Events are a favorite acquisition and retention channel for organizations today. They’re a chance to brand your company as an industry expert, generate demand for your offerings, increase product adoption, renew customers, and build loyalty.
In Splash’s Outlook on Events report of more than 1,250 marketers, 83% said events are critical to their business growth.
But what technology is best for driving event-led growth?
Event marketing platforms extend beyond supporting just annual tentpole events or conferences — they should enable you to create, host, and scale repeatable event programs that maximize ROI. And they should be usable by everyone in your organization: democratizing who can derive value from event programs, centralizing the data that demonstrates that value, and enforcing brand standards with the right permissions.
For too long, it’s been impossible to market, measure, and scale events of every size and format in a single platform. Companies need a way to create beautiful, on-brand marketing assets for their events and ensure effectiveness in driving registration, attendance, lead flow, and revenue.
Ultimately, an effective event marketing platform should unlock event-led growth for your organization, letting you capture and retain business through strategic, repeatable, and data-informed event programs.
This guide is your roadmap to understanding the key roles involved in an event marketing platform evaluation, the lifecycle of event marketing, which features and functionality to look out for, and the best practices and pitfalls to be aware of in making your selection.
Anyone in your organization responsible for vetting marketing technologies should be involved in selecting an event marketing platform. It’s also helpful to include a marketer responsible for running and hosting events since they’ll be working in the tool on a day-to-day basis.
The best way to evaluate the software for your organization is to ensure all players who touch events at your organization have shared their requirements:
That said, every organization is different. At some, employees have multiple roles, while in others, there may be several program implementers and designers. What’s important is not your organization’s role count or exact alignment to the bulleted list, but that the event marketing solution facilitates your organization’s goals.
Form follows function. As you evaluate event technology, you and your team should be supported throughout each stage of the event lifecycle.
We’ve identified ten primary stages of a successfully executed event. The right solution for your organization will directly address, or integrate with technologies that address, activities in each stage:
Once you find a platform that addresses each of these stages, confirm that it can scale with your team, is secure, keeps up with compliance, and includes built-in education and community for your users. There’s a section for that, too.
Splash is a needed tool in the martech stack, and it is a qualification for my next job. I won’t even consider a company if they don’t have Splash.
Nina Skoko
Global Partner Marketing
You know your organization and its needs best, but as you evaluate your event marketing options, there are some key platform attributes to keep in mind. A successful implementation will need to meet this criteria across the event lifecycle.
Your event technology should let teams create experiences in any format. That means it should enable your team to promote and measure in-person events and host live streams with guest engagement.
Branding, data capture, and ability to scale programs are as critical requirements for in-person events as they are for virtual and hybrid ones. For programs that have online components, keep in mind that it should be easy to test live streams, communicate with multiple hosts or presenters, and engage guests with features like Q&A, polling, chat, networking, and on-demand playbacks.
To support virtual, hybrid, and in-person events, event technology should let you:
When it’s time for your organization to host an event, who are the drivers, approvers, and contributors? It’s common for leadership teams to create a consistent set of requirements before dedicating budget to an event program.
If your organization has an approval flow for events, your event marketing software should let executives and program owners review requests. Think of it this way: the easier you make it for your team to get up and running with their events, the more likely they are to generate impactful program ideas — and the faster the whole company will see results. In a nutshell, this is true event marketing at scale.
To support event approvals, event technology should let you:
Your event marketing solution should support both paid and free events. In both instances, you should be able to control the entire registration experience, from privacy settings to domain restrictions to capacity settings.
If your organization hosts global events, make sure your event technology either partners with a globally recognized and secure payment processor or allows you to integrate with your own payment provider.
To collect RSVPs or sell tickets, event technology should let you:
Once an event is approved, most teams build and maintain an event guest list.
Your event marketing solution should let you import contact records and integrate with your existing CRM and MAP to keep your data accurate across systems. Teammates from various parts of the organization should also have visibility into guest list statuses: who was invited, registered, and attended.
Don’t let simple contact managers fool you: if registration management isn’t the backbone of your event marketing solution, you lose the advantage of leveraging guest data — from assessing interest by demographic to automating marketing emails by registration status.
To manage guest lists and increase attendee alignment and awareness in your organization, event technology should let you:
An on-brand, clean pre-event experience is perhaps the most critical part of marketing your event. You can raise — or crush — guest expectations with the right assets.
An event page that successfully markets your event and its agenda, optimally tailored social share materials, and personalized emails are mandatory in an event marketing platform — and everything needs to be consistent with your brand’s design.
To create the right event marketing assets, event technology should let you:
What good are beautiful marketing materials if they’re never seen? Activate the right channels, and you’ll be looking at a full house. Neglect communication, and you can bank on low turnout. Remember: the ROI of your event is dependent on how many people you can get in the room. Don’t let lead flow stall out before the show even begins.
Choose a platform that considers key promotional channels: email marketing, social sharing, and your website (embedding an events calendar on a webpage). The smartest solutions give you the flexibility to customize and schedule these communications.
To promote your events effectively, event technology should let you:
It all comes down to this: who showed up? Your team should be confident that their event technology gives them flexibility to support their guests’ needs in real time and keep the line moving so everyone’s on-site experience is smooth.
You should be able to check guests in quickly at the door, print name badges, and take notes from one tool — and all this information should remain up-to-date in your CRM and MAP systems. If your program is virtual or hybrid, check-in should happen automatically, and your event platform should note how long attendees stayed on.
To effectively host events, event technology should let you:
What good is running the perfect event if you can’t prove its impact? Any technology worth investing in should give you a way to demonstrate success and overall ROI.
Choose a solution that collects data about each step in the event marketing lifecycle and exposes results in a visual way that is easy to share with stakeholders and leadership.
To prove event marketing success, event technology should let you:
You already know that executing events is only part of the puzzle. You also want to optimize programs by consistently collecting data about your events before and after they take place. By streamlining your team’s workflows, they have more time to generate new ideas and prove event program ROI.
Look for event technology that collects information while your team creates an event. By collecting data from your team over time, you’ll be able to predict and improve event specifications like budget, region, expected attendance, AV needs, and more. Remember: lack of consistency leads to poor decision-making, so you should solve any data problems sooner rather than later.
To take advantage of internal event data, event technology should let you:
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
Marketing Automation Specialist
When lead flow is on the line, you need event technology that can be implemented in less than a few weeks — and one that can be administered without constant support calls. Platform integration, accessibility, ease of use, user enablement, and deployment flexibility should be top-of-mind considerations as you evaluate your options.
Industry leaders are taking advantage of the time required to perfect and repeat an event. How? By guaranteeing that all of their event-led growth efforts are scalable. Scale is the ability to grow your organization’s revenue without requiring a corresponding increase in its resources, and it’s a powerful thing.
Scale:
To scale your event marketing efforts, event technology should let you:
Scale doesn’t stop paying off there. Data privacy laws, like GDPR and CCPA, must be taken into account when marketing events. Get in front of your event data management processes by setting standards once — like adding a Terms & Conditions checkbox as part of a registration form — and reusing them whenever you create a new event.
To ensure your events are in compliance, event technology should let you:
While program implementers may want to customize every detail of an event page, on-site hosts may only require access to a mobile app for checking guests in on-site. Choosing a platform that meets the needs of every event marketer is important, but one that meets that need gracefully (by offering multiple types of access) makes your team that much more efficient and effective.
Don’t get fooled into bait-and-switch pricing. Choose a platform that’s transparent with its pricing options and is equipped to help you scale your programs successfully.
If your company has platform requirements that aren’t specifically met, be sure to ask what customizations can be made available to you. Even better: ask what level of visibility you get into the provider’s product roadmap and feature releases as a customer.
When you evaluate the total cost of event technology, look for one that offers:
It should be clear what kind of ongoing customer support you’ll receive. Best-in-class support organizations will offer help over the phone and by email throughout the week.
Your solution provider shouldn’t abandon you after purchase. Make sure to ask for an implementation timeline and request that an implementation specialist helps set up the platform to get you started. If implementation or support teams have to hold your hand after the onboarding period, the cost and pain of your deployment rises. It’s important that you also have thorough help topics and educational videos available to you and those in your organization to self-serve and answer questions in real time.
Choose a platform that has a built-in community surrounding it. Your team will benefit from having access to product experts at no additional cost.
Today, software education goes beyond an online version of a printed manual. Your team should be able to answer their own questions in real time within the product, take their learning further with dynamic content online, and network with other users to increase their impact.
When you select event technology, choose a platform that extends beyond just its software. Look for one that offers:
Adding to or changing your marketing tech stack shouldn’t be painful.
With the right community and learning resources, event technology will increase the impact of your live and on-demand programs while giving your team a competitive advantage. Optimize the ROI of investing in the right software with a strong professional and educational network.
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
Marketing Automation Specialist
