Virtual Events: How to Avoid the 3 Biggest Event Data Mistakes

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.

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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:

If you pivoted all of your live events to virtual, you’ve probably figured out by now that there’s a whole new set of data you have the opportunity to collect and analyze.

While this probably excites your marketing operations team beyond compare, it’s a double-edged sword. More opportunities to collect data means more possibilities of collecting the wrong or incomplete data, giving you a skewed view of how your virtual events are actually performing. 

Over the past few months, I’ve watched Splash customers host all types of virtual events and listened to their experiences. I’m starting to see trends and understand where the data black holes exist. Hopefully, by the time you’re done reading this post, you’ll be able to avoid these virtual event data mistakes.

I’ll admit, this isn’t the most riveting blog post I’ve ever written. But bear with me — I promise it’ll be worth your while.

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First things first: I’m not saying you need to host every single virtual event on an exclusive webinar or streaming platform. What I am saying is that all virtual event registration data should be gathered in an event marketing platform that integrates with the webinar or streaming platform you’re using for the event. 

I know what you’re thinking: Why would I add this seemingly extra step in the registration process when I can just send an invite directly from the webinar platform or from my marketing automation platform and have guests register there?

Because just like with live events, rogue virtual events are a real thing. 

Here’s a real-life example to clarify how this mistake can get out of hand: A company uses Splash to organize all live events and most of their virtual events. They have an integration set up with Splash and ON24 to host all webinars, and they are confident they’re collecting all registration and attendee data in an organized fashion.

However, the sales team has been putting together a virtual event series for top-tier prospects that is hosted on Zoom. Instead of having those prospects register for the virtual event on Splash and then receive the Zoom link in confirmation emails, the sales team is just sending calendar invites with the link out to guests where they can accept or decline the invite. 

This creates data silos and black holes like you wouldn’t believe. Take the time to educate any teams responsible for hosting virtual events on how to effectively use the technology they have access to, how guest data should be collected, and any other process they should observe.

Image: Penguin Random House

Image: Conference Matters

One of the biggest challenges event marketers are facing in the pivot to virtual events is capturing check-in data. Arguably the most important data to collect, so many organizations don’t have the tools in place to capture this data. That means they either use their best guess of who was in the room or in some cases, have no process in place for capturing virtual event check-ins. 

This issue is most prominent in virtual events that are set up as live streams or a Zoom video conference. If you’re only hosting on a traditional webinar platform, you’re probably not going to run into this problem. 

The good news is that there’s a way to solve this. And it’s called Virtual Event Page touchpoint. Normally, I wouldn’t straight-up plug Splash in a blog post, but this is one of those times where the technology our team created was so game-changing that I can’t help but rave.

Virtual Event Page touchpoint allows event marketers to create a secure, branded destination for a live stream event. This means that when a registered guest clicks on their unique code in their confirmation email to join the live stream, that data is automatically recorded in Splash. If this doesn’t make you undeniably excited as a data-driven event marketer, I’m not sure what will.

It’s one thing to blindly upload an attendee list from a large industry event and blast everyone (you know who you are), but it’s another to know exactly who visited your booth, who met with your sales team, attended your event — they’re the ones that are the most engaged with you and they’re the ones you should focus on the most.

Though brief, that simple interaction with with the chef took the night beyond just an excellent meal.

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.

A caveat to this section: This is more in the “ninja moves” category of collecting event data, and if you can’t solve for this today, it’s okay. My advice is that if you’re not in a place where you could capture this data today, bookmark the idea and start creating processes to get to this place. 

Once you’ve solved for capturing check-in data, it’s time to level-up and start understanding how long your attendees are staying at your virtual event. By capturing this data, it will allow you to optimize for the duration of future events because you’ll know how much attention your audience is willing to give. (Hint hint: It’s not six hours, but probably more like 60 minutes.)

A lot of marketers are hosting their smaller virtual events on Zoom meetings. It’s simple, it's easy to set up, and just about everyone in the world is familiar with the tool since it’s been a favorite for both professional and personal use since COVID-19 came to town.

However, Zoom meetings can create some data black holes ... or so I thought. After listening to Ryan Duffy, VP of Corporate Partnerships at Declare, present at a Splash user group meet-up last month, I learned that if you log into your profile on the Zoom web app and head into Reports → Usage, you can find out exactly how long each unique user stayed in the Zoom room. 

We’re just scratching the surface of what data you’re able to capture at virtual events. As someone who likes to look for silver linings, event marketers have an awesome opportunity right now to get a deeper understanding of who their audience is than if we were hosting live events.

What’s even cooler about being an event marketer during this unprecedented shift is you get to write the book on what virtual events should look like, what data truly matters, and how you can evolve your strategy to get the most bang for your buck. As a perpetual learner and someone who is fascinated by listening to customer experiences with virtual events, if you have ideas that need a spotlight, hit me up on LinkedIn and let’s chat.

Learn more about how Splash Virtual can solve your virtual event data woes.

This is when having accurate event data readily available and synced between sales and marketing systems becomes crucial, so that executives, sales teams, and the marketing team are all on the same page. Event data is shared weekly or even every other day, so everyone has a clear understanding of things like RSVPs and check-ins, and can adjust their communications or follow-ups accordingly.

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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.

When the MediaMath team goes to determine the ROI of an event, they’re able to track and attribute opportunities and future deals to a prospect attending the event.

And from a budget perspective, they’re also able to look at data from all events over the course of a year and see which opportunities and deals are associated with people who attended. This helps them determine which events are working or what they should adjust, and where they should continue investing their marketing dollars.

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.