Spending hundreds of hours on marketing assets for each event and letting off-brand visuals slip through the cracks are nightmares of the past. No one knows this better than the marketing team at Expedia Group, who has advanced change in their organization by bringing their global events into the future. Here’s how they did it.
Expedia Group is one of the world’s largest travel platforms. Its mission is to bring together buyers and sellers in their marketplace, making travel easier, more enjoyable, more attainable, and more accessible. Since 1996, the company has built an extensive portfolio of businesses and brands that help move people and deliver local and global travel experiences.
With thousands of events to host each year, the marketing team at Expedia Group was all too familiar with how many hours go into perfecting event marketing programs. (They were spending 100+ hours on each event.) And with the global partner teams also hosting thousands of smaller events, they became even more familiar with a concept they desperately wanted to kick to the curb: rogue events.
To eliminate some of the challenges that come with rogue events — brand integrity issues, lack of event visibility and measurement, and inconsistent attendee experiences, to name a few — Expedia Group sought an event marketing solution that could scale their events and empower teams to create their own event marketing programs in a way that was on-brand and measurable.
Expedia Group needed a solution that could help their team scale event marketing programs. Specifically, they wanted a platform that would help them design, customize, and share the event website, registration page, and email communications — all without engaging their designers, developers, or operations teams.
And because they have global teams running events, a top priority was the ability to give everyone brand- and marketing-approved materials and guidelines. Marketing craved standardization in event design that would ultimately lead to improved brand integrity and event transparency.
Today, Expedia Group saves up to 60 hours of work per event (multiply that by thousands of events!), which allows the team to host more events globally and focus on more strategic projects.
Reporting and analytics from Splash give Expedia Group’s marketing team insight into everything they need to know about event ROI and performance. This helps them prove the value of their event marketing programs and make better decisions about future events.
But perhaps the most visible change in their events: Global teams are now using approved, on-brand event designs that have improved consistency of brand experiences and allowed them to wave goodbye to rogue events.
