depth with a small, curated group	High cost per attendee and careful curation	Founderpath founder retreats: forty to fifty founders, three days

A side event is a cheap way to test whether in-person works for you. Stephen London, president and co-founder of Fello ($10M revenue), told a Founderpath audience that one of the marketing experiments that worked was a free party for 200 people at a conference, set up with a larger organization that gave Fello access to the real estate agents it sells to.

Event planning timeline: work backwards from the date

Plan the event backwards from the date, and decide the goal, format and budget before you commit money to a venue. Max Altschuler, then CEO of Sales Hacker, told Nathan Latka in a 2016 interview that his June 2016 conference brought in about $1.2 million in sponsorship revenue and $300,000 to $400,000 in ticket sales, with close to 2,000 attendees. Asked what a first-time organizer should do when a venue wants a large deposit before any tickets are sold, his answer was to start selling sponsorships before you have the venue.

For promotion, SHMS recommends starting to market an event six to eight weeks before the date. For a virtual summit, Growth Marketing Conference’s Vasil Azarov recommended starting promotion 30 days out. Keep budget for the end: 59% of organizers in Bizzabo’s 2025 survey reported more last-minute registrations for in-person B2B events than in previous years.

How to host a live event that drives pipeline

1. Set one goal and name the buyers you want in the room

Pick one primary goal and measure the event against it: pipeline, customer retention, product adoption or ticket revenue. Pipeline is now the most common: 24% of organizers in Bizzabo’s 2025 survey named sales pipeline growth as the top priority for their in-person B2B events, up from 16% in 2023. Then write down the job titles and company types you want to attend, because they decide the format, the speakers and the partners who can reach them.

We did some maths recently: like 90 [percent] of our customers we close are people who attended an event before talking to sales.

Palash Soni, CEO and co-founder, Goldcast, a B2B event platform. Watch at 11:00 (Top Founders, 2022)

2. Fill the room with your list and your partners

Your own email list sets the floor; partners who already reach your buyers multiply it. Offer partners something concrete in return, such as a speaking slot, their logo, or a share of the leads from their session.

In a May 2020 interview, Vasil Azarov, CEO of Growth Marketing Conference, said 7,437 people registered for its virtual summit. About a third came from its own list of about 40,000 subscribers, and most of the rest came through media partners such as GrowthHackers and SEMrush, who promoted the summit in exchange for a speaking slot and the list of attendees from their sessions. A referral incentive run through the tool Early Parrot, the chance of a free all-access pass for registrants who shared the summit, drove about another 1,000 registrations. He said it ran no paid ads to new audiences, only about $200 of retargeting ads shown to people who had visited its website.

3. Plan for no-shows and late registrations

Registrations are not attendance. Over 2,500 of Growth Marketing Conference’s 7,437 registrants attended live, about a third, and about 1,500 more watched later, Azarov said. In the same interview, Nathan Latka, now Founderpath’s CEO, said that back in 2016 and 2017, when he was using webinars to build his first SaaS company, Heyo, the best he could get was about a third: he could rely on 20% to 35% of registrants attending live. Plan reminders for the last days, a recording for those who miss it, and a reason to show up live, such as a question-and-answer session or networking.

4. Give every group at the event a reason to come back

Attendees are not the only audience. Speakers, sponsors and exhibitors are often buyers too, and they have the strongest reason to see the event succeed. Give each group its own preparation and follow-up.

We actually host weekly webinars for the exhibitors and the speakers that are participating on the platform as well, and of that we’ve actually seen that 15 percent of our new business comes from folks who are previously an exhibitor on a customer event on our platform.

Jonathan Kazarian, founder and CEO, Accelevents. Watch at 8:37

5. Follow up, then count opportunities, not registrations

Decide before the event who follows up with which attendees, and how fast. Then track how many sales opportunities each event created and what they turned into, so you can compare events with your other channels. That is hard: 70% of organizers in Bizzabo’s 2025 survey said they had difficulty proving event ROI in 2024.

Jeff Schwartz, founder and CEO of dataroomHQ ($5M revenue), described a company that tracked opportunities by source every month. When it fell behind its May target, it could see that events were converting well, so it added four events to its calendar, sponsored one of them and had each sales rep host a local dinner in their territory. Counting opportunities per channel is what let it move budget to events in time.

How Founderpath runs its own events

Founderpath uses events for the same reasons. In October 2022 it announced that it had acquired SaaSOpen, a SaaS conference held in New York each spring. The announcement said 75 early-bird tickets released on September 1 sold out in 43 minutes, and Nathan Latka said 1,000 SaaS founders and executives had come to its events in 2022. By May 2026, TNW reported, Founderpath had acquired SaaStock’s US and European conferences; the history of Founderpath has the full timeline.

Today those events run as the Top Founders Summit, hosted by Latka. As of October 31, 2026, topfoundersummit.com lists three formats that mirror the table above: annual summits for two thousand founders (the next is in London on May 8 to 10, 2027), city meetups of one night of operator talks and dinner (New York, Amsterdam and Kraków in autumn 2026, with Berlin on November 12), and founder retreats for forty to fifty curated founders over three days (Napa, September 8 to 10, 2026). The large summit builds visibility, and the dinners and retreats keep the relationships going between summits.

A picture of your conference packed with standing room only is a monument. You can’t fake that.

Nathan Latka, founder and CEO, Founderpath. Watch at 16:53

For more ways to reach founders and buyers through other people’s audiences, see the guides to sponsorship strategies, partner co-marketing and community building.

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Frequently asked questions

What is event marketing?

Event marketing is promoting a brand, product or service through in-person, virtual or hybrid events that a company hosts, sponsors or attends. The term also covers the marketing used to promote an event itself. For a B2B company, the goal is usually to meet buyers and create sales pipeline.

What is the best event format for a B2B company?

It depends on the goal. Virtual summits and webinars give reach and list growth at low cost, dinners and city meetups build relationships with a few valuable accounts, side events reach an audience already gathered at a conference, and your own conference builds category leadership but needs money upfront.

How far in advance should you promote an event?

SHMS recommends starting to market an event six to eight weeks before the date. Vasil Azarov of Growth Marketing Conference recommended 30 days for a virtual summit. Keep budget for the final weeks: 59% of organizers in Bizzabo’s 2025 survey saw more last-minute registrations.

What percentage of registrants attend a live event?

Often a minority. Growth Marketing Conference had over 2,500 live attendees from 7,437 registrations at a 2020 virtual summit, about a third, and Nathan Latka said his webinars at Heyo drew 20% to 35% of registrants live. Plan reminders, a recording and a reason to attend live.

How do you measure the ROI of an event?

Set one goal before the event, then track the sales opportunities each event creates and what they turn into, so you can compare events with your other channels. It is hard: 70% of organizers in Bizzabo’s 2025 survey said they had difficulty proving event ROI in 2024.

How do you pay for your first conference?

Sell sponsorships early. Max Altschuler of Sales Hacker advised first-time organizers to start selling sponsorships before booking the venue, and said his June 2016 conference brought in about $1.2 million from sponsors and $300,000 to $400,000 from tickets.

Should you host your own event or sponsor someone else’s?

Sponsoring, exhibiting or hosting a side event at someone else’s conference is cheaper and puts you in front of an audience that is already there. Hosting your own event costs more but lets you choose the audience, the speakers and the follow-up. A side event or a dinner is a cheap way to test whether in-person events work for you before you host your own.

Sources and method

Reviewed October 31, 2026. Survey figures come from Bizzabo’s 2025 State of Events report, an online survey run in November 2024 with 1,558 responses from event organizers and attendees; Bizzabo sells event software, so read its figures as an industry survey, not a neutral census. Company results come from the founders’ own words in Top Founders interviews on YouTube and in Founderpath resource talks, checked against the captions or transcripts at the linked timestamps, and dated to the interview. Founderpath’s event facts come from its own announcement, TNW and topfoundersummit.com as of the review date. An earlier version of this post listed 45 one-line examples; those we could not check against a source were removed.