Wait…what? You think I can do…more? With less? That doesn’t sound simple at all!
Well, believe it. Achieving more with less can be simple. With helpful tips and advice from Camille White-Stern and Zach Napolitano on the latest episode of Checked In With Splash, you can learn ways that you and your team can achieve more in less time. Let’s dive into it…
This may be an obvious first step, but if your marketing tech stack isn’t cutting it, that’s likely going to result in more manual tasks and more time-consuming work for you and your team. Zach gave a great example of what this may look like IRL:
“If your tech stack is holding you back because your emails don't connect to your guest list, or you have to rely on a CRM or marketing ops person to queue up an email for you, or if you want to change a speaker bio on your event page that has to go through a designer or developer…When I think of a good tech stack – it's the breadth of what you're able to do so you can hit all those different event marketing checkboxes.”
And these days, tight marketing budgets won’t allow event marketers to accomplish these tasksusing multiple, highly specialized SaaS platforms. Marketing teams need fewer, more powerful solutions with a broad array of features and capabilities that can help their event marketers automate tasks and save time.
Engaging your target audience in multiple ways is a key way to ‘do more with less.’ Zach and Camille emphasized this very point, as it relates to repurposing content from your virtual events. Zach summarized an example of this during the podcast:
“You can start taking the best parts of an event – the best talks and the best speaker moments – and turn that into content for your website, for social media, for Linkedin feeds, for your sales team to follow up with. All of these little places that we would call ‘dark social’ – where word of mouth sharing happens, but isn’t measured by attribution software. Virtual events really lend themselves well to dark social because they can be so easily repurposed into content that spreads through word of mouth.”
By repurposing content from a given event (ahem, much like we’re doing with this blog post about a podcast!), you and your teams can really squeeze every last drop out of your events – whether they’re in-person, virtual or hybrid.
And speaking of multiple different event types - Camille and Zach discussed Splash’s mantra of “No one-off events.” Basically, no single event should ever exist in isolation. If you’re doing events on a one-off basis, that probably means your marketing team is needing lots of time to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch every time.
Part of this holistic, programmatic approach, is really being able to set yourself up for success from the beginning, which Camille had some great thoughts about:
“It’s the importance of ruthlessly prioritizing and setting the right goals. Because as event marketers, or even as marketers in general, we have no shortage of ideas. And the people on our teams have no shortage of ideas. But as the people responsible for shaping the strategy behind our event programs, we need to be the ones who really, deeply understand how to align business objectives with event program goals. And I think being really clear on what you're trying to influence from the get-go is the first step. And then defining what metrics and KPIs you need to track and measure in order to gauge success of your program.”
If you’re an organized, programmatic thinker, you’re going to save your team a lot of time in the long run. And that extra time can be used to give your communications that extra personal touch (and, if you listen to the full podcast, you can hear some specific examples here around ways the Splash team has used targeting and personalization to successfully combat event attrition).
While we are just scratching the surface here, Camille and Zach offer lots of specifics in the full episode itself. If this piqued your interest - give the podcast a listen!
In the meantime, keep leveraging a strong tech stack, repurpose that event content in multiple ways, and be militant about planning and goal-setting! Who knows, you may just find yourself with enough time to catch up on more than one episode of Checked In With Splash ;)
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