Presented by Cvent
Event marketing tech integrates your events into your overall marketing mix, boosting your ability to to reach, engage, and convert new customers. Learn how event tools and tech can help your events win demonstrable results when you access this VB Live event!
Access on demand for free right here!
“CMOs need to care about events because of the incredible power in the human connection face to face,” says Patrick Smith, CMO at Cvent. “There’s nothing like getting a captive audience on site and engaged. It’s the best brand experience you can build.”
Events excite new buyers, but they also help build brand loyalty and affinity with existing customers. Smith points to studies that that have shown that when you meet someone face to face, you’re 35 times more likely to get a positive response to an ask than if you do it through email or over the phone.
This is especially true of closing deals, particularly at an event that you’re running, he adds. At an event, you can build a picture of interest much faster than if you’re running campaigns over a period of time. It can also accelerate sales cycles, again because you have that dedicated time face to face with people.
“Our customer user conference is where we go to learn more about who our customers are,” says Sharon Summers, director of global events at CPA Global. “It’s our time to get to know them, to develop those relationships.”
She and her team spend a lot of time delivering training and content, so that when they arrive on site, their customers know that they’ve made the right decision and investment with them. The company also invests heavily in trade shows, and empowering their sales people to shake hands and deliver the company’s message in the right way for every lead and each persona.
This is where data plays an essential role in turning events into bottom-line gold, Summers says. Events are a significant investment, and a sales team might come back with only ten leads. But the data your team captures on site can lead to a deal that covers the entire cost of the event, she explains.
“It only takes one or two business closes to really capture the ROI and make it worthwhile,” Summers says.
“The key is being able to have the information from the event you’re running integrated with your marketing automation and CRM systems to be able to build that attribution,” explains Smith. “That’s one of the challenges we see for a lot of organizations, when they’re forced to piece together a bunch of various technologies.”
Capturing that data and leveraging it in an actionable way is key to proving your event spend, which is a key metric for marketing event managers: How much am I spending on events and what am I getting for it?
Event technology digitizes events. With an event technology platform you can put all of the pieces together, from the moment you invite a customer or potential customer all the way to learning what they thought of the event in the post-event survey. Digitizing that path and all the information you’re getting means you’re capturing data points across an entire attendee journey and bringing them online.
That includes learning who opened your invitation, and who registered for the event. Who then attended the event from the registration pool? What sessions did they attend on site? Did they use your event app if you had a mobile app associated with the event? What did they do in the mobile app? What products did they see in an innovation pavilion or an expo hall?
“When you have event technology that unifies all these data points, that’s a ton of buying signals that you’re aggregating right away in a very short period of time,” Smith says. “Then you take all that information, merge it with what you know about your buyer and your marketing automation and CRM systems, and build that entire picture of interest.”
It can mean turning a lukewarm lead into a hot one. Let’s say they were lukewarm before they attended the event. You track them over the course of the event and capture the actions they take on site. When you add that to what you knew about them prior to the event in your system, you can take that lead from lukewarm to hot because now you’ve built a fairly comprehensive picture of action.
You can then take that information, put it in your marketing automation systems, and do smart nurtures to warm that person up until they get hot enough to send to sales. You’re taking all this information offline, merging it with what you do online, and taking the next best sales and marketing action.
“One of my biggest goals is to capture leads who don’t know who we are, and to capture those leads who haven’t stumbled across our website, or maybe they’re not in our database and we haven’t spoken to them,” Summers adds. “It’s up to that on-site event to pull in those leads who don’t know who we are. It’s capturing the net new leads, explaining to them what we can do to better their everyday business.”
To learn more about capturing the high-value event data you didn’t know you had, how event marketing technology can turn cold and lukewarm leads hot in your second and third touch points, and the value marketing tech adds before during, and after an event, catch up on this VB Live event!
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:
- Patrick Smith, CMO, Cvent
- Sharon Summers, Director, Global Events, CPA Global
- Ivo Lukas, CEO/Founder, 24Notion
