How to Grow Your Event Portfolio With Global Roadshow Events

Global roadshows have become increasingly popular in recent years. These single-day events give attendees the opportunity to discover new products or services in a city near them. The highly valuable experience also includes meeting product experts and connecting with like-minded peers in their surrounding community. In this blog post, we’ll share how companies are growing their event portfolios by incorporating global roadshows and reveal practical tips for planning a successful global roadshow. 

A Brief History of Global Roadshow Events

While the global roadshow event format has been around for some time, they have become much more popular in recent years. When the COVID-19 pandemic first struck in 2020, many event teams that moved to virtual for the first time experienced an influx of registrations and began viewing their global audiences in a new way. When in-person events resumed, they began hosting global roadshows to engage their entire community. Today, an increasing number of organizations use this format to share their key messages with audiences anywhere.

How Does a Global Roadshow Fit Into an Event Portfolio?

Deciding when to host global roadshows in relation to your other events can be tricky. Having worked on some of the world’s most renowned global roadshow series, here’s what we’ve found works best: 

First focus on your flagship event. Often organizations leave a buffer (e.g., two months) between their flagship event and the start of their global roadshow series. This pause gives time for them to decompress from, analyze, and iterate on their flagship event before going out to different regions.

Don’t plan your stops too close together. Plan ample travel time between each presentation to allow the team — especially your speakers — time to rest. Keeping one to two weeks between each event, depending on the length of the event, gives you and your speakers time to recover and respond to any unexpected needs. 

What Makes a Global Roadshow Successful?

Use data to iterate and improve along the way. Storing all of your event data in one platform is crucial for making the most of a global roadshow. This will enable you to share and act on event insights to improve each new event. For example, one RainFocus client leverages its annual conference data as the foundation for their global roadshow strategy. For registration, they note recurring check-in behaviors and apply successful practices to their global roadshow. Looking at session performance, they identify key messages that will likely resonate with their wider audience. If certain messaging doesn’t resonate, the company’s content team tweaks the session content before it’s shared worldwide.

Integrate with marketing and sales technologies. Roadshows have the tremendous potential to accelerate sales. RainFocus clients use their global roadshow series to progress opportunities down the marketing funnel. Throughout the year, the global events team for one of these clients meets with marketing to compare the tour data with won opportunities and determine which purchases can be attributed to their regional events. Because they have integrated their customer data profile with RainFocus, they can instantly see how customers’ event experiences have factored into their purchasing decisions. 

Keep your audience at the center of your strategy. Choosing the right locations for your audience is imperative. While event teams regularly select cities with a high concentration of customers, others might also favor popular travel destinations to elevate their attendee experience. The timing, location, and content of your global roadshow should all align with your audiences’ needs and desires. 

Global roadshow events provide a valuable experience for attendees worldwide to explore new products and technologies in their own communities. Using your global roadshow to support your primary event can help you grow your event program and generate momentum for your business. Having a single source of data and putting it to use through a platform like RainFocus allows you to constantly iterate and improve your global roadshow to drive revenue-generating experiences. Request a demo of RainFocus to learn how it can unify your event experiences.