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.

The events industry is evolving, and with that, marketers are saying hello to events that go beyond the “big show” (i.e., massive conferences with thousands of people) and instead looking at multi-city, repeatable programs they can run globally. 

While you can throw a large tentpole event — the one that involves year-long prep and half the annual budget — have you considered smaller, repeatable programs throughout the year that can have an immediate impact on your revenue targets?

Splash recently partnered with SiriusDecisions to host a conversation focused on going Beyond The Big Event with expert and Research Director, Demand Marketing Strategies, Cheri Keith of SiriusDecisions; veteran Senior Field and Partner Marketing Manager, Natalie Graham of Medallia (recent IPO); and Splash’s savvy Senior Director of Product Marketing, Sasha Pasulka. 

The trio covered the new era of events, defined repeatable event programs, and addressed the business impact of repeatable events, including topics: modern and effective event strategy and management, building field marketing programs, and event marketing at scale. This set the stage for event program owners and marketing leaders to consider how they will navigate going beyond the “‘big-event” mentality.

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person next to them?

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:

No matter your business’s product or service offering, or if you are a large-scale enterprise or an up-and-coming fast-growth company, part of an organization’s growth strategy includes event marketing. As a marketer or event manager, you are the driver of your programs and responsible for deciding the type of event, cadence, goals, and of course budget — determining just how much are you willing to put on the line to get the results you need.

Let’s rewind to the first line of this blog post — we’re saying goodbye to the big-show mentality. I know what you’re thinking: Is Splash suggesting I should hit the pause button on hosting my large annual conference?! No, definitely not. We are, however, suggesting that implementing a strategy that allows teams to test ideas and move quickly to action can yield some truly amazing business learnings and results. And, we know repeatable field events are becoming a key tactic in marketing plans, as they help drive quantifiable outcomes; just ask the team at Index Exchange. These smaller, rinse ‘n repeat events are not only easier to pull off than a 1,000+ person conference, but significantly cheaper, and will likely prove a better ROI since they are higher, more curated touchpoints for your audience.

INSERT IMAGE HERE

In the latest study on event marketing, Harvard Business Review found that rapid revenue growth was fueled by event marketing — 52 percent to be exact. So maybe you’re nodding, perhaps even bought into the idea of the repeatable half- to full-day field event strategy — fantastic! Here’s how to bring your event programs to life, effectively and in a scalable way:

The first step to any event program is to take a deep breath and ask yourself, Why am I actually doing this?  Whether you’re an event marketer, demand gen marketer, or field marketer, it’s easy to lose focus of what you’re truly attempting to showcase for the company’s webinar, live event, or customer conference. Is your award ceremony an opportunity to showcase branding or a platform to give out your sustainable swag? What are you telling your sales team when they ask for follow-up materials? How many customers versus prospects are you inviting? Collaborate with your marketing team, ask your sales team questions, and put something on paper that will serve as a north star for the entire initiative.

For example, if you see in your analytics that one organization isn’t engaging with the initial email, it probably means they have a very strict firewall in place. So, now you know to follow-up personally or adjust your strategy for the next email.

This first email could come in the form of a teaser email to drum up buzz for your event, or even something a little more vague to get people interested (and curious).

Field marketers adjust their programs based on the needs of varying customer and prospect types. To do this, they need reliable tools to keep their brand, data, and communications consistent. 

If you or your field marketing team are leveraging one-off tools to showcase regional events, strategic scale and brand continuity is not feasible, and the value proposition you worked so hard to define will be overshadowed by the technical difficulties you encounter every step of the way. Your brand is your company’s identity, so why would you use tools that are not powerful or flexible enough to showcase it? From your landing page to email communication to name badges onsite, make sure your field marketing team has the proper tools in place to execute on-brand, seamless experiences every time.

INSERT IMAGE HERE

Here’s an example of a great looking event email:

Don’t just take it from us. Having a field event or repeatable event strategy that is consistent, scalable, and globally friendly pays off beyond what you (or your boss) thought was possible. Natalie Graham, who joined us for the previously mentioned Beyond the Big Event conversation, explained it best:

Image: Penguin Random House

Image: Conference Matters

When Natalie started at Medallia in 2018, she was faced with one-off tools for field marketing programs. The Medallia brand was not always displayed properly, teams were working in silos, and if field event data existed, it was hard to track down. Natalie is responsible for scaling the global field marketing program and had all the right ideas in motion to make an impact on the business, but was missing the tools to do so. To set a registration page for an event and ensure email marketing was ready to rock quickly wasn’t a thing; there was a ticketing process in place that usually took days, if not weeks. It was the furthest thing from self-serve, and the marketing operations team was saddled with the stress of handling all technical aspects of a global field program (landing page, emails, list management, campaigns... the list goes on). This simply wasn’t scalable.

Enter Splash. Once the Medallia team was onboarded with Splash, they were able to streamline all field event programs and the weight was lifted from the ops team. What used to take over a week and involved multiple departments, now took a mere 24 hours; and Natalie was able to build out the whole event herself.

Splash helps the people behind the event programs deliver a beautiful, branded, digital experience, and allow hosts to measure event impact accurately. "It felt to us that so many parts of businesses have breakthrough technology that really enables scale. We hadn't seen that in events yet, so we built it." - Sasha Pasulka

Want to see how we built it? Check out every corner of Splash's event marketing platform here. 

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.

You also need to think about who you’re sending your emails to. Make sure you’re only sending to your engaged recipients — a good rule of thumb is to send to those who have opened or clicked emails in the past few months.

And of course, don’t send emails to users who have unsubscribed or whose emails have bounced in the past. This also means you need to constantly maintain your lists, and update them with any unsubscribe or bounce information.

^{Post-event page made with Splash}

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.

One of the best ways to improve email deliverability is to build a solid reputation with email services by sending high-quality emails day after day.

For example, you shouldn’t just send an email to 500,000 people in one day (that’s a huge red flag to servers). Instead, build up to a large email send by breaking it up over several days, and increasing the volume with each send (in other words: sending to 100,000 people five days in a row isn't great either).

P.S. If you're a Splash customer and considering a large-volume email send, talk to your CSM about the best approach for your strategy.

This is the most effective email deliverability tactic, but it’s also the most complex to achieve. Depending on your relationship with your guest list (e.g. VIPs or high-value accounts), you can request that their IT team have your company’s IP put on a “whitelist,” which would allow your promotions to bypass any company firewalls.

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.

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.

In case you missed it, top-tier organizations have been canceling their in-person events in light of the coronavirus threat. Event marketers understand how risky these investments can be, and we’re seeing the most innovative companies shift toward agile event programs.

This type of programming is designed to thrive in a world of fast-moving business priorities and unexpected change — sound familiar?

Agile event programs include an online component or embrace hybrid events — ones that happen both in-person and online. Over the last few weeks, hybrid events have seen tremendous growth.

For instance, Lattice’s Head of Events, Erin Flannery, is pivoting to either local, in-person events or virtual ones: “Though these are unfortunate circumstances, it is a great way to expand our concept of what makes events special and learn how we can replicate that experience over a digital platform.”

Our upcoming webinar, How to Move Your Live Events Online with Splash, demonstrates ways to pivot to a hybrid event marketing model. Make sure to register, then read on to hear from Perry Piep, Product Operations Manager at Splash, for how-tos on preparing your organization for this reality.

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person next to them?

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:

Events that happen both in-person and online are better for business, because they’re easy to scale up and down quickly, and you can move them to be entirely virtual if you need to.

Plus, there’s less up-front investment involved with an event that isn’t exclusively in-person, which means changing plans isn’t painful for your bottom line.

There are certain strategies that equip you and your team to better handle hybrid or virtual events, and quality event marketing platforms will help you execute on them.

Consider:

• Can you quickly update all your event marketing assets centrally?

• How do you disseminate information about virtual elements of your event?
• Can you embed live streams on your event pages?
• How can your guests indicate if they’re arriving in person or virtually?
• Can you send your guests real-time updates about your event, with clear next steps?
• Does your event marketing platform integrate with technologies that enable you to host meaningful hybrid events?

Splash has your back across every attendee touchpoint, and makes it easy to quickly update your event marketing assets centrally.

Pivoting to accommodate virtual requirements of a hybrid or virtual event strategy shouldn’t require a ton of extra work. Here are a few ways that Perry Piep, Product Operations Manager at Splash, leverages the Splash platform to its fullest when it comes to hosting hybrid and virtual events.

Did you know you can use your event page as a home for streaming? Take advantage of video blocks to embed YouTube or Vimeo streams. Or, add an iframe element to your page for almost any streaming service — we recommend Facebook Live.

If you want to boost engagement at your hybrid event, consider hosting a live Twitter chat and embedding the feed onto your event page. There’s no reason virtual attendees shouldn’t be part of the action.

With the power of stages, transform your site from collecting registrations to a place of viewership for your remote guests:

• Create a stage entitled “Streaming Site” for clean record keeping.
• Schedule the stage to go live at “Start Date.”
• Transform your stage into a home theater.

Pro tip: Create another stage — this time called “Post-Event” — where you can host a recording of the livestream, plus information about the next event and photo gallery recaps. This stage can be scheduled for the event end date.

To bake flexibility into your event strategy, set guests up with the choice between attending your event in person or virtually.

Using conditional logic, you can steer them along this personalized journey:

• First, create a new radio type question: “How are you planning to attend the event?”
• Set your radio options to “In person” and “Virtually.”
• Then, depending on the information needed based on your guest type, create a new question.
• Using the conditional logic icon, you can ensure this question only appears for those who have answered “In-person.”

By catering the registration experience to guests intending to attend your event either in person or online, you avoid showing preferential treatment to a certain type of attendee and can begin demonstrating the value of your event up front.

In the case of a hybrid event where virtual guests rely on a streaming link, touchpoints are the sure-fire medium for minding the details.

Use this checklist to make sure that guests always have access to your webinar link.

Include the link on:

• Your event page.
• On-page confirmations.
• Follow-up and reminder emails.
• Post-event stages.

By double-checking that every touchpoint includes a way for guests to access your streaming location or resulting recording, guests will always have all relevant information before, during, and after your event.

Your Splash guest list has more power than you think to guarantee that your organization can adapt to any event environment.

Get started by learning how to filter your Guest List by their registration answers. Once you’ve segmented out your in-person and virtual guests using filters, create lists that will help you streamline and personalize communication for different types of guests.

With a series of targeted email campaigns created in Splash, you can provide specific “know before you go” tips for all audience types — whether you’re suggesting a comfy couch for viewing, or parking tips for those attending IRL.

You can also gauge and combat IRL drop-off sooner by giving guests the ability to modify their RSVPs. Create an email campaign specifically for your “In Person” list with the “Modify RSVP” button. Guests will be able to adjust their response to the “How are you planning to attend?” question, ensuring they don’t miss out on the content and you don’t overestimate attendance.

No matter where you’re hosting your virtual event, ensure that attendees can get the information they need — and that their registration data is up to date in your CRM and MAP systems.

If you’re using BlueJeans, Splash automatically creates a BlueJeans webinar when you create an event, and attendees are automatically marked as attended in the Splash event when they join the webinar.

Integrate your ON24 webinar with Marketo and Splash. Event registration and attendance information will be shared across all three systems — just associate your ON24 webinar with the Marketo program connected to Splash.

Using other technologies? Leverage Zapier to automate your tasks and plug into existing workflows to sync event data in real time with over 750 platforms, including GoToWebinar.

In this example, check out Senior Product Manager, Tim Alexander, connect Splash to GoToWebinar using Zapier.

By the way, if you’re not keeping your guest information up to date across CRM and MAP systems, you’re doing it wrong. Good news: Splash offers integrations for Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and more to make sure that contact records are accurate with attendance status for optimal follow-ups, and accurate prospect and customer engagement analysis.

We’re just getting started with pro tips. Why not give our virtual event a go to get pro tips from the Splash experts?

Join Zach Napolitano, Director of Customer Education, and Faisal Mawani, Technical Solutions Consultant, on 3/26 for a webinar about How to Move Your Live Events Online with Splash.

You’ll learn:

• How to create and market a webinar or online meetup.
• Tools and strategies for promotion and post-event engagement.
• How to use Splash to host a "hybrid" live/virtual event.
• Embedding a live video feed into your Splash event sites.
• Implementing webinar integrations, such as BlueJeans, ON24, and Zoom.

For example, if you see in your analytics that one organization isn’t engaging with the initial email, it probably means they have a very strict firewall in place. So, now you know to follow-up personally or adjust your strategy for the next email.

This first email could come in the form of a teaser email to drum up buzz for your event, or even something a little more vague to get people interested (and curious).

Here’s an example of a great looking event email:

Image: Penguin Random House

Image: Conference Matters

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.

You also need to think about who you’re sending your emails to. Make sure you’re only sending to your engaged recipients — a good rule of thumb is to send to those who have opened or clicked emails in the past few months.

And of course, don’t send emails to users who have unsubscribed or whose emails have bounced in the past. This also means you need to constantly maintain your lists, and update them with any unsubscribe or bounce information.

^{Post-event page made with Splash}

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.

One of the best ways to improve email deliverability is to build a solid reputation with email services by sending high-quality emails day after day.

For example, you shouldn’t just send an email to 500,000 people in one day (that’s a huge red flag to servers). Instead, build up to a large email send by breaking it up over several days, and increasing the volume with each send (in other words: sending to 100,000 people five days in a row isn't great either).

P.S. If you're a Splash customer and considering a large-volume email send, talk to your CSM about the best approach for your strategy.

This is the most effective email deliverability tactic, but it’s also the most complex to achieve. Depending on your relationship with your guest list (e.g. VIPs or high-value accounts), you can request that their IT team have your company’s IP put on a “whitelist,” which would allow your promotions to bypass any company firewalls.

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.