What is B2B event marketing?
B2B event marketing means running your own events, such as webinars, roundtables, dinners and user meetups, so that the right people at target companies spend time with you and move towards a deal. It differs from attending conferences: you choose the guests, the topic and the follow-up. (For other people's events, see our sibling post on B2B marketing conferences and how to work them.)
The measure is pipeline, not headcount. A dinner for eight buyers who each book a meeting beats a webinar with 300 sign-ups and no next step. Choose the format by how many people you need in the room and how much one deal is worth.
Which event format should you choose?
Pick by the number of target accounts you can realistically fill seats from and the deal size. Platform prices below were read from each vendor's own page on 5 Nov 2026.
| Format | Good for | Typical size (our guide) | What it costs to host (checked 5 Nov 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webinar | Teaching a problem to many people at once; lead generation | Dozens to hundreds | Zoom Webinars: $89 a month billed monthly, or $66.67 a month billed annually, at the 500-attendee capacity shown by default |
| Virtual roundtable | Peers comparing notes; late-stage accounts | 6 to 12 | An ordinary video meeting plan you may already pay for |
| Dinner | Senior buyers, high deal value, one city | 8 to 12 | A private room minimum spend, for example £1,500 to £2,000 at one London restaurant (worked example below) |
| User meetup | Customers and prospects meeting each other; referrals | 20 to 80 | Luma: free with a 5% platform fee on paid tickets, or Luma Plus at $59 a month billed annually with 0% platform fee |
Webinar platforms bill on different bases, which changes the cost a lot. Zoom prices by attendee capacity: a 500-attendee plan lets up to 500 join, and Zoom says registrations can be unlimited for unpaid events. Livestorm Pro instead charges per attendee: €2.50 per attendee when you buy 400 attendee credits, where one credit is used for each unique participant per session over 12 months, live or watching the replay, and team members aren't counted. For a ticketed meetup on Eventbrite, free events have no fees and paid tickets carry a 3.7% + $1.79 service fee per ticket plus a 2.9% payment processing fee per order.
How much does a B2B event cost? Two worked examples
Here are two sample events with prices from the venue's and platforms' own pages. The guest numbers are invented for the example.
Sample dinner: 10 guests in London in November. Berners Tavern's 2026 private dining brochure lists a room with a capacity of 12, a set menu at £75 per person, and a food and beverage minimum spend for dinner of £1,500 from January to September and £2,000 from October to December. Prices include VAT, and a discretionary 13.5% service charge is added.
- Menu: 10 × £75 = £750, below the £2,000 November minimum, so you pay at least £2,000.
- If the 13.5% service is added on that: £2,000 × 1.135 = £2,270.
- Per guest: £2,270 ÷ 10 = £227. In March, with the £1,500 minimum: £1,500 × 1.135 = £1,702.50, or £170.25 a guest.
Season alone moves the per-guest cost by about a third, and cancelling within 14 days loses the deposit, so book outside the busy months if you can.
Sample webinar series: one a month for a year. Zoom Webinars annual billing: $66.67 × 12 = $800.04, or $66.67 per webinar. On Livestorm Pro at €2.50 per attendee, a webinar where 83 people join live (the average in the benchmark below) uses 83 credits, €207.50, before replay viewers, who also use credits. 400 credits cost €1,000 and cover about four such webinars (4 × 83 = 332 live attendees), leaving 68 for replay viewers; credits are used over 12 months. Capacity pricing is cheaper for big audiences; per-attendee pricing is cheaper for small, irregular ones.
How many people will actually turn up?
Plan for roughly half your webinar registrants to attend live. Livestorm's 2026 webinar benchmark report (vendor research, published 1 September 2026) analysed 33,786 sessions from 3,199 organisations run on its platform in 2025: the average show-up rate was 47.7% (48.9% in 2024), with 175 registrants and 83 live attendees per webinar on average. Tuesday had the best show-up rate, 51.7%.
The same data shows when people sign up: 49.7% of registrations came in the final seven days, and 15.3% on the day of the event. In its survey of 853 go-to-market professionals (11 to 20 December 2025), email was the top registration channel, cited by 86.3% of teams. These figures are from one vendor's customers, who chose to run webinars on that platform, so treat them as a rough guide. We didn't find a comparable public benchmark for dinners or roundtables in our searches on 5 Nov 2026; for those, count confirmed seats and expect some last-minute drop-outs.
What does a promotion timeline look like?
Start three weeks out, then put most of your effort into the last week, because that is when half the sign-ups arrive in the benchmark above.
Day -21: pick the guest list and topic
List the target accounts first, then the topic they would leave a desk for. Book the platform or the room. For a dinner, send personal invitations now.
Day -14: first invitation and event page
Email the list, post once from the host's own profile, and ask each speaker to share it.
Day -7 to -1: the main push
Second email to people who haven't opened, personal notes to your top 20 accounts, one more social post. Confirm dinner seats by name.
Day 0: reminders
A reminder email the morning of the event and one an hour before, with the join link in the first line.
Day +1: follow-up
Separate messages for attendees and no-shows (templates below).
The same tactics that cut demo no-shows help here; see our post on reducing no-shows for sales demos.
Invite and follow-up templates
Sample templates for a small B2B team. Northwind Ltd and Priya at Acme are sample names; replace every bracket.
For more follow-up wording, our follow-up email templates cover the replies that come after these.
How do you measure pipeline from an event?
Tag every guest with the event in your CRM before the day, then count meetings, opportunities and revenue from those contacts at 30 and 90 days. Without the tag, the event disappears from the numbers once a salesperson takes over.
- Before: create one campaign or source value per event, and import registrants and confirmed guests under it.
- After: mark each as attended, no-show or declined.
- At 30 days: meetings booked and opportunities opened with at least one attendee.
- At 90 days: opportunity value and won revenue, and cost per opportunity (event cost ÷ opportunities).
Attribution tools can help if you already have them. HubSpot's attribution reporting help page lists "registered for marketing event" as an interaction type and marks the contact's last interaction before a deal was associated to them. Its reports count interactions; they can't tell you whether a deal would have happened anyway. For a small team, a simple rule works: count an opportunity as event-sourced if it opened within 90 days of an attendee's first meeting with you, and event-influenced if an attendee joined an open deal. If you keep contacts in Siela's built-in CRM with a visual pipeline, each attendee's deal stage shows in one place.
The first follow-up after the meeting matters as much as the event; our guide on the first 24 hours after a sales call applies to post-event calls too.
Frequently asked questions
What are examples of B2B events?
Webinars, virtual roundtables, executive dinners, customer or user meetups, workshops, product launch sessions, office hours and booths or side events at a trade show. Your own events give you the guest list and the follow-up; attending other people's events gives you reach. Small teams usually start with a monthly webinar or a quarterly dinner.
How much does it cost to host a webinar?
On 5 Nov 2026, Zoom Webinars listed $89 a month billed monthly or $66.67 a month billed annually at its default 500-attendee capacity, and Livestorm Pro listed €2.50 per attendee for 400 credits. Add the time to prepare, promote and follow up, which usually costs more than the software for a small team.
What is a good webinar attendance rate?
In Livestorm's vendor benchmark of 33,786 webinars run on its platform in 2025, 47.7% of registrants attended live on average. Your rate depends on how well the topic fits the list and how many reminders you send. Track your own rate over several events and compare against that, not against one vendor's average.
How far in advance should you promote a B2B webinar?
Start about three weeks out so speakers and target accounts can plan, but expect most sign-ups late: the same benchmark found almost half of registrations came in the final seven days. Put your second email, personal notes and reminders into that last week.
How do you measure the ROI of an event?
Divide the event's full cost by the opportunities it produced within 90 days, then compare won revenue from those opportunities with the cost. Tag guests with the event in your CRM beforehand so their meetings and deals can be traced back. Treat early numbers cautiously because deals often close months later.
Sources
- Zoom: Webinars and Events pricing (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Livestorm pricing (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Livestorm: 2026 Webinar Benchmark Report (vendor research) (published 1 Sep 2026; checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Luma pricing (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Eventbrite organiser pricing (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Berners Tavern private dining room brochure 2026 (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- HubSpot Knowledge Base: Understand attribution reporting (checked 5 Nov 2026)