If you’re familiar with Splash, you know that we’re big fans of small, scalable IRL events. Bigger events certainly have their purpose and can be great too, of course… but there’s something about a personalized, intimate event that really helps deliver your message and boost your brand.
On a recent edition of Splash’s podcast, Checked In With Splash, Camille White-Stern hosted an episode walking through how to get attendees to show up to your events so you can really ‘nail it’ with your smaller, in-person gatherings (definitely check out the full episode ASAP!).
Where did all these pearls of wisdom come from, you ask? Well, Splash recently hosted an executive dinner series called Magic Spark that spanned 12 cities worldwide. And here are some of our Magic Spark learnings that Camille highlights in this bite-sized episode:
Having a well-thought-out plan and defined playbook for our Magic Spark dinners was the first step to success. Marketing knew what sales was doing, sales knew what marketing was doing, so there wasn’t overlap or duplicative work going on since every player knew what their role was.
"Take the time to get that alignment [between marketing and sales]. It will serve you in the long run in so many ways… You will appreciate it because your sales team who is supporting these programs will be doing exactly what you need them to do. [A detailed playbook] helps you remember that we're on the same team and we're working towards the same goals."
Camille White-Stern
Sr. Manager Experiential Marketing, Splash
We also found the sweet spot as far as when to start promotions for these smaller events. Through some trial and error in the past, we found that 1-2 weeks beforehand really didn’t give attendees enough time to plan and block their calendars. But, once we extended that timeline to 3-4 weeks (that’s the time between the first official ‘invite’ to the event date itself), we started getting a lot more interest. That ideal timeline was far enough in advance for attendees to plan but not so far ahead of time that attendees weren’t yet ready to commit.
Planning and executing these events would be an uphill battle if you were trying to do all of this manually. So we have four words for you: Leverage. Your. Tech. Stack!
Event technology platforms can help you:
We started touching on this in the last section, but personalization was a big key to the success of our Magic Spark dinner series.
Two key things we learned when trying to best tailor the attendees’ experiences were:
"[Our personalization strategies] really put a face to the company name/event that we were running. There were several attendees who shared that that was like a *chef's kiss* addition to our pre-event comms strategy and really made them feel like, “Oh, a real human is inviting me to this event. I'm going to show up!"
Camille White-Stern
Sr. Manager Experiential Marketing, Splash
First off, be sure to give this full podcast episode a listen since you’ll get some color commentary from Camille around all of these great pieces of advice. Check out some of our other great episodes of Checked In With Splash too, while you’re at it.
If you have any event marketing stories or topics you want to hear about - holler at us at podcast@splashthat.com or reach out to Camille on LinkedIn.
