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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.
When I joined Tableau in January of 2007, there were only 30 people in the entire organization.
No one knew anything about Tableau at that time — and to make things even more difficult, we were looking to disrupt the business intelligence and data analytics space in a way most people had never seen before.
We knew we needed to get our brand and product in front of people in a meaningful way. In 2008, we squeezed 187 people into a conference room at a hotel, and launched our very first customer conference.
Tableau's very first customer conference in 2008 took place in a hotel conference room and featured 187 guests.
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:
In the early days of Tableau (small budget, small team), we did what most B2B technology brands with tiny budgets did: invest in industry trade shows and sponsorships.
But as our company grew, so did our marketing.
With sponsorships, we realized quickly that we weren’t maximizing the potential of our events. After all, by hosting our own experiences, we’d have more control over everything: from the messaging on the signage to the design of our event pages to the content presented on-site.
While we haven’t completely scrapped sponsorships or trade shows (we find these are still effective when our goal is net-new leads), our biggest focus is on our hosted events: large-scale conferences, segment-focused summits, product launch events and roadshows, and user groups.
All these events, especially our hosted events, have been integral in building our brand and community and have played a huge role in growing at the scale and level and pace that we did.
Unfortunately, events are rarely “one-size-fits-all.” Know what the goal of your event is to know which metrics to focus on. If you want to target every stage of the sales funnel, ensure you’re throwing a strategic mix of events to maximize your impact.
At Tableau, we matrix our event types based on the sales funnel and our different audience goals. For example, an executive roundtable will not necessarily bring us new customers, but can help influence buying power in an organization that we might already have an open opportunity with.
Educational events (we call these “make-me-smarter events”) don’t have a sales goal at all, and are just meant to educate. For our large-scale events — the ones we invest the most in — we usually target every stage of the funnel (from customer renewal to sales velocity to brand awareness).
The secret to increasing event registrations and ROI? Partnering with your sales team.
The secret to getting your sales team to actually invite their prospects and customers? Proving to them it works.
Our event marketers spend at least 25% of their time coordinating with the sales team: not only by providing collateral, aligning on details, and collaborating on the guest list, but also by reporting event performance directly related to the sales team (potential ROI and post-event success).
To take it a step further, we also incentivize the sales team with competitions and award those with the highest event registration numbers with cash or prizes (like a free trip to Hawaii).
Show your sales team the data and the ROI they get for taking those extra minutes to get people to register. Show them that their time investment is worth it.
Event marketers test new strategies all the time (how else do we stay ahead?) and we have to make predictions all the time. The key is to track your progress continually, measure what worked and what didn’t, be okay with being wrong, and be flexible in making appropriate adjustments.
For example, back in 2011, we launched our customer conference in Europe. It was a completely new market for us and we leveraged a lot of previous attendee behavior to predict event sizes and demographics.
What we didn’t see coming was that our conference in the Netherlands had nearly 40% prospects attend, which is highly unusual for a customer conference.
Using this data, we were able to shift our on-site behaviors and activities on the spot (i.e. equipping salespeople with more prospect-focused language) to cater to both prospects and customers.
While focusing on the goals, metrics, and results of your event is important, showing how those results affect the entire organization is the best way to get your leadership excited about your events.
Performance reporting is the most effective way to prove the value of events to your whole company. Constantly educate your leadership team on your event performance and celebrate wins in a visible way (i.e. performance dashboards, post-event reports).
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.
