Event marketing is a useful tool, but few brands and marketers fully take advantage of it, according to a recent study from Splash. I talked with Splash CMO Kate Hammitt about the evolution of event marketing, both in-person and virtual, and how to better plan in order to collect valuable data and build lasting customer relationships.
An excerpt from this interview appears in Wednesday’s Forbes CMO newsletter.
How has event marketing changed through the years?
Hammitt: I’ve been in events pretty much my entire career. I started in sports marketing events, doing the U.S. Open and Women’s Senior Open, and then zeroed in on the technology that drove events. I’ve seen from 2004 and beyond, and I feel like marketers, especially event folks, are really the tip of the spear, whether it’s embracing new marketing channels to make events successful—like digital marketing, social media, all of these things that have occurred in our evolution. I feel like the pandemic, for those of us who’ve been around, was no different. It was basically increasing the modalities in which we needed to connect with customers.
Splash CMO Kate Hammitt
SplashWhen you talk to CMOs about events, they automatically go to a trade show, a booth sort of activation. I think the pandemic obviously turned everything on its head, and you had to think about, ‘How can we take what was that former engagement, those activations, and rethink it.’ The real embracing of virtual—there are many marketers who had virtual meetings and webinars; we’ve been using these tools for a long time—was acknowledged and embraced holistically. You need this motion in order to be successful.
Since the pandemic, there’s a lot of headlines around ‘Are trade shows dead?’ Lots of questions about how we go to market. Where I see a lot of our most successful clients, and certainly our approach, is really taking a holistic view of your [ideal customer profile]. Where are you meeting your audience, and what sort of outcomes do you want to drive? Then you layer onto that the event modality. We need more brand awareness, so we’re gonna start with a broad reach, webinars, thought leadership for top-of-funnel.
At Splash, our go-tos are some education and product work at middle-of-funnel, as well as some community and networking programs that we’ve been running that have been incredibly successful that kind of lead to bottom-of-funnel, more one-to-one personalized meetings, where you’re getting really deep with the buying committee. You’re establishing that trust, that partnership, those relationships, and a lot of that tends to be in person. From a customer perspective, depending on [whether] you need to kind of deepen the partnership, or do you need to educate and lift that practitioner up so they are performing at the top levels? Those two strategies result in different events.
We really talk with clients and consult with clients to take that funnel approach to events, and developing the strategy accordingly.
Has the pandemic changed event marketing?
[It’s] less pandemic, and more buyer-driven changes. The independent buyer, the anonymous buyer, the buyer that’s really focused on recommendations from their community and their peers, that change has been driven by that evolution.
It’s your go-to-market motion that drives revenue and expansion, and doing that in a programmatic way. I think the newcomers to events are like, ‘OK, we’re going to do one event.’ Well, it’s not just about one event. If you’re going to the trade show, if you’re doing this work for three days a year at the annual conference, what are you doing the other 362 to drive your brand awareness, product understanding, and then those connections, and that personal element that events hold.
How successful do you see events to drive marketing nowadays?
We’ve had, both at Splash and with our clients, incredible numbers in terms of what events can specifically drive. We see like a three-times increase from event attendees, about a 45% increase in product usage. That’s been a huge boost. We do a series called ‘Build It and They Will Come’ and the customers that attend, they embrace the product so much more and become instant power users. We have one [financial organization] customer that went from one event a day globally to eight. They’ve gone from $3 billion under management to $12 [billion] just from the event attendees.
We've seen a 10% increase in win-rate personally from attendees, and then our new business [all-commodity volume] is 18% higher for attendees.
The study indicated that there are many events happening now, but a lot of marketers aren’t capturing data of the prospects that attend. Why are these details going by the wayside?
Events are hard. We’ve all tried to get people to a dinner, throw a birthday party, the stress of a wedding. I think we can all personally relate to the challenges that events have. I think event marketers are not equipped with the right tools to measure appropriately, so the metrics that matter are very hard to get when you’re using in-house solutions. A lot of times, events are not necessarily considered as seriously as other marketing. If we were going to launch a digital advertising motion, we would hire or acquire fractional skills from a digital marketer. It’s cost effective to invest in a tool, invest in skills to execute accordingly. I think a lot of times, events have been done with a lot of in-house solutions, duct taping it together.
I think events are now starting to get the credit that they deserve in terms of how they can drive revenue and expansion. It’s not just the anecdotes of, ‘Wow, that was a great event and everybody had fun.’ That has been the case, and if you look at the category of how events have been evaluated, it’s the event management. It is about the large conferences, the large tentpole events. There are so many different flavors of events. You need to consider your use case in order to get the appropriate tools in place and be able to thrive.
A lot of our competitors will charge by the registrant. For us, we want our customers to have as many registrants as possible. I’m trying to show an outcome that is driving revenue and expansion, and you are getting that volume. Truly making events successful is about getting that revenue in the room. It’s a numbers game.
What advice would you give to marketers who are getting into more events so they can get a better grip on all the things that they are getting, and be able to really take advantage of what they get from events?
I would say for marketers, asking yourself the questions: Do you have a solid strategy? Sometimes they’re starting like, ‘Let’s do the event,’ and everyone’s thinking about the day-of-the-event experience. Are you thinking about where your ICP is, what is going to meet them where they are, how to best engage with them and making sure that you are rooted in a strategy. You’re going to give your ICP what they need if you start with the strategy.
Then flip to after the event: What are the outcomes that you want to drive? What is the business that’s going to make this event a success? What’s the ACV that you expect coming out of it? What are the meetings in the pipeline that you’re trying to create? Start to iterate on those metrics and improve in that way.
It’s very hard to kind of get this motion going, but I encourage marketers to start to put that together. So they’re able to say, ‘If we can activate our sales team two weeks prior, and give them certain information or certain lists, they’re able to drive X more meetings.’ That automatically is creating a case for a more successful event, perhaps more data, and you start to invest in the elements that you need to drive your broader business strategy, and align events as a true valuable marketing channel.
Where do you see the trend of event marketing going in the next couple of years? Do you think there will be even more targeted ones? More in-person? More virtual?
I think it’s definitely going to be a more targeted, bespoke type of motion. We are all focused on how to get more personalized. The [account based marketing] components, how do we compile this into our motion? How do we make events work across the other motions? I do think that the data is going to change. Instead of only a quarter of marketers measuring the metrics that matter, that is going to change with our environment today in our markets. We’re in a no-fail zone of either not being able to invest in this channel, or getting those metrics in front of the key internal stakeholders to make sure we don’t lose this opportunity.
I do think the experiential component and the ways to dazzle clients, we’re definitely going to innovate there. I think that we’re going look back and say, ‘Wow, events are even more impactful than we thought,’ because more marketers are going to get really good at taking the data, pushing it into their CRM, where truth really truly lives for an organization, and understanding this power, and investing more across the enterprise.
I think with the rise of AI, we’re all looking for that human connection. It’s so powerful when you see people outside of our Zoom square. At the end of the day, people want to buy from people. I think they’re just inherent human behaviors. Events really meet the mark there.
