It’s been one month since Dreamforce and by now, most marketers are reaping the benefits of their investment. Or, they’re trying to forget the money they sunk into a mega conference where they failed to break through the clutter. At Splash, we’ve already regained our investment in accelerated closed-won revenue and opened nearly $400k in new opportunity.
With 170,000 attendees, 2,700 sessions, and 300 exhibitors, Dreamforce is famous for attracting the tech elite along with their massive buying power. But, it’s also notorious among marketers for being one of the most difficult conferences to crack — especially for those with modest budgets.
That only slightly intimidated us. With a modest budget and a small (but mighty) marketing team, we set out to accelerate and generate revenue through unique activations — activations that allowed attendees to experience the Splash brand and product firsthand.
Here's an overview of our investment:
• Marketing team size: 5 total (3 of whom were on-site at Dreamforce)
• Budget: $85k, including travel and expenses for 13 Splash attendees
• Activations: 5 hosted events; 1 Dreamforce event calendar
• Cloud Wine: our flagship event.
• Dreamforce.events: our curated calendar of the best events at Dreamforce.
• Mastermind Dinner: A VIP dinner for our top customers and in-pipe prospects.
• C-Cycle: A SoulCycle ride exclusively for C-Suite or VP-Level
• SplashCycle: A SoulCycle ride exclusively for our customers and friends of Splash.
• OutFierce Community Ride: A SoulCycle ride supporting Salesforce’s Ohana group for allies of diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity.
Leading into Dreamforce, we had early indications that our investment would pay off — high conversion rates on our promos, good registration numbers, a few landing pages that went viral among a close-knit group of CMOs and tech marketers. And, on-site, the momentum continued with better-than-average attendance rates and a line around the block for our Cloud Wine event.
While Dreamforce certainly felt like a victory as we packed our bags in SF and headed back to Splash HQ in NYC, we weren’t ready to claim victory until the ROI spoke for itself. One month later, we’re celebrating here at Splash. 🥂 🎉
I don’t think there’s any better way to explain our approach than to share the memo I sent to Splash employees three days after Dreamforce. It’s a little unconventional, but the excitement among attendees, across our social channels, and internally, was contagious when we returned. Everyone wanted to know how we conquered Dreamforce, especially without an official sponsorship.
So, when I returned to my desk on Monday following the event, I sent the following note to the company.
Warning: It’s long, so I’ve broken it into sections (click to jump to what’s of interest):
Of course, the first question some of you asked throughout the planning process was “Why Dreamforce” when there are countless other events we could activate at.
Here’s why:
• Our deep relationship with Salesforce as a customer. Almost all of their satellite events around the conference were hosted on Splash. This was great exposure for us and we also wanted to be on-site to support them.
• Our natural fit with this community because of our integrations with Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Our high density of current customers and prospects in the Bay Area and/or that we know attend Dreamforce
• The right types of people on-site:
• Event marketers/planners there to run the activations for their own companies
• Marketing, sales and executive leadership from our target accounts
• Salesforce admins, sales ops, and marketing ops — those we don’t typically target, but are very influential in technology buys and ultimately manage the Splash/Salesforce integration and are thrilled with the depth of event data we collect.
One of our main goals was to have people experience the Splash brand firsthand. There’s no better way for them to do this than to go through an event lifecycle with us. So, we invested in our own curated, satellite events. Here's the final breakdown.
• A VIP dinner for 30 of our customers and top prospects
• 3 SoulCycle buyouts with 102 industry influencers/customers/prospects
• A MEGA party with 1500 registrants / 600+ attendees
• Our Dreamforce.events hub
• 61% Event production
• 28% Employee travel/expenses (13 attendees)
• 8% Swag/Promo items
• 3% Event promotion
• ~1650 unique people engaged
• ~900 unique companies engaged
• 65% were NET NEW leads (never in our database before)
• $50k on a small pod in the back -or-
• $150k on a decent sized booth somewhere in the sea of exhibitors
It’s also important to note that these sponsorship costs don't include any activations you want to do at your booth. That includes computers/equipment for demos, traffic drivers (i.e. spin the wheel/slot machine), swag/incentives, and employee travel. Typically, when I've done a conference sponsorship in the past, I budget an additional 50% over the sponsorship fees for everything else that goes into it.
I'm not saying official conference sponsorships aren’t worthwhile, but you have to figure out what you’re trying to achieve before you determine your event presence.
With one of our key goals being as having people "Experience the Splash Brand," there was no better way for us to do this than to have them go through an entire event program with us — from registration to emails to post-event AND to connect in-person with us at Splash-owned events.
This way, they could meet us and get a real feel for our brand. To be fair, if we had a bigger marketing team and budget, I would have likely taken out a booth AND done all of our activations (and we saw many, much larger and very successful, companies do this), but — like most other marketers — we have limited resources and had to spend where it made the most sense for us.
I spoke to some of my peers that bought the $150k option and they generated ~1k leads at their booth (significantly fewer than us). It will be interesting to compare our performance with some of theirs in the coming months (Note: shoot me an email if you want to compare!).
It was really important for us to have events that attracted different audiences (customers, new prospects, executives). To pull that off well, we really needed to focus on how we would curate the intended attendees for each event.
Something that helped us curate the right audiences for our smaller, more intimate events was having two key CTAs to drive the masses to. Using our events hub (Dreamforce.events), and our mega party (Cloud Wine), we were able to cherry-pick the best registrants to cross-promote those smaller more intimate events to (our 3 SoulCycle events and our VIP dinner).
Our mass promos included: batch emails to our database, ads, social sharing, event listing sites — all of which either pointed to Cloud Wine or Dreamforce.events.
• Emailed C- and VP-level registrants with an invite to our C-suite SoulCycle ride
• Emailed customers, target accounts, and influencers with an invite to SplashCycle
• Alerted sales/CS to personally invite their customers / prospects to our VIP dinner
All of this drove great, curated participation in the smaller, more intimate events — and we got good net-new participation in those smaller, more intimate events, which is a little unheard of.
What We'll Do Next Time: we will also test using retargeting/paid social/ads to do similar, very targeted cross-promotions.
Bonus: Having the two big CTAs was key in driving our ~50 on-site meetings.
Dreamforce is massive and there are at least dozens (maybe hundreds) of competing events/events happening at anytime. Going into Dreamforce and with the help of insights from our Data Science team, estimated a 50% attendance rate at our smaller, more intimate events and a 25% attendance rate at Cloud Wine.
Here's how we stacked up:
• Dinner: 56% attendance rate
• SoulCycle Rides: 59% attendance rate
• Cloud Wine: 40% attendance rate
• The Friday before Dreamforce - a personal, text email from Ben (CEO)
• Day-of reminder, sent mid-day, from Ben
• The Thursday before Dreamforce (when they're packing) - a personal, text email from Ben
• A day-before HTML email
• Morning-of -6 am!- personal email from Ben (Rides were early!)
• Sunday of Dreamforce week HTML (cross-promoted Hub to drive more traction there too)
• Day-before "Upgrade to VIP” HTML to high-quality registrants on the general admission list (come an hour early, taste with the winemaker)
• Morning-of HTML (super fun and creative tease)
Having each of our events use our Waitlist functionality and approval flows was critical to ensuring a great quality audience at each event. Dreamforce is a beast and everyone will register for everything they can get their hands-on, especially if it's got good food/entertainment/booze.
Here's what we did to ensure great audiences at each event:
• Guests went to a waitlist and received an automated email that said something like "Hang tight, we're confirming your registration / space / remaining availability."
• The marketing team manually approved (changed status to attending) as registrations came in.
• Those approved, got a confirmation email that said something like "You're in!” and focused on all the fun they would have at the event.
• For those that didn't fit the profile of the audience we wanted to curate for the event, we had a text email in Splash ready to go that said something along the lines of, "Thanks for registering, but we can't confirm your spot." We would either asked them to re-register with business contact info or told them the event was for a certain audience.
Results: we turned away ~50 unqualified RSVPs across all events. We were fair about our qualification criteria and only turned away those who were truly not relevant (students, etc).
I generally think of our email systems like this: Marketo for mass promotions and driving response to an event and Splash for all comms after someone has converted (registered) for the event.
Promoting via Marketo allows for advanced segmentation and ensures communication preferences are followed (i.e. what kind of content someone wants to get, how often they receive communications from the company, etc) without having to move/manipulate data outside of its primary platform.
Once someone has converted and the emails are more transactional in nature (reminders, bring a friend, post-event, etc) it makes sense for communications to come from the place that captured that data — Splash!
Important to note: Even when we do send emails from Marketo, we always design them in Splash (usually from a template) and export to HTML — it's so much easier than starting from scratch or a bad Marketo template.
Also, emailing from Splash makes me despise certain things about Marketo — no emojis in subject lines or body — Boo! 😣
We had 4 Cloud Wine party partners. Because of the ease of tracking partner registration via Splash, I was able to:
All of this is possible in Google Analytics and with marketing automation, but it's a pain. It was truly refreshing to use Splash to track!
I've never gotten to a place where I can track event campaigns granularly, nor have I been able to run incentive contests at scale. I've always had to rely on my marketing ops team and/or digital marketers to help me with this in the past.
Splash was way easier and I could manage myself — in fact, I literally set up partner tracking myself late one night by using this support article (shoutout to Zach/Support/Customer education) and I pulled most of our results myself — that doesn't happen with other tools.
Splash tracking links made it possible to easily and granularly measure paid ad/paid social event spend — more granular than I ever have before!
Each channel was assigned a unique URL. We also added standard UTM parameters for Google Analytics tracking. (For reference, links looked like this: https://dreamforce.events/twitter?utm_medium=paid+social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=dreamforce+events&utm_content=cpc)
Paid Ad Results from Twitter and LinkedIn:
20% of our total Dreamforce.events hub subscription came from paid social ads. And to my surprise, these campaigns drove insanely high-quality / senior-level people.
Lesson for next time: Invest more in paid social for our events — more time setting up campaigns, more money, be more aggressive, launch campaigns earlier.
We also used tracking links to incentivize sales, BDR, and CS to drive registration and open opps to the event. Each rep was assigned a unique URL that tracked their registration results.
Internal Contest Results:
• Through the tracking links/contest, our team drove 11% of the Cloud Wine registration (we can do better next time!).
• Attendance ratio was 5% higher than our average (this is why you should always do personal outreach!).
This is kind of fluid depending on how proficient you are in your various tools/tech. For us, here's how we do it:
Pre-Event:
• Splash for RSVP tracking, partner performance, paid spend performance, contest performance.
• ROI Dashboard via Splash for insight into the opportunity in the room leading up to each event.
Note: This was really helpful in getting our on-site team jazzed about the events each day and focused on who they had to engage with at each event. I found this to be MUCH easier to navigate than similar Salesforce reporting and really exactly what you need going into an event.
• Salesforce for sharing a roll-up of all events/activations that's easy to segment by lead/contact/account owner and campaign data (critical to have this view for outreach around setting on-site meetings).
• Slack for real-time registration and check-in activity internally.
• Marketo for email analytics on promo emails.
• Splash for attendance tracking by partner performance, paid spend performance, contest performance
• ROI Dashboard via Splash for easily measuring new opps open and closed/won post-event with really beautiful and easy-to-read views
• Salesforce for sharing a summary roll-up of all events/activations that's easy to segment by lead/contact/account owner, campaign (event), status data (critical for rep follow-up)
• Also, longterm, Salesforce for evaluating how this series of events performed against other marketing tactics over time
An example of our ROI Dashboard via Splash:
Want to dig deeper into our Dreamforce strategy? Check out our latest webinar with our CEO and VP of Marketing.
Amy Holtzman is VP of Marketing at event marketing platform, Splash, which powers in-person marketing programs for the world’s leading brands, including more than half of the Fortune 500. As VP of marketing, Amy oversees demand generation, product marketing and customer marketing. Prior to Splash, Amy served as VP of Demand Generation at content intelligence platform, Conductor, and before that held senior-level marketing roles at Demandbase, CBS Interactive and Crain Communications.
