Can Savvy Event Marketing Strategies Help Fuel ROI? Q&A With Bizzabo’s VP of Marketing, Alon Waks
We wanted to share a conversation with MarTech Advisor - Alon Waks, Vice President of Marketing at Bizzabo on how marketers can measure, manage, and scale events towards key business outcomes.
"The future of [event marketing] is data-powered, which means data will be used to increase professional event attendance, amplify engagement across channels through personalization, and granularly track event ROI."
The event management software industry is expected to grow to $14.45 B by 2022. We speak to Alon Waks, Vice President of Marketing, Bizzabo in this informative MarTalk interview, to gain his insights on the event marketing industry’s power to generate awareness, educate, and forge relationships that turn prospects into customers.
In conversation with MarTech Advisor, Alon reveals how event success platforms can forecast and determine the next customer opportunity for marketers. He explains how marketers can guide the right buyers successfully through the funnel with smart event marketing strategies.
Alon also discusses the factors marketers should be mindful of when leveraging event marketing plans. With over 20 years of experience, Alon heads Bizzabo’s marketing strategies for their event software. Bizzabo helps brands address their customer needs and capture quality leads.
As event marketing strategies pick momentum, Alon answers our questions on:
How marketers can measure, manage, and scale events towards key business outcomes.What is experiential marketing and how does it impact a marketing plan?
Will the use of big data create better events in the future?
Key takeaways from this Q&A onevent marketing strategieswith Bizzabo’s VP of Marketing:
Highlights of significant changes taking place in event marketing.Best practices for marketers to boost B2B event and conference attendance.
Latest trends in event marketing for 2020.
Here’s what Alon shares on the importance of event marketing:
Alon, to set the stage, tell us about your career path so far and what your role at Bizzabo entails
I am the VP of Marketing at Bizzabo. I have been a marketing and GTM executive and startup advisor, having helped B2B and SaaS companies scale and expand their GTM for over 20 years. Before Bizzabo, I led Marketing and Business Development organizations at Kustomer, 8x8 and LivePerson, in addition to holding several roles at Avaya. I joined Bizzabo because of its mission to build tools that use the power of in-person to drive better business outcomes. I believe people-skills and human interaction will always be the most relevant way to build real bonds in our personal lives and in business. I’m proud to be a part of a company that has successfully identified this need in the market and is ahead of the curve in understanding and executing a way to meet the demand. I was also excited to be a part of a company that is spearheading ABM for event marketing, maximizing account nurturing, and the velocity of prospect movement.
How have event success platforms evolved since Bizzabo’s inception?
The event success category is expected to balloon to nearly $15 billion by 2022. This is due to the growing demand for event automation and an increased focus on gaining actionable business insights from events. As such, technologies for event success have drastically evolved over the last decade, including Bizzabo’s offering. For example, we started out as a mobile platform for business networking. However, since our founding, we have pivoted into a holistic cloud for event, including tools for creating microsites, marketing events, selling event tickets, processing payments and much more to meet the growing and ever evolving demands of the market.
What eventually helped us to decide to move from a networking app into the event success space was what we learned from our customers. We understand that everything is about the customer, and we constantly ask for feedback and for customer opinions. We became expert listeners. As such, we realized that customers can run an event without a mobile app, but they cannot run an event without an "operating system." With that, we set out to create something that wasn’t just a nice to have, but instead, a must have.
What are the top 3 factors marketers need to keep in mind to leverage intent-based personalized engagement?
The top three factors marketers should be mindful of when leveraging intent-based personalized engagement are:
1. Creating winning pre-event experiences through content marketing: Marketers should be thinking of ways to create and share content to boost awareness while simultaneously drumming up excitement to maximize exposure of an event. A good example of content marketing is email marketing. In fact, according to our own data, the most successful organizations consider email the most effective channel for promoting an event. Other types of content that can help drive a winning experience include teaser videos, blog posts, and much more.
2. Generating successful event engagement: Keeping attendees actively engaged throughout an event is instrumental in solidifying overall success, which leads to post-event results in driving revenue, retention, membership or a community. And while engagement is clearly an important metric to keep track of within a larger strategy, it can be hard to define, let alone measure. For example, engagement can be measured in sessions attended, meetings held, connections made, poll participation, social media activity or event app adoption among other metrics. Generally speaking, an engaged attendee or customer is a satisfied one.
3. And, executing meaningful post event work: The most effective events are the ones that build relationships (between attendees and brands, attendees and other attendees, and attendees and sponsors) that last long after the actual event has ended. Keeping in touch through multiple channels like email marketing, social media, and future events can all help cultivate a long-lasting community.
What framework can marketers use to measure, manage, and scale events towards key business outcomes?
Pipeline progression and new deals sourced: Measuring how many new deals come in from an event, and how many existing deals are influenced and moved through the pipeline, is one of the most important metrics.
Content creation: A lot of companies run events to get new content from the most engaging sessions. With that content, a brand can create future marketing materials, social media content, insightful blog posts, and much more.
Social Media Activity: How many people are posting about your event? Is the event hashtag trending? How many times is it being shared or retweeted? Asking these questions will help you understand how much social media activity is being generated from your event. Use a social media monitoring tool to keep track of all this activity and to paint an accurate picture of attendee engagement.
Event App Adoption: Is your event leveraging an event app to improve the attendee experience? If so, you'll want to keep track of how many attendees are actually adopting it. On the one hand, downloading an event app is a simple task, but veteran event organizers will say that it requires a coordinated campaign to get attendees to click download, and then actually use the event app.
Event App Engagement: During the actual event, the event app will be the main source of engagement for attendees. Because so much of the event content will exist within the app, attendees should be taking full advantage of this resource and utilizing all of its features to maximize their event experience. Ideally your event management software will have a dashboard with event analytics that describe the app performance and in what ways attendees are engaging with the app. In the following section, we’ll explore how specific app features can facilitate engagement.
What are the 3 most significant changes taking place in event marketing today?
The three most significant changes taking place in the event marketing category are:
1. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for Events: Event marketers can use a more comprehensive and sophisticated dataset to approach events from an ABM perspective, maximizing account nurturing and the velocity of prospect movement down the pipeline. This type of insight is invaluable, as it provides go-to-market teams with true leverage to drive acquisitions, retention and satisfaction.
The concept of ABM centers around the idea of targeting a specific list of key accounts whose needs perfectly fit your product offering and thus add most value to the company. The campaigns for each account are then personalized to ensure maximum engagement. ABM strategy is ideal for companies who have a strong grasp on their product-market fit and thus a clear understanding of which accounts would be ideal clients. When executed properly, ABM is mutually beneficial for both the supplier and the customer since the strategy is specifically designed to directly address the client’s needs, which in turn results in valuable long-term partnerships.
When applying ABM strategy to event marketing, the organizer witnesses the power of live events coupled with the deep impact of a more personalized marketing strategy. In a nutshell, more data means better targeting for your events and it also means a better experience, all-around, for attendees. It’s a no-brainer as a strategy but the data has to be there in order for it to work.
2. Data-driven Personalization: The future of this category is data powered, which means data will be used to increase professional event attendance, amplify engagement across channels through personalization, and granularly track event ROI.
3. The amalgamation of in-person and digital: Of recent, we see the most forward-thinking companies combining the power of in-person experiences with digital to gather more data on customers and drive brand presence far beyond that of traditional marketing.
What are your best practices for marketers to boost B2B event and conference attendance?
According to our own data, 85% of business leaders believe that in-person events are a critical component of their company’s success. More specifically, 25% of B2B companies’ marketing spend is on live events. As a result, the number of professional events each year has exploded and more organizations, specifically, B2B companies, are creating personalized event journeys.
Some best practices for marketers to boost B2B event and conference attendance include:
Branded Website & App: Given that the event website and app will be the primary touch points for potential attendees, they should encompass all of the strengths of your event while being packaged neatly into your brand aesthetic.
Email marketing: As mentioned in the previous section, segmentation is crucial for effective campaigns and this especially rings true for email marketing. Segmenting emails based on industry, location, industry, and other contact properties will yield higher open and click-through rates. Each segment should have its own triggered workflow that sends an email after a certain action, such as opening the previous email or visiting a certain page on the event website. Having a series of emails based on behavior will make the experience much more personalized and relevant for the recipient.
Social media: The key for social media campaigns for events is to maintain uniformity. Use the same hashtag and handle across platforms so people know how to refer to your event on social media. Additionally, devise a social media content calendar at least one month in advance to make sure people have posts to engage with, keeping your social media buzz healthy leading up to the event.
Content Marketing: Whether it be blog posts, video series, or a combination of both, content marketing is always a great way to spread awareness about your event. Serial content works well because it gives your audience a reason to continually come back to your page for new content.
Can you tell us more about the experiential marketing industry? How can marketers calculate the ROI on their experiential marketing-based event strategy?
Properly analyze the numbers and communicate them effectively to the right people: This is a key best practice to corporate event planning. The campaign should not be considered complete until a thorough post-event analysis and debrief is conducted.
Focus on the key metrics: What were the KPIs that were discussed prior to the event? Revisit your original event objectives and create a report that keeps consistent with the initial goals. This will make for a more coherent and digestible ROI report for your relevant stakeholders, whether that be event sponsors, managers, or the executive board.
Connect event KPIs with overall business metrics: The event ROI should not be self-referential. Articulate how the event performance impacts bottom-line business metrics. Instead of saying that 300 new contacts were acquired from the event, show that 100 of the 300 new contacts have already been connected with the sales team and that the sales pipeline has increased by 60%. Connecting your event metrics to the larger company objectives will make it easier to prove the event’s impact.
Schedule a follow-up report: Often times the impact of an event can only be fully understood after a few months have passed. Whether the goal was brand awareness, customer acquisition, or increasing sales pipeline, most event metrics require time to mature. Set a reminder on your calendar to send a follow-up report to relevant stakeholders informing them of how the event has continued to influence the overall business metrics, including year-over-year growth marks, a summary of what worked and what didn’t, in addition to recent market trends. This shows initiative on your part and helps prove the point that corporate event marketing is a long-term strategy.
In your opinion, will the use of big data create better events in the future?
Yes! Especially when it comes to driving better customization, which is by far the most in-demand ask. With more data and better technology, actual personalization is becoming a reality. Chatbots, wearables, event apps, AI and event technology platforms are all helping to facilitate that.
Event marketers can have the capability to provide a fully customized experience for attendees. As in-person events gain popularity, marketers are looking for new ways to innovate and please event attendees. It’s no longer a matter of hosting and attending an event, now it’s a matter of creating an integrative, experiential custom experience where every single attendee feels the event was made for them.
Can you tell us about any upcoming new projects at Bizzabo that you’re most excited about?
We’ve recently launched a podcast series called IN-Person to showcase event trends and what our customers are seeing. This series tells the stories behind the world's biggest professional events and the leaders who make them happen. Each episode of IN-PERSON treats listeners to an in-depth conversation between IN-PERSON’s host and leaders from companies such as Forbes, Sprint, InVision, plus many more.
Could you share any predictions in this space for 2020 and beyond?
Personalization and connecting in real-time is only going to continue to gain popularity in 2020 and beyond. In an age of email and social media, face to face interactions will become more important and companies can leverage this need for marketing purposes.
Neha: Thank you, Alon, for sharing your valuable insights on how marketers can leverage event marketing strategies to maximize conversions. We hope to talk to you again soon.