The marketing team at Avetta weren’t strangers to the tradeshow life. Along with large industry events, the team hosted smaller events like roundtables and roadshows to engage qualified leads, educate customers on their product, and grow customer accounts. This year, Avetta’s team will participate in more than 100 events using Splash. Two years ago, that scale would have felt like an impossible task, as they were creating event landing pages with their marketing automation platform. Today, they’ve mastered repeatable, scaled events that save time, eliminate manual work, and close deals faster than ever before. They reformed the way events support lead generation and customer relationships. And they’ve officially said goodbye to unreliable data, headaches for the design team, and miscommunications between sales and marketing.
Avetta provides a cloud-based supply chain risk management and commercial marketplace platform. Their global solution is uniquely designed to connect the world’s leading organizations with qualified suppliers, driving sustainable growth. Hundreds of global organizations depend on Avetta to align their supply chains to sustainable business practices worldwide.
Successful event marketing is no longer all about the large, tentpole event.
It’s about creating personal experiences that resonate. Creating a space for connection, learning, and inspiration. Crafting your message to the people in the room. Nailing one event, then using that proven template over and over again. You heard it here first: Successful event marketing is all about scale.
This story begins in the fall of 2019.
Senior Marketing Manager Michelle Moran knew that a streamlined events program would mean significant gains. It would mean increased brand recognition, sales pipeline, and ROI. Her team had no shortage of ideas for events but were too weighed down by the current system to move them forward. She knew she’d have to clear some significant roadblocks to take Avetta’s events to the next level.
Case in point: Managing Avetta’s events program using their CRM and marketing automation software was not cutting it. Design for event assets fell on the shoulders of one person: Avetta’s graphic designer, Braden Erickson.
Braden’s design expertise is extensive, yet the tools at his disposal weren’t built for the sophisticated design he’s capable of. It was a struggle to keep branding consistent across all events. Even simple changes meant an overcomplicated revision process. He knew the current setup had created a bottleneck.
“The platform we were using wasn’t user friendly,” said Braden. “Even simple updates had to go through one extra person, creating more work than necessary.”
Beyond the team’s design woes, keeping event data organized across a large group of event owners and stakeholders was daunting. Finding a particular list required navigating a labyrinth of folders and campaigns. To top it off, the lack of accessibility to event data added stress for Michelle’s already-busy team.
“It took so many clicks to see who registered versus who actually attended,” said Michelle. “Then, distributing this data to our sales team took so much time and energy. We needed a more streamlined process for our events.”
Michelle knew she couldn’t scale Avetta’s events program without a platform that could make things easier for her team. The dream? A tool that templatized event designs, supported brand consistency across events, and streamlined data processes.
“We wanted to design a branded event template and make it something we could easily rinse and repeat,” said Michelle. “For example, we have client roadshows in the U.S., Canada, EMEA, and APAC. The bulk of these events have the same design and branding. We wanted to be able to make one, duplicate it for the others, and adjust the little things like dates and speakers.”
Another must-have in an event marketing platform: a solution that would integrate with the team’s existing tech stack, particularly Marketo and Salesforce. This functionality would eventually lead to massive time savings, better data, and real-time data visibility across internal teams.
Built-in survey capabilities were also essential in their future event marketing software. For certain events, Michelle’s team used a separate survey tool to collect additional details from attendees. Having a fragmented registration process was not ideal. This roadblock was costing Michelle and her team valuable time and energy.
“Using multiple tools, we had tons of information,” said Michelle. “Sometimes people would register for the event but miss the link to the survey. If that happened, we’d have to manually reach out to them after they registered to get that information.”
After evaluating their requirements, Michelle’s team found an event marketing platform that checked all the boxes: Splash.
I’m still so excited about and love the branded templates I’ve built in Splash. Those templates took us to the next level. It was something we didn’t know we were missing until we saw it. With the old system, that would have taken forever. It’s cut the time I spend by about 75%.
Braden Erickson, Graphic Designer
Two years ago, keeping event pages on-brand and visually appealing was a struggle. Michelle and her team now build eye-catching event pages that have become the blueprint for their entire program. Many hours went into toiling over just one event’s registration experience. Now, they have the availability to center on higher-level strategy, expand their events program, and focus on what makes their jobs interesting.
Michelle’s team didn’t have the bandwidth to host as many events, but now they do.
“We definitely didn’t host as many events as we do now,” said Michelle. “Since we’ve been with Splash, it’s a lot more streamlined and easier to duplicate events using the templates.”
Braden also used Splash to build custom landing pages for their team’s account-based marketing efforts — a testament to the team’s success at scaling their marketing programs. “By using Splash in this unique way, we were able to build more than 30 unique, specialized landing pages for our prospect accounts in less than one day,” said Braden.
Braden’s favorite design features are the blocks, containers, and elements that make it simple to build a beautiful Splash page. He loves that each touchpoint is automatically generated in line with brand guidelines.
Avetta now hosts about 100 data-driven, measurable events a year.
Event data is accurate, organized, and visible to any team member. They’re relieved to now be managing, measuring, and optimizing their events program with confidence.
“Before using Splash, just trying to find an event was a pain depending on how you organized it,” said Michelle. “In Splash, events are all alphabetical, or it’s by the date that it was created, or however you want to segment it.”
Michelle said user-based permissions have made it simple for internal teams to access event data, eliminating a bottleneck while democratizing ownership of event data.
“Nothing gets missed, and someone can log in and see who is attending,” she said. “It helps that Splash integrates with Marketo and syncs with the related Salesforce campaign. Now, instead of having the sales team asking, ‘Who’s registered?’ they’re empowered to access that information without asking marketing.”
What’s more, Avetta’s marketing department can rest easy about the accuracy and routing of event data.
“It’s nice having integrations now that actually work. There were a lot of things missing and data not syncing when it needed to. Whether that was user error, the technology, or both, I remember a lot of struggles with that,” said Michelle. “It’s so easy now.”
Behind every seemingly simple marketing operations process are integrations connecting the dots. By integrating Splash with Avetta’s sales and marketing tools, the team is accurately measuring ROI. It’s easier to demonstrate the value of the events program they’ve worked hard to build.
“There used to be so many different loopholes you had to go through,” said Braden. “With Splash, it’s as simple as clicking the box, and everything goes straight to Marketo and then to Salesforce. We get instant access to the data instead of trying to shuffle through it all. It’s been a huge help.”
One year after Avetta began using Splash, COVID-19 flipped the world upside down. While many businesses struggled to adapt their events program, Michelle’s team and their event technology were flexible enough to shift their strategy to virtual.
“It was a pretty straightforward pivot for our registration process,” said Michelle. “We had to change some event details, add a Zoom meeting, and send an email with Splash’s feature saying, ‘Hey, for your safety, we are doing this virtual.’ It wasn’t anything too crazy for us, thankfully.”
The team acted fast to shift their attention from in-person events to virtual ones. From an attendee’s perspective, though, Michelle is glad they could adapt without compromising the experience for registered attendees.
Since optimizing Avetta’s blueprint for events, Michelle, Braden, and everyone supporting them have experienced a surplus of benefits. The team knows their strategy is flexible enough to weather a pandemic.
They’ve scaled their event marketing. They’ve boosted event attendance and sales pipeline. They’ve proven the value of events. They’ve strengthened their community of customers and prospects. And with the support of event marketing technology, they’re ready to bring their event programs to the next level year after year.
With Splash, no data gets missed. It helps that Splash integrates with Marketo and syncs with the related Salesforce campaign. Now, instead of having the sales team asking, ‘Who’s registered?’ they’re empowered to access that information without asking marketing.
Michelle Moran, Senior Marketing Manager
