JetBrains empowers software engineers with productivity tools, yet they needed to replicate that same efficiency in their own event marketing efforts. Previous tools lacked simple design customization and offered no integrations, making it a challenge for the team to scale their programs. Splash’s templates, combined with a powerful Marketo integration, unlocked the team’s ability to host measurable events, increase their digital footprint, and drive attendance to future events.
Based in Prague, JetBrains is a global software company that provides essential tools for software developers and teams. JetBrains strives to make the strongest, most effective developer tools on earth. Through automating routine checks and corrections, their tools speed up production, freeing developers to grow, discover, and create.
Before virtual events became the norm, JetBrains hosted more than a dozen events globally, where up to 1,000 attendees gathered to learn about the JetBrains products, engage with peers, and explore trends in the software development industry.
And among many other things, there was one thing JetBrains was really good at: giving their audience a hyper-relevant, customized event experience. One way they did this was by running surveys to gather insights on relevant topics for target regions before their events.
Their marketing team spent countless hours marketing, managing, and measuring these tailored events. But as a company whose product increases productivity, they couldn’t say the same about their event marketing platform.
“When we were creating events with our previous platform, customization was complex and the functionality was limited,” said Irina. “Plus, considerable changes to our pages were only possible with the help of web developers.”
The platform they used did not have capabilities like a flexible design page or customized analytics. In other words, nothing was scalable — and in an increasingly virtual world, this was a huge barrier.
“When the pandemic happened, we decided that online events would be a great opportunity to stay in touch with our customers and also engage new audiences,” said Irina. “But we didn’t have a great first touchpoint for our events, tracking capabilities, or an integrated system to make syncing attendee information across systems a smooth process.”
Splash is intuitive with a user-friendly interface that makes all kinds of customization possible for our event marketing. And since our mission is all about productivity, I especially love how easy it is to create templates — even mobile-responsive templates — that we can use over and over again.
Irina Manolova, Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Specialist
And so began the team’s search for a new event marketing platform. Their priority requirements: easy behind-the-scenes collaboration, a visually appealing interface, and the ability to seamlessly integrate and customize.
“One thing we absolutely needed in a platform was the ability to integrate smoothly with Marketo,” said Irina. “It’s important for us to have all of our data in one place — both for events and other marketing efforts — so there are no leads left behind.
“We were also looking for a platform that had out-of-the box templates we could easily update with our own design elements and brand requirements. If we could get all of this self-serve functionality and not have to work through a web developer for every update, that would be a huge win.”
After researching several event marketing platforms, Irina and the JetBrains team found one that offered all of this and then some: Splash.
The level of productivity we’ve gained by using Splash, especially the integrations, is more than we could ever imagine. The integration with Marketo has saved us so much time and lets us focus on bigger things. There’s no excuse for marketers not to use Splash as an event marketing platform.
Irina Manolova, Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Specialist
For the JetBrains team, the days of disconnected data, off-brand event marketing, and waiting in long internal queues are long gone. For one program in particular, the team needed to prepare an event page that could take partnership requests and automate that data.
“Once a form was submitted, Splash sent an automatic notification to our team,” said Irina. “After the partner checked in, their status changed immediately in Splash and their information was pushed to Marketo. This workflow saved us a lot of time and helped us to effectively deal with more than 50 partnership requests.”
JetBrains’ results extend further than connected, visible data. They’ve also tapped into scalable design features.
“The ready-to-use branded templates in Splash save us a lot of time,” said Irina. “And actually, when we moved to online events, we just took the same templates we used previously. Everything was scalable because the agenda could be used for both offline and online, the same for speakers, and the same for partnerships. So the pivot to online, in terms of preparing our event marketing, was quite smooth.”
And all of this ultimately means higher event registration numbers for Irina and the JetBrains team.
“Not only are we getting more digital traffic because of our event pages, we’re also getting more users to sign up for future events,” said Irina. “Moving forward, we hope to host even more events on Splash and collect even more analytics. We want to continue getting stronger insights to understand past events and plan for future ones.”
