Events are opportunities to bring awareness to your organization, generate more revenue, and strengthen customer loyalty.
In a recent Splash survey of more than 1200 marketers, nearly 78% said events are the most effective marketing channel for their organization.
For a long time, companies relied on big conferences and tradeshows to achieve their goals. Now, they’re finding value in events beyond these, particularly with smaller, repeatable event programs. These events represent key points across the entire customer journey and are critical for companies focused on event-led growth.
Companies are making significant investments into these smaller, repeatable events and for good reason. They’re scalable, which ultimately can lead to higher ROI and greater business impact.
But there’s one important thing that can take your entire event strategy down: your event data.
Many event marketers focus on the more visible elements, like event promotion and production. But data is the single biggest differentiator between average and wildly successful event marketing programs.
An event data strategy is all too often an afterthought for event marketers, even though it is more important than ever before — and will only continue to be a competitive differentiator.
The good news is that you’re probably already capturing more data through events than you realize. Think:
Information about attendance, participation, and preferences holds clues that can unlock deep engagement with your prospects and customers. But you often have far more event data than what’s listed here — you simply may not realize it. (We’ll get to the specific later.)
Tapping into this additional data means you can give your attendees more customization and value in their event experiences, in turn helping to accelerate business results.
What’s more, today’s most successful event marketers integrate and share this data with other technologies used across their organization. Event data integration has many benefits, like keeping contact information updated, qualifying leads better, and understanding your event ROI.
These integrations also empower other teams that use those systems — like sales teams using Salesforce — to use event data in their prospect and customer interactions. This helps continue the momentum from their events and frees up event marketers to do what they do best: event strategy.
Simply put, an integration is when one software technology shares information with another. If information flows both ways between the systems, it’s called a bidirectional integration.
How does this crazy magic even work? The under-the-hood technology is possible thanks to something called an Application Programming Interface (API).
An API defines the questions that one system’s code can ask another system, along with the right way for the code to ask those questions. For instance, a sales platform's API might explain to a software developer: "You can ask me what a contact's last name is. I'll need your code to include that contact's email address to do that. Here's how your code should be formatted when it asks me."
If this sounds complicated, it’s because it kind of is. But the good news is that you can do all these things easily without writing a single line of code.
The minds behind some of the best software platforms know that day-to-day tech users don’t want to get wrapped up in technical API functionality. That’s why platforms have built-in integrations with easy-to-use interfaces that don’t require you to know any code.
Capturing data and insights at your events is so important to give your attendees the best possible experience and inform you on who’s engaging with your brand.
But have you thought about the potential of integrations to prove event ROI and enable your coworkers to do their jobs even better? Here are seven benefits of integrating your event data with your CRM, MAP, and internal communications tools.
Imagine this: you’re gearing up for your most important event program of the year.
You’ve sent all invitations, registrations are flooding in, and you’re now sitting down to update your Salesforce campaign’s attendee statuses — one by one. You sigh (and probably cry) thinking about having to update all of these statuses again after the event.
The sales team is starting to turn green on Slack, so you quickly make a third cup of coffee, prepping for what will inevitably be a long day of fielding requests for the full registration list.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It doesn’t have to be like this with some of the most popular integrations for event technology.
An event tech integration with CRM systems (like Salesforce) empowers you with the insights and process you need to close more deals.
By syncing your event data through this integration, you get what you need to make your events more efficient, connect them all to revenue, and give sales a quick and easy way to answer the question: “Is my prospect coming to the event?”
A few reasons why Splash customers love our integration with Salesforce:
An event tech integration with marketing automation platforms (like Marketo) gives you the functionality to ditch messy spreadsheets and late-night uploads.
By connecting these two platforms, event registration and check-in data can be automatically synced. This means your team can take faster follow-up action on leads, and you don’t have to stress about managing unsubscribes.
A few reasons why Splash customers love our integration with Marketo:
An event tech integration with internal communications tools (like Slack) enables your entire organization to take immediate action on event milestones.
Spend less time communicating event progress internally, so your team can spend more time engaging with their most valuable contacts. It’s a win-win for everyone. (Pro-tip: Loop all the right sales people into the channel to inspire a bit of competition.)
A few reasons why Splash customers love our integration with Slack:
We covered what integrations are and why you should connect your event data across systems like Salesforce, Slack, and marketing automation platforms.
Now, for the big question: how much data should you capture? If you’re just getting started using event data, it might be useful to capture as much data as possible. After all, it’s better to have more than not enough. As you get more sophisticated with your data, you might be able to scale back.
For now, here’s a list of event data we recommend you collect before, during, and after your events.
Events have the power to connect people through meaningful, immersive experiences. And even though they’re one of the highest revenue-generating activities in B2B marketing, events can also be a black hole of data.
It’s so hard to have a complete picture of every single interaction at your events. But your ability to collect, integrate, and use your event data can be much easier than you may have thought.
Integrating your event data is so important for your event marketing programs because it helps you easily gather the information you need from prospects and customers, without doing extra work. It helps you focus on the big picture, because you’re empowering sales and customer service teams to use the data.
It helps those teams build positive results for the business, because they’re using personalized, accurate information.
Whether you are just starting to think about an event marketing strategy or have had a sophisticated one for years, it’s always a good idea to revisit your event data strategy. After all, it’s not only about scaling your programs and driving business outcomes. It’s also about what event attendees are coming to expect in their event experiences — and that’s customization every step of the way.
