5 Tips for Creating Engaging Virtual Events
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Written by Hannah Swanson

@HannahLSwanson
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5 Tips for Creating Engaging Virtual Events

August 14, 2019

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5 Tips for Creating Engaging Virtual Events
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Written by Zach Napolitano

@funeral_z


7 Ways to Improve On-Site Communication With Your Team and Your Guests

July 31, 2018

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:

Modern Event Strategy

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:

Define Your Event's Value Proposition

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).


Put the Right Tools in Place

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:

Setting a Global Field Event Strategy into Action at Medallia


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

roadshow event experience

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. 


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.

Amy Barone, Senior Director of Marketing Events & Engagement Programs at Tableau


4. Take Care of Your Lists

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.

5. Build Up Sending Volume Over Time

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.

6. IP Whitelisting

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.

6. Create the best guest experience possible

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.

Want to watch the whole webinar? Grab the recording here: Beyond the Big Event: Innovative Strategies for Marketing Event Programs at Scale

author

Hannah Swanson

Hannah is the Community & Customer Marketing Manager at Splash. Her goal is to empower Splash customers to showcase their expertise with the rest of the event marketing community. A former event marketer, Hannah understands the effort it takes to pull off a seamless event and understands how imperative the Splash software is to an event marketer's success. Hannah is a Rhode Island native/glorified beach bum, equestrian, and mother to the world's most perfect corgi, Wilbur.

Written by Zach Napolitano

@funeral_z


7 Ways to Improve On-Site Communication With Your Team and Your Guests

July 31, 2018

I know I’m not the only one guilty of watching a webinar on one screen and answering email, scrolling through social media, or just generally multitasking on the other. When hosting a virtual event and having your audience behind a screen, you’ll always have to work harder to get and keep them actively engaged. Here are some tricks I’ve learned after both hosting and attending countless virtual events.

Tip #1: The Content You Prepared for Your Live Event May Not Translate at a Virtual Event

1. Create a Reusable Template with Branded Event Marketing Assets

If I’ve learned anything about the virtual events, it’s that the content you prepared for the live event will not resonate in a virtual environment. When presenting to a live audience, you have their undivided attention. When presenting to an audience behind a computer screen, you have to work much harder to keep their attention. 


Short snippets with tons of visuals and interactive content work best (keep reading for more on this later). If you think for one minute the 45-minute keynote you prepared for your live event with no visuals is going to keep your audience on the edge of their seats, you’re wrong –– they’ll be scrolling through Instagram before you’re finished with the welcome address. 

Tip #2: Keep Engagement Up with Interactive Content & Attendee Homework

kiosk mode check-in

Splash makes it stress-free for our team at headquarters to enable over 180 retail locations to propose and execute in-store events. With Splash, we know all store outreach for our events will be on brand and on message. The individual store managers and their district managers are also empowered to use their deep knowledge of local markets to create events that work best for their stores.

Elyssa Dimant, VP of Brand Marketing and PR, J.Crew


When you’re creating a content plan for your virtual event, assume your audience wants to connect with fellow attendees just like they would at a live event. Think about the exercises you would have prompted: greet your neighbor, raise your hand if you’re using a specific solution, stand up if this is your first time visiting the hosting city, etc. 


While replicating the exact same prompts at a virtual event might not be feasible, you can still create an interactive environment. Insert frequent polls into the content flow to keep attendees involved (bonus points for simultaneously gathering attendee data), or even call on attendees to share insights. 


Pro Tip: As you watch registrations pour in for your virtual event, connect with a few attendees ahead of time and ask them if they’d be willing to share insights on the virtual event. This allows you to have some seeded questions and committed attendees to get the conversation going. 


If you want to get really creative, give your attendees some homework before they arrive at the virtual event. On the Splash Community team, we’ve been asking our attendees to bring their best and worst event pages to specific virtual events so they can share how they created their favorite pages, and ask the audience for help to up-level their least favorite. 

Tip #3: To Record or Not to Record? 

Here’s a tricky one: Do you record your virtual events? At first, you’re probably thinking: Of course I would record. I can use the recording as gated content and score leads after!  Not so fast.


While it’s true that recording and repurposing your virtual events can be a great demand generation tool, think back to how many times you ditched a webinar or other virtual experience because you knew you could watch it on-demand at a later date. I’ve found that explaining an event won’t be recorded (or recorded for internal purposes only) prompts registrants to show up and participate. 


Having clear goals prior to promoting a virtual experience is key here. If your main goal is to share content and educate your audience, then recording makes sense so you can repurpose into demand generation content. If your goal is to have a collaborative, virtual, hands-on experience, your best bet is to hold on recording. 


Tip #4: You Can Never Have Enough Visuals

Having a plain old slide deck isn’t enough when it comes to hosting an engaging virtual event. Your audience needs something to look at that captures and keeps their attention. Try not to keep one visual up on the screen for more than five minutes, and pull in as many visual examples to support the presentation as much as possible. 


For example, three Splash User Group chapters held virtual meet-ups in March, and each speaker toggled between their bright, animated slides to examples of event pages they’ve created. Using examples and giving the audience something fresh to look at every few minutes not only kept attendees present, but cultivated more collaboration and audience Q&A. 

Tip #5: Every Webinar is a Virtual Event, But Not Every Virtual Event is a Webinar

Just like every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square, virtual events and webinars are not interchangeable terms. While you can categorize webinars under virtual event programs, it’s misleading to promote a run-of-the-mill webinar as a virtual event. I would argue that the only similarity between a webinar and a virtual event is the page setup and registration process. 


Virtual events have unique elements that engage the audience with interactive touchpoints and should bring a more human element to the table. Webinars are typically more rehearsed and educational, with prepared slideshows and only a handful of people talking. All attendees are muted and typically do not have the option to come off of mute and interact with the speakers. When creating and promoting the program, be sure to clearly explain what experience you’re creating for attendees so expectations are reasonable. 


The most important piece of the virtual event puzzle is knowing that they cannot and will not replicate the exact experience a live event provides. And that’s okay. Today, virtual events are what we have, and they are a great way event marketers can reach their audience and create value during times like this. And when in-person events come back with a vengeance, remember that IRL + URL will be the right recipe, not URL instead of IRL.

We love the event hub functionality in Splash. It allows us to easily add new in-store events to our national event calendar, which gives us a single URL we can link to across social media, our website, and in email footers. It’s an effective holistic reference for our store activations and is easy to manage internally as well.

Jill Hennessey-Brown, EVP/Head of Stores, J.Crew

Watch How to Move Your Live Events Online with Splash on-demand

6. Leverage Metric Reporting Like You’ve Never Seen Before

The reason these surveys are valuable is that they provide immediate feedback—both qualitative and quantitative—and are condensed into reports for the team at HQ to review. Sure, they might get this in a quarterly or annual report, but the district managers and team at HQ may need access to this feedback immediately. With Splash, everyone with a license can access the reporting tools in Splash and review activity shortly after each event.

Splash has made event data much more accessible and meaningful. We’re able to use it more effectively to optimize the customer experience and understand intent, the same way we’re able to use email open and click data toward those goals.

Daryn Foster, Event Manager, J.Crew


8. Brands will begin to focus on power stores — even though that means closing others.

Image: Penguin Random House

4. Take Care of Your Lists

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.

5. Build Up Sending Volume Over Time

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.

6. IP Whitelisting

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.

6. Create the best guest experience possible

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.

author

Hannah Swanson

Hannah is the Community & Customer Marketing Manager at Splash. Her goal is to empower Splash customers to showcase their expertise with the rest of the event marketing community. A former event marketer, Hannah understands the effort it takes to pull off a seamless event and understands how imperative the Splash software is to an event marketer's success. Hannah is a Rhode Island native/glorified beach bum, equestrian, and mother to the world's most perfect corgi, Wilbur.

Our latest event marketing guide has a galaxy of on-site tips and best practices. Start exploring The Universe of Events.

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