Amy Barone, Sr. Director of Marketing Events & Engagement Programs at Tableau Software, shares her event marketing secrets in our A New Era in Event Marketing webinar with Harvard Business Review and AdAge. Below, she gives an inside look at how Tableau  grew and scaled a high-performance event program.

The events industry is evolving, and with that, marketers are saying hello to events that go beyond the “big show” (i.e., massive conferences with thousands of people) and instead looking at multi-city, repeatable programs they can run globally. 

While you can throw a large tentpole event — the one that involves year-long prep and half the annual budget — have you considered smaller, repeatable programs throughout the year that can have an immediate impact on your revenue targets?

Splash recently partnered with SiriusDecisions to host a conversation focused on going Beyond The Big Event with expert and Research Director, Demand Marketing Strategies, Cheri Keith of SiriusDecisions; veteran Senior Field and Partner Marketing Manager, Natalie Graham of Medallia (recent IPO); and Splash’s savvy Senior Director of Product Marketing, Sasha Pasulka. 

The trio covered the new era of events, defined repeatable event programs, and addressed the business impact of repeatable events, including topics: modern and effective event strategy and management, building field marketing programs, and event marketing at scale. This set the stage for event program owners and marketing leaders to consider how they will navigate going beyond the “‘big-event” mentality.

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person next to them?

Ten years later, our annual conference attracts nearly 20,000 customers and partners, our company has grown to 4,000 people, and we have a first-class marketing team with dedicated event professionals who are the best in the biz. Events have been a crucial part of our brand and help us better connect with our community, evangelize our customers, and ultimately grow our company.

Here’s how we did it:

No matter your business’s product or service offering, or if you are a large-scale enterprise or an up-and-coming fast-growth company, part of an organization’s growth strategy includes event marketing. As a marketer or event manager, you are the driver of your programs and responsible for deciding the type of event, cadence, goals, and of course budget — determining just how much are you willing to put on the line to get the results you need.

Let’s rewind to the first line of this blog post — we’re saying goodbye to the big-show mentality. I know what you’re thinking: Is Splash suggesting I should hit the pause button on hosting my large annual conference?! No, definitely not. We are, however, suggesting that implementing a strategy that allows teams to test ideas and move quickly to action can yield some truly amazing business learnings and results. And, we know repeatable field events are becoming a key tactic in marketing plans, as they help drive quantifiable outcomes; just ask the team at Index Exchange. These smaller, rinse ‘n repeat events are not only easier to pull off than a 1,000+ person conference, but significantly cheaper, and will likely prove a better ROI since they are higher, more curated touchpoints for your audience.

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In the latest study on event marketing, Harvard Business Review found that rapid revenue growth was fueled by event marketing — 52 percent to be exact. So maybe you’re nodding, perhaps even bought into the idea of the repeatable half- to full-day field event strategy — fantastic! Here’s how to bring your event programs to life, effectively and in a scalable way:

The first step to any event program is to take a deep breath and ask yourself, Why am I actually doing this?  Whether you’re an event marketer, demand gen marketer, or field marketer, it’s easy to lose focus of what you’re truly attempting to showcase for the company’s webinar, live event, or customer conference. Is your award ceremony an opportunity to showcase branding or a platform to give out your sustainable swag? What are you telling your sales team when they ask for follow-up materials? How many customers versus prospects are you inviting? Collaborate with your marketing team, ask your sales team questions, and put something on paper that will serve as a north star for the entire initiative.

For example, if you see in your analytics that one organization isn’t engaging with the initial email, it probably means they have a very strict firewall in place. So, now you know to follow-up personally or adjust your strategy for the next email.

This first email could come in the form of a teaser email to drum up buzz for your event, or even something a little more vague to get people interested (and curious).

Field marketers adjust their programs based on the needs of varying customer and prospect types. To do this, they need reliable tools to keep their brand, data, and communications consistent. 

If you or your field marketing team are leveraging one-off tools to showcase regional events, strategic scale and brand continuity is not feasible, and the value proposition you worked so hard to define will be overshadowed by the technical difficulties you encounter every step of the way. Your brand is your company’s identity, so why would you use tools that are not powerful or flexible enough to showcase it? From your landing page to email communication to name badges onsite, make sure your field marketing team has the proper tools in place to execute on-brand, seamless experiences every time.

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Here’s an example of a great looking event email:

Don’t just take it from us. Having a field event or repeatable event strategy that is consistent, scalable, and globally friendly pays off beyond what you (or your boss) thought was possible. Natalie Graham, who joined us for the previously mentioned Beyond the Big Event conversation, explained it best:

Image: Penguin Random House

Image: Conference Matters

When Natalie started at Medallia in 2018, she was faced with one-off tools for field marketing programs. The Medallia brand was not always displayed properly, teams were working in silos, and if field event data existed, it was hard to track down. Natalie is responsible for scaling the global field marketing program and had all the right ideas in motion to make an impact on the business, but was missing the tools to do so. To set a registration page for an event and ensure email marketing was ready to rock quickly wasn’t a thing; there was a ticketing process in place that usually took days, if not weeks. It was the furthest thing from self-serve, and the marketing operations team was saddled with the stress of handling all technical aspects of a global field program (landing page, emails, list management, campaigns... the list goes on). This simply wasn’t scalable.

Enter Splash. Once the Medallia team was onboarded with Splash, they were able to streamline all field event programs and the weight was lifted from the ops team. What used to take over a week and involved multiple departments, now took a mere 24 hours; and Natalie was able to build out the whole event herself.

Splash helps the people behind the event programs deliver a beautiful, branded, digital experience, and allow hosts to measure event impact accurately. "It felt to us that so many parts of businesses have breakthrough technology that really enables scale. We hadn't seen that in events yet, so we built it." - Sasha Pasulka

Want to see how we built it? Check out every corner of Splash's event marketing platform here. 

Image: Google Books

When it comes down to it, the goal of any event is to grow and nurture the relationship between your guests and your brand — whether you’re promoting a product, building community, or looking to increase brand awareness.

You also need to think about who you’re sending your emails to. Make sure you’re only sending to your engaged recipients — a good rule of thumb is to send to those who have opened or clicked emails in the past few months.

And of course, don’t send emails to users who have unsubscribed or whose emails have bounced in the past. This also means you need to constantly maintain your lists, and update them with any unsubscribe or bounce information.

^{Post-event page made with Splash}

This way, guests didn’t have to worry about memorizing each other’s names or drawing a blank when they turned to chat with the person next to them, and we also got to show off  our product in a natural way.

One of the best ways to improve email deliverability is to build a solid reputation with email services by sending high-quality emails day after day.

For example, you shouldn’t just send an email to 500,000 people in one day (that’s a huge red flag to servers). Instead, build up to a large email send by breaking it up over several days, and increasing the volume with each send (in other words: sending to 100,000 people five days in a row isn't great either).

P.S. If you're a Splash customer and considering a large-volume email send, talk to your CSM about the best approach for your strategy.

This is the most effective email deliverability tactic, but it’s also the most complex to achieve. Depending on your relationship with your guest list (e.g. VIPs or high-value accounts), you can request that their IT team have your company’s IP put on a “whitelist,” which would allow your promotions to bypass any company firewalls.

Even if your event doesn’t require a full seating chart with assigned seats, think about how you want the flow of your event to go, and how you can create natural opportunities for meaningful connections.

Image: designworkplan

•   A sense of privacy: a completely private and closed off room for dinner proved to be an extremely crucial element. At one of the venues, an open section in the room allowed noise to disrupt the flow of conversation — making it feel less private and less special of a night compared to dinners that were completely closed off to the public.

At the end of the day, throwing events mean nothing if you’re not providing value to your customers.

At our conferences, we provide “Tableau Doctors” on-site that help customers or prospects with any questions about our product. Not only do these one-on-one appointments empower customers to engage with us in a meaningful way, they’ve also been the critical to driving event ROI.

What we all know as the season of giving may be over, but I have one gift left for all you marketing operations professionals out there: a priceless piece of advice. Ready for it? Here goes. If your company isn’t integrating event data with other business systems yet, make 2020 the year you do it.

As a marketing ops pro myself, I can tell you that these integrations are game-changers for your event marketing. Today, I want to focus on the integration between Splash and Marketo, and how it can positively impact marketing operations.

Before I started at Splash, I worked in marketing operations for companies that didn’t integrate their event marketing and marketing automation technologies. We’d have to build our event in one platform, create the Marketo program separately, then manually connect the two. What’s worse, when we wanted to send an email or update attendee statuses, we had to pull a list from the events platform and upload it into Marketo. 

Every. Single. Time.

As you can imagine (or perhaps you’ve lived it), this is exhausting. No marketing ops person wants to spend their time like this. There’s little strategy involved, it’s a huge time suck, and the chances of you making errors are much higher.

But this doesn’t have to be your life. With the native Marketo integration for Splash, Marketo programs are automatically created within a minute of building the event in Splash. This means that what used to take me several hours to complete now takes me only a few minutes.

Most marketing operations people are always super busy. This is what happens when you’re in a role that so many others in different departments depend on. So the more efficient we can be with our time, the better. Moving away from uploading spreadsheets and instead having automated, “set it and forget it” processes helps us do this.

What’s more, setting these processes up is quick and easy. Recently, I was on a call with a customer who was looking to onboard one of their internal teams onto Splash. Several other teams in the organization were already using Splash, but this team had been siloed up until this point. They were hosting events and using Splash to build event pages, but manually pulling lists from Splash and sending event communications from their individual emails. They had no idea how their programs were impacting the greater marketing efforts because reporting was non-existent and they were unaware of other events happening within the company. After having a short discussion, we realized there was nothing barring them from using the integration — they simply didn’t know what was possible. 

Within five minutes during this call, we set up the integration for this team. Now, when they build an event in Splash, the Marketo program is automatically created. And because they also use the Salesforce integration, it’s automatically tied to their associated Salesforce campaign and the all-up marketing reporting as well.

By setting up the integration, the team can send event invites, track responses, update attendee statuses, and view opportunities created from their event. But the best part: We helped loop that team into the bigger picture of marketing efforts so they could see how their work was directly supporting a larger strategy (more on this later).

And all it took was five minutes.

By this point, you’re probably convinced that the Splash and Marketo integration is the only thing you need in your life. Now it’s time to get your leadership team on the same page.

First things first: Keep track of what you spend your time doing and how much time everything actually takes you. Everyone knows marketing operations is busy, but proving it can be very impactful. Make note of how much time you’re spending on manual uploads, syncing data, pulling lists, changing attendee statuses, etc. 

If you’re like who I used to be (before integrations), you likely spend several hours a week managing event data. Now, I spend only a few minutes a week doing this, and my time has been freed up to work on more strategic things. 

And if your leadership team is like mine, they value efficiency and high-impact work. The common problem with events is showing that impact in a way that makes sense to leadership. 

With the Splash and Marketo integration, you can quickly pull metrics on opportunity generation, influence, revenue attribution, and of course, the usual event-related data points. My favorite thing? Having consistent data across multiple systems. For those who have lived data nightmares (like trying to make sense of two differing reports), you know how important it is that all platforms tell the same story, especially when recapping your progress to management.

                         Total Event Cost: $50,000

                         Total Ticket Revenue: $57,125
            [(57,125 - 50,000) ÷ 50,000] x 100 = 14.25% ROI

But Hannah, the event program I run doesn’t involve ticketed events. Can I still measure ROI?  Glad you asked! The answer is yes, but I call it something a little bit different: event influence.

When it comes to the benefits of integrating Splash and Marketo, increased efficiency, visibility into event data, and time savings are just the beginning. Because this integration makes it easy to access accurate data in real time, I’m able to significantly influence my marketing team’s broader strategy and the ROI that comes from my efforts. 

After we host an event, I can see program performance data in Marketo (who attended or didn’t show up), making it easier to customize the communications we send after that event. Plus, because I also use the Salesforce integration, attendee data is linked to all opportunities created. This lets me see which events result in the most opportunities and closed business (and for how much).

All of this means I know which events are working and as a result, which events we should continue investing in. I also better understand which events are not working (and where we may think about cutting our losses).

But more than that, this integration encourages me to stop looking at events as single points in time. Instead, I get the information to analyze an entire year of events and identify how our program is working as a whole. Understanding how our event marketing program translates into opportunities, dollars, and pipeline lets me prove impact and influence on our broader marketing strategy.

All of this sounds easy enough, right? I hope you learned a little something from this, and we’ll be adding even more content about Splash integrations soon, including thoughts on best practices, reporting, and how to make your lives a lot better with Splash and Marketo together.

Speaking of the little details, here are 51 of the tiniest things that can make the biggest difference at your next event.

The reason these surveys are valuable is that they provide immediate feedback—both qualitative and quantitative—and are condensed into reports for the team at HQ to review. Sure, they might get this in a quarterly or annual report, but the district managers and team at HQ may need access to this feedback immediately. With Splash, everyone with a license can access the reporting tools in Splash and review activity shortly after each event.

Image: Google Books

When it comes down to it, the goal of any event is to grow and nurture the relationship between your guests and your brand — whether you’re promoting a product, building community, or looking to increase brand awareness.

You also need to think about who you’re sending your emails to. Make sure you’re only sending to your engaged recipients — a good rule of thumb is to send to those who have opened or clicked emails in the past few months.

And of course, don’t send emails to users who have unsubscribed or whose emails have bounced in the past. This also means you need to constantly maintain your lists, and update them with any unsubscribe or bounce information.

^{Post-event page made with Splash}

This way, guests didn’t have to worry about memorizing each other’s names or drawing a blank when they turned to chat with the person next to them, and we also got to show off  our product in a natural way.

One of the best ways to improve email deliverability is to build a solid reputation with email services by sending high-quality emails day after day.

For example, you shouldn’t just send an email to 500,000 people in one day (that’s a huge red flag to servers). Instead, build up to a large email send by breaking it up over several days, and increasing the volume with each send (in other words: sending to 100,000 people five days in a row isn't great either).

P.S. If you're a Splash customer and considering a large-volume email send, talk to your CSM about the best approach for your strategy.

This is the most effective email deliverability tactic, but it’s also the most complex to achieve. Depending on your relationship with your guest list (e.g. VIPs or high-value accounts), you can request that their IT team have your company’s IP put on a “whitelist,” which would allow your promotions to bypass any company firewalls.

Even if your event doesn’t require a full seating chart with assigned seats, think about how you want the flow of your event to go, and how you can create natural opportunities for meaningful connections.

Image: designworkplan

•   A sense of privacy: a completely private and closed off room for dinner proved to be an extremely crucial element. At one of the venues, an open section in the room allowed noise to disrupt the flow of conversation — making it feel less private and less special of a night compared to dinners that were completely closed off to the public.