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.

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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.

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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.

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.)

After you’ve mastered the art of influence, your next step is figuring out how many new contacts your events created and how meeting these people in-person can be attributed back to pipeline and revenue goals. 

If you’re part of a large organization with a sizable marketing team, this part might fall to your marketing operations team as it requires prerequisite lead scoring and qualifying. But if you’re like many event marketers, you have a small team and this metric lives in your wheelhouse. 

One of the unique advantages event marketing has over digital marketing is the fact that we actually get to talk to our prospects and customers face-to-face –– somewhat of a foreign concept these days. This gives us a leg up because we don’t have to fight tooth and nail for email opens or responses. Instead, we can just have a conversation and qualify someone as a prospect in minutes. 

After each event is complete, you update Salesforce campaigns with relevant statuses and enter new contacts into the system; or it all happens automatically because your event tech is integrated with Salesforce. At the end of the year, you’ll want to create a report of any qualified new contact who had a “first touch” at an event. By appropriately correlating opportunities to the new contacts, you’ll have visibility into how much pipeline and revenue can be attributed back to your event program. 

Pro Tip: The sales team is likely making the new connections and entering new contact data into Salesforce. Take the extra step to educate them on how you’re measuring event success to ensure that all event data is correctly entered into Salesforce.

Measuring any marketing activity can be completed in a slew of different ways and every organization has its nuances. But, every organization wants to understand exactly how their hard-earned dollars are being invested. If you can master the art of measuring event success in the major areas outlined above, you’re off to a great start and will be poised to receive the fat event budget you’re aiming for in 2020 to create even more powerful, scalable, and measurable experiences.

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.

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.