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.
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.
Ready to be the most efficient marketing ops pro in the game? Take the full tour of Splash and get started.
Kara has been a Marketo Certified Expert since 2013, and has spent much of her career in marketing automation consulting and marketing operations for both startups and enterprises. Prior to Splash, she spent more than three years at Amazon Web Services helping run their Global Lead Management and Marketing Automation team. In her free time, you can find her at the stable with her horse, Money, or spending time with her three children.