This article was first published June 22, 2020 on Forbes.com as a Tech Council post.
Event marketing has changed significantly this year — no one can argue this. If events haven’t been postponed or canceled, they’ve been transformed. Venues are no longer conference centers, private dining rooms, and ballpark box suites, but rather virtual meeting spaces behind our computer screens.
We can take comfort in the fact that the fundamentals of event marketing remain constant. The goals of generating leads, building brand awareness, and boosting customer loyalty, to name a few, are still relevant. Event marketers must still create engaging experiences.
But as we continue to navigate this new normal, business and marketing leaders have experienced an increasing strain on resources. The combination of lean teams, disconnected tech stacks, and growing lists of responsibilities has led to inefficiencies, stressful hours, and more rogue event programs than ever before.
Solving this challenge comes down to scale. By scaling things like event design and event data, marketing leaders and their teams do two things. One, they do more than just maintain their current event programs. They can grow their programs — even with fewer resources. And two, they can ensure all programs are aligned when in-person events come back with a vengeance.
And they will come back, stronger than ever.
Just as quickly as the current pandemic surfaced, event marketers have had to adapt their event programs. Through the chaos and shift to virtual events, marketing leaders I’ve talked to have said that event design and brand integrity were among the first things to suffer. Given the increasing strain on resources and the need to pivot quickly, this isn’t surprising.
But it’s unfortunate since an event’s design is often a customer or prospect’s first impression of not only the event itself but the brand behind the event. The brand experience today means more than it has in the past, as companies must work harder to earn loyalty and trust in a crowded market and with fewer resources.
To stand out, especially in an increasingly saturated virtual event space, marketing leaders must ensure their teams are set up to easily create beautiful, branded events. In the coming months, it’s likely they’ll have fewer in-house resources to support this, so they need to think smarter.
The solution is building compelling, branded event marketing templates, including promotional materials and invitations, that can be used for more than one event and by more than one team. This enables scale across teams and their organization, alleviating the pressure felt from fewer resources. It also helps ensure brand consistency and eye-catching marketing materials across all events — in-person, virtual, and hybrid.
Between the rush to understand the virtual event landscape and fewer marketing resources to manage the search for virtual tools, teams across organizations are working in silos. This has led to data loss, delayed event follow-ups, and lack of event reporting. Without these, marketing teams are risking huge opportunities to understand their attendees, drive action, and reach business goals.
To avoid the potentially disastrous collision of fewer resources and data misuse, marketing leaders must prepare now. Scaling data through a connected marketing tech stack is the way to do this. Teams need to understand which events are making the biggest impact on each individual prospect’s journey through the sales funnel.
It doesn’t matter whether we’re in a situation like today, when virtual events are the only option, or in the future, when in-person and hybrid events make a comeback. Either way, data still needs to move fluidly across systems so marketing and sales teams can understand what’s working (and what’s not working). This also lets teams keep today’s virtual events aligned with past and future in-person events, so no event data gets lost in the meantime.
The bottom line: If marketing leaders don’t take action today to scale event data, the gap between in-person and virtual events will only widen, especially as in-house resources become more and more limited.
We are all moving faster than ever before to continue activating event programs, filling the sales pipeline, and driving business results. And as marketing resources are becoming increasingly strained, leaders need to connect teams, reassess their approach to event marketing, and begin scaling their event design and data operations.
At the end of the day, marketing leaders can solve these challenges by empowering their teams to use one event marketing platform and one process that will align all of their event programs and set them up for scale. In-person events aren’t gone forever. It’s important to stop thinking of in-person and virtual event programs separately, and rather identify how to successfully scale virtual events today that will help grow a long-term event strategy — without having to add more resources.
