Events are a prime marketing channel for your company to build brand awareness, generate revenue, increase product adoption, and strengthen customer retention.
Some may even say they are the prime marketing channel.
But they don’t come without challenges. Perhaps most notably, they can be stressful and big hits to the budget.
That’s why event technology is so important. It helps event marketers do their jobs easier, faster, and better.
Event technology should enable event marketers to drive value. It should support all kinds of events that drive revenue and progress toward other goals. And it should help marketers do what was seemingly impossible for so long: measure events with data.
But how should an event marketing platform support an event-led growth strategy? Let’s take a look.
Year after year, event marketing is named one of the most stressful jobs. It’s no wonder why: You spend months planning a single event, constantly worry about filling the room, and have to consider plans B, C, and D.
If your company is doing event-led growth, you're not doing one event a year. You’re probably doing dozens (or more). Many of these are probably repeatable events. An event marketing platform automates several of the more time-consuming, tedious tasks for you, including:
The cold truth: Even if you had all the time in the world, launching event promotions on time is always a challenge. Having a jam-packed events calendar doesn’t help.
Think about everything you need ready for launch. You’ve got an event website, event invitations, reminder emails, confirmation emails, follow-up emails, and social share cards, just to name a few.
An event marketing platform will templatize these things for you, so it's faster to launch your events. And the faster you can launch events, the faster you’ll see opportunities flow in. Templates also offer more design consistency. This supports overall brand awareness and recognition, while assuring your design team that no logo, color, or font will be out of place.
If you’re running events that involve other parts of your organization (like having regional sales teams run their own field events), you might start handing over light event efforts over to those teams.
A problem we see a lot with democratizing events is what we call "events gone rogue": too many people making too many decisions about things they don’t know much about.
For example, a sales team in Austin hosts a networking event. They know their venue options, can pick out budget-friendly food and beverage, and don't really need an event marketer on-site. Sounds great (and less work) for marketing.
But then you see an event website and email invitations (that were already sent) featuring unlicensed stock photos, off-brand colors, and no company logo in sight.
This happens a lot. With an event marketing platform, you can give these other teams governed access. This lets them quickly and easily build event websites and promotions — on-brand. This supports (not detracts from) your work toward the bigger event strategy and goals.
Having an event-led growth strategy means you have multiple event programs running at the same time, and they're serving different stages of the buyer journey. Multiple teams likely have a stake in these events.
An event marketing platform gives more visibility into these event programs for all involved. It keeps teams aligned on event details, progress toward goals, and next steps. Integrating your event technology with other tools you use maximizes visibility, like:
Increasing brand awareness, generating revenue, increasing product adoption, and strengthening customer retention.
These are just a few reasons why businesses love events. They do them all.
But events can be really hard to pull off. They’re stressful, expensive, and often come with huge headaches for everyone involved.
Event technology alleviates event challenges.
Event technology supports repeatable events. Faster events. Event democratization. Better visibility.
And without event technology, marketers focused on event-led growth will find it difficult to drive value, make progress toward goals, and prove impact at the executive level.
