Wow. It’s been a wild few weeks. Or has it been months? It’s hard to keep track. It’s hard to keep pace with the daily change. It’s hard to predict anything.
You’ve been trying to figure out what to do. Honestly, so have we. Over the past month, we’ve talked to hundreds--probably thousands--of you, on community calls, at Splash User Groups, in the Slack community, on social media, in the streams of Q&As on our webinars, and in one-on-one conversations.
Our biggest takeaway is this: It’s totally normal if you’re not sure what to do. Even the most experienced marketers have never been through anything like this before. Event marketers are the tried-and-true masters of bringing order to chaos, but even they aren’t exactly sure what to do from their work-from-home war rooms. Everyone is on a steep learning curve. Nobody is sure they’re doing it right. It’s hard, and it’s weird, and it’s stressful, and that’s okay.
But we had other takeaways, too. We’re lucky to have this bird’s-eye view of the event marketing world. We wanted to share the key trends we’ve noticed and a handful of recommendations.
(Oh, and we also launched Splash Virtual to help you out.)
It feels like everything has changed for event marketers. But in key ways, things are the same. At Splash, we talk a lot internally about design, data, and scale. These are our “north star” principles: as we build our product, these are the three things we are solving for, because they’re the things our customers need. As we’ve talked to so many of you these past weeks, we’ve realized that they’re the same things you need even today.
- Design. We’re hearing from you that it’s difficult to create engaging and branded virtual experiences. Events are a way for people to experience a brand, and the virtual event platforms on the market aren’t exactly design-forward. They either allow minimal branding or none at all. In an increasingly crowded virtual world, marketers are looking for beautiful, branded ways to stand out from the crowd.
- Data. As you look to leverage virtual events to advance business goals, you still need data to move seamlessly between your systems. You still need follow-up programs to trigger. You still need your CRM to be up-to-date. Compliance is still the law. And you still don’t want to spend your time downloading, formatting and scrubbing spreadsheets to make that happen.
- Scale. You need all this to work for more than one event. For more than one team member. On more than one team. You need it to work for your virtual events today, and you need it to work later, too, when you’re ready to move back to some in-person events.
As we talk to so many of you –– and sometimes we’re even talking to different teams within the same company –– we’re noticing a few other trends in the midst of this crisis.
- A rush to understand and leverage the virtual landscape. You’re all exploring a wide world of virtual event platforms and virtual event types, learning what a virtual event entails and assessing whether and how it can replace an in-person event. This is awesome. Not every in-person event has to become a straight-up webinar. The smartest event marketers are rapidly evaluating the original goals of their in-person program types against the virtual platforms on the market to determine which platforms and formats will work best to advance their goals.
- Disconnected learning within organizations. Amidst this rush, teams across organizations are conducting separate virtual-tool searches and hiking up a steep learning curve in siloes. If you work for a larger company, we recommend you connect across teams to see what’s worked for others. Your field marketing team, demand generation team, recruiting team, internal events team and community teams--across product lines and regional offices--may have valuable learnings and insights to share already. Open up those lines of communication and do this together.
- Process disruption. Many teams are recreating their event marketing processes, almost from scratch, to adapt to virtual events. Even if they previously had a process that worked well, they’re discarding much about it and trying to rebuild as they pivot to virtual.
- Uncertainty about the future slows decision-making. How long will we need to stay virtual? How heavily should I invest in virtual tools? How will I switch back to in-person? When? How can I make a decision when I don’t know these answers?
We’re seeing some very specific problems emerge as a result of this.
- Limited or zero brand consistency across virtual events. With the current “every team on their own” chaos and the rapid shift to assorted third-party virtual platforms, visual brand integrity has been the first thing to go. This is a bummer, because events are such an important part of bringing a brand to life.
- Limited ability to measure or optimize across programs. As teams rush to different third-party platforms and new processes, and as they do it separately, there is no “single source of truth” to help leadership apply data-driven learnings across teams and program types rapidly, which is so incredibly important right now.
- Lost data and fragmented follow-up. Without the systems and processes teams are used to, virtual event data gets lost, siloed or delayed, and follow-up programs are slow to trigger or don’t happen at all. This further hampers efforts to use virtual programs to drive pipeline or other business goals.
- A widening gap between in-person and virtual events. The siloed adoption of new platforms and processes for virtual events is going to make it difficult for teams to most efficiently leverage these virtual technology investments when in-person events are back on the table.
Now is the time to bring everything together. Across event types and event teams, it’s absolutely critical to start working together (and stop reinventing the wheel). Take all that time you’re not spending on an airplane and connect across teams and departments to build out an event marketing strategy that makes sense for your business now … and years from now.
- Bring all event programs under one platform. By moving all teams that host event programs into one platform, you can manage visual brand, data, and analytics all in one place. You can save teams hundreds of hours of repetitive work, you can measure and optimize across teams and program types, and you can ensure that data is connected and compliant automatically.
- Bring all event programs under one process. Establish a clear and easy-to-follow process for how teams can request, create, manage and measure any event marketing program, in-person or virtual, and use a platform to enable that process.
- Connect in-person events with virtual. It’s time to stop treating these like separate parts of the business. Bring them into one platform and one process so they can work together, now and in the future, to drive business goals.
If you’re interested, Splash can help with all this. Let us know if you want to chat about it. (We also just launched Splash Virtual to make it even easier.)