Presented by Cvent
Event marketing technology is the key to making events your opportunity to reach, engage, and convert new customers. To learn how to make them a meaningful portion of your overall marketing budget, and have demonstrable results every time, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Nothing beats the power of face-to-face interactions. A Harvard Business Review study showed that you’re 34 times more likely to get a positive response to an ask when it’s done face-to-face.
“We’ve found that nothing beats the power of the handshake to get business done,” says Patrick Smith, CMO, Cvent. “Events are a great way to engage with prospects, build your brand, and accelerate sales cycles.”
It can take a long time to build a picture of interest through online digital marketing, but at an event you’re able to gather a lot of information about that person’s interest all at one time, helping accelerate that cycle. It’s also a great way to engage employees as well, generating buzz and motivation for a sales team.
The only way to unlock maximum value from an event you host or sponsor is to bring it online, which requires event technology. Technology is the only way to capture all the points in an attendee’s event journey: registration, check-in, sessions, conversations, and product interactions.
“Just like the way you track your digital campaigns and online interactions, you can do the same thing for events,” Smith explains. “You can take this data and add it together in a lead scoring model for your customer or prospect.”
Add all the interactions you’ve had with a customer to the mix, whether you’ve met with them on other occasions, they’ve visited your website, or they’ve downloaded your content, and you can put that full picture of interest together if you have the right marketing automation and CRM systems in place. From there you can act on your data to accelerate sales and customer advocacy.
“Not only does that complete picture give you the full information about that prospect that you’re going after, but it also gives sales the information to be much more targeted in their outreach back to that person,” he says. “That’s incredibly powerful in a hyper-competitive world.”
It’s also a way to look at all the different touch points from a marketing perspective that led to a sale, and find out what events worked, and when, at each part of the buyer’s journey. When you have the right systems in place to really get that whole chain linked together, you can prove the impact of your events program.
One of Cvent’s case studies is a large software company that held events as a big piece of their marketing mix, but didn’t know how effective they were. They were unsure of which events were more effective than others, how to allocate the events budget in the best ways, or whether they should even run an event versus diverting that to another marketing tactic. With event technology they were able to track attribution of their event program to demonstrate their effectiveness. The company ended up going all in, because they found that events were about the best channel they had.
They galvanized their sales force and started using events strategically in the buyer’s journey. Because they were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their events and leverage them, the person running the event program was promoted to VP within two years, revenue and growth accelerated, and the company was eventually sold for more than $2 billion to one of the biggest software companies on the planet.
“It’s really all about the data and the proof,” Smith says. “All executives want is proof and ROI. We have a limited amount of capital to spend, a limited amount of time for our employees to spend. But you need data and technology to light up that path and do that right.”
To learn more about how events work at each point of the buyer’s journey and why, the most important metrics to track, how to optimize for success, and more, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
You’ll learn how to:
- Pitch events as an important part of a holistic marketing strategy to leadership
- Run an integrated event marketing program and optimize it for success
- Capture the data that uncovers attendee behavior at events
Speakers:
- Sharon Summers, Director, Global Events, CPA Global
- Patrick Smith, CMO, Cvent
- Ivo Lukas, CEO/Founder, 24Notion
