If coronavirus hasn’t been the only thing you’ve been thinking and talking about for the past couple of weeks, I envy you. It’s no secret our industry has been shaken up by the recent turn of events. Business leaders, sales teams, and event marketers alike are feeling the effects of major conference cancellations and company travel bans forcing dips in attendance.
Here’s what’s beautiful about all of this though: the amount of teams jumping into action to pivot their event marketing strategies. Instead of wallowing and accepting defeat, they are proactively looking to new solutions and wildly brainstorming on how they can fill the gap that these large events have created. Every time I log into LinkedIn, I see the community of smart marketers coming together to help each other solve this problem and work together to activate programs that create growth — not just keep the lights on.
You don’t have to take it from me though. Read on to see how our community of event and marketing experts are thinking about event marketing right now and what they’re doing to be agile.
“At Yext, we’ve enacted new company- wide travel policies to protect the health and safety of our employees and customers. This means, for the time being, we will not be participating in sponsored events, conferences, and internal in-person meetings where travel is required. We are not committing to event sponsorships, and have made the difficult decision to pull out of sponsored events for the next month, monitoring future sponsorships on a weekly basis.
As far as field marketing events go, we are being cautious. For upcoming events in any cities experiencing outbreaks, like Seattle, we have made the decision to postpone. However, this does not mean we are hitting the pause button all together. Our travel policy has forced us to be ultra-agile, so in the cities we are still hosting our field events, we have activated our local team members –– marketing or not –– to step up and become event people. Even outside of our core field marketing programs, we are empowering our local sales representatives to host in market, smaller, safer events that will still foster business connections.”
Lindsay also mentioned that she is toying with the idea of marrying virtual events with in-person experiences. While this strategy is still in planning-mode and I don’t want to give away any of the creative ideas that her team is working on, I can say this: Lindsay’s team understands that virtual events alone won’t cut it. Attendees need the physical experience to feel connected to the brand, and the power of direct mail just might solve the experience gap.
“Currently, there is a shift away from large events. Facebook's F8 and Adobe's Summit are two examples of large events that were recently cancelled.
So how do brands continue to engage in a responsible manner? In the next six months, I think we will see a shift to more virtual events and an increase in smaller local events, like dinners where the risk of virus spreading is decreased.”
“To be overly cautious, we’re pivoting all of our events for the foreseeable future to digital experiences. Here’s what I told my team: don’t assume that just because your event is digital now that it’s just another webinar. Target that digital event in the exact same way you would an in-person event — if it was a local meet-up, restrict your promotions to a certain geography and ask attendees questions about their local area. If it was a dinner, remember that those attendees who are tuning in are expecting a higher-touch experience, even though it’s digital. Though these are unfortunate circumstances, it is a great way to expand our concept of what makes events special and learn how we can replicate that experience over a digital platform.”
“We see a trend with clients who are hosting events in the immediate coming weeks, either cancelling or postponing to the summer or the fall. If they haven’t cancelled or postponed, we’ve seen some companies explore live streaming options so that those who can’t attend due to travel restrictions still have access to the content. The events that are most difficult to prepare for are those in May or June. Since we can’t predict how the situation will evolve by then, we’re in a holding pattern until areas institute state of emergency policies that implement a force majeure.”
It’s clear that event marketers are at a crossroads. With so many options to cancel, reschedule, go virtual, go hybrid, or forge ahead, our days are full of critical decisions. However, this is not the time to lose focus on what moves the needle: human connection. Events have the unique ability to create serendipitous moments that would otherwise not happen if people were not physically present at an experience. The best thing we can do right now as a community is to come together with ideas on how to keep connecting. Whether that’s an internal or external conversation, we will work together to reinvent our strategies, goals, tactics, and processes to keep those unplanned moments and happy accident meetings moving the needle.
Hannah is the Community & Customer Marketing Manager at Splash. Her goal is to empower Splash customers to showcase their expertise with the rest of the event marketing community. A former event marketer, Hannah understands the effort it takes to pull off a seamless event and understands how imperative the Splash software is to an event marketer's success. Hannah is a Rhode Island native/glorified beach bum, equestrian, and mother to the world's most perfect corgi, Wilbur.
