5 Major Trends Redefining Event Marketing Playbooks

In this episode, Splash Senior Customer Success Manager Danielle Geisler steps in as a special guest host.

Danielle works closely with the top event marketers at brands like Spotify, Nutanix, and Uber to understand their event strategies and help them reach their business goals.

Throughout the episode, she walks through the biggest event trends she's seeing from customers and shares real life examples of how different companies are approaching and implementing these changes.

Plus, she dissects the 7-11-4 rule from Google, a formula for building trust with potential customers through strategic content and touchpoints, and explains why marketers are increasingly focusing on quality of leads rather than quantity. 


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Check out more event trends for 2024: https://splashthat.com/resources/2024-outlook

Transcript

Camille White-Stern: 0:01

This is Checked In with Splash. Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of Checked In. My name is Camille Whitestone. I lead experiential marketing here at Splash and for this week's episode we have a special guest host, none other than Danielle Geisler. Danielle is a senior CSM here at Splash. She works with some of our biggest clients to help them unlock event-led growth. This week she will be digging into five trends redefining event playbooks. This is a really juicy episode. She's sharing so much wisdom. I hope you love it. I'll be back next week with another episode. Until next time, take care.

Danielle Geisler: 0:51

In the dynamic world of event marketing, staying ahead of the curve is not just a strategy, it's a necessity. Working with seasoned event marketers, I've witnessed firsthand the evolution of this field, adapting to new technologies, the ever-changing consumer behaviors and everyone's least favorite the changes in regulatory landscapes In 2024, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment where several key trends are shaping the future of event marketing, and we're diving into the top five trends redefining the playbook for event marketers today. Hi, I'm Danielle Geisler, a Senior Customer Success Manager for Enterprise Accounts here at Splash. I work with some of our notable brands like Spotify, Nutanix, Uber and more, on a daily basis. I'm working with event marketers from these brands to truly understand how their event marketing will fit into their overall marketing mix, their needs and how they're going to actually reach their goals. Now, before I actually jump into those top trends, I want to just set the landscape.

Danielle Geisler: 2:02

I recently listened to a podcast from Think Media where they had a great guest speaker on talking about how we're currently in a trust recession. So they based this on a recent survey done by the General Social Survey Company, which is one of the longest and largest trust surveys in the world. The findings from this survey were at the lowest point of person-to-person trust in years low lead-to-booking ratio, low accuracy, form details and filling out forms and a trend of overall high refunds. What does this all mean? It means that if you want to actually sell your products or get customers that you need to make sure you're working a lot harder than ever before just to gain their trust. Now juxtapose this to another survey done by Google, which was released on the 7-11-4 rule, which states seven hours of content across 11 touch points in four different locations is what it's going to take to turn a stranger into a buyer. This 7-11-4 rule is not super new. It's been out there for a while now.

Danielle Geisler: 3:18

But let's break down what that actually means. Seven hours of content can seem like a lot, but if you're running webinars and events, that content can be recorded and streamed in a lot of different touch points and locations. When we say locations, it doesn't need to be geographically. It can be on the web, so that means you can be streaming it on YouTube. You can be posting it on Twitter, facebook, so that means you can be streaming it on YouTube. You can be posting it on Twitter, facebook, any other social channels that your audiences might be in and letting them understand and learn about your brand before you actually have your sales teams going out there. By doing this, you're going to increase sales calls, you're going to increase conversions and you're going to, overall, be turning prospects into trusted customers. The basic rule here is more exposure is just going to lead to more sales, but it's important to know that the price of your product is actually going to have to garter a much higher level of trust. For example, if I have a $5 ebook, I might not need to have as much content, locations or touch points on it as I would for, say, a $2,200,000 SaaS contract. As your product goes up in price, so will the trust score that you need to have your customer. They're really going to need to understand who you are, not just what you do, and customers are doing that in a lot of different ways, and that's what the background is for a lot of these trends that we're seeing in 2024.

Danielle Geisler: 5:02

Okay, now that we've set the stage, let's talk about our top five trends. The first one is quality leads over quantity. Five trends. The first one is quality leads over quantity. Gone are the days of simply counting foot traffic and collecting business cards at events In 2024, there's an emphasis on shifting towards quality leads over sheer quantity. Event marketers are now focusing on engaging with the right audience. These are individuals who are genuinely interested in your product or service. They're more likely going to convert from prospect to customer and, with this, event marketers have to have a deeper understanding of audience segmentation, personalized messaging and strategic lead nurturing tactics.

Danielle Geisler: 5:52

One way customers are driving quality leads is through owning their own events. Instead of purchasing a costly booth to get the foot traffic of a larger conference, we're seeing that customers are doing auxiliary events outside of the conference. This means they're hosting potentially experiential experiences VIP dinners, happy hours, lunches, et cetera, et cetera. Now, one way that Splash actually did this is off of the Adobe Summit. This year, we did an experience at the Sphere in Vegas, which is a newer space in Vegas, and we were able to do a happy hour where we had conversations with a hand-selected group of individuals that we could curate the conversations with, and then we allowed them to watch this great Sphere show and this was a memorable moment that they will then remember from the conference outside of potentially just having a conversation with a drink. Now, take that and put it at a much larger scale and you'll find that companies like Lattice are even owning their own tentpole or conference events. Lattice does their own yearly tentpole event called Resources for Humans, where they own everything around the event they own the agenda, they own the guest list, the partners and more. Really driving those quality leads over just a quantity of numbers coming through someone else's owned tentpole or conference event.

Danielle Geisler: 7:27

Although successful event marketing extends beyond the event itself, it encompasses the entire customer journey. And that leads us to our second trend, which is understanding the customer journey. My customers are investing significant amounts of resources into really mapping out that customer journey, from the initial awareness stages to post-event follow-up, to understand all the various touch points and decision-making stages that come along with the customer journey. As you may have noticed, customers are completely different than they were five years ago and by understanding the journey we can understand how to truly convert those customers. Now for all the check damage slash groupies out there.

Danielle Geisler: 8:15

I'm sure you all know of Camille White-Stern. She's the head of our experiential marketing and is usually the host of this podcast. She recently did a webinar which we can link down below, and there might even be a podcast recording on where she shared this amazing fact I've told so many of my customers about and they are still stunned. It is that, on average, there are 30, yes, 30 required touch points along the buying journey. This number is up from 17 touch points in 2019. That is a staggering increase in touch points.

Danielle Geisler: 8:57

And what's also crazy is, along that customer journey of turning a prospect into a customer, the way that they want to be treated is completely different. We found that customers want to do their own independent research. They want to learn about the product on their own. They don't want a salesperson coming in and bombarding them with sales content. They actually want to be able to view your blog, watch videos, and this goes along with that 7-11-4 study that we talked about earlier. You want to be creating enough content for them to do a deep analysis of your brand on their own.

Danielle Geisler: 9:37

They also want to be able to trust in peers and the community. They are starved for IRL connections. They want to meet and talk to people that are also customers of your brand and they want to hear positive things. You can do this by doing webinars, where you break out into networking circles and let them converse. You can do this by having small community events and let them actually go in and engage with other customers in the community. Hashicorp's user group Hugs is a great example of this. They're able to support events for their members and enable them to run their own meetups in person. They can share best practices, build relationships and scale a program that an internal team would struggle to manage, with the ability to reach 40,000 people in over 143 groups in 53 countries.

Danielle Geisler: 10:36

And lastly, and probably one of the harder ones, is they want to have an anonymous customer experience. While researching, doing product research and learning about your product, they want to remain anonymous until they don't. Another great way to do this is through webinars, which are top of the funnel a cheaper, easier experience to run for a larger subset of customers or prospects. And then, once they do actually want to be known and not remain anonymous, they want you to really understand them, what's valuable and create personalized messaging towards them. And this is where those smaller VIP dinners and experiences can be key to fostering that relationship and really diving into them once ready.

Danielle Geisler: 11:24

Okay, we've talked through our top two trends. Trend one is to have quality leads over quantity. Trend two, understanding the customer journey. And trend three is the ability to track the ROI of events. Gone are the days of ambiguity when it comes to measuring the return on events. With advancements in technology and analytics, you now have the tools and capabilities to track impact of events with precision, from the ability to track online registrants and engagement metrics to correlating event attendance with sales conversions, measuring the ROI of events has become more data-driven and transparent than ever before. It's really important that before you even attend an event or do an auxiliary event around it, or you even put on your own event, that you actually know what the outcome will look like. One way that we are doing this here at Splash is working with partners like Vendelux to level up and understand what the guest list will look like and if our target prospects will actually be in the room before we even attend an event. And we're not the only ones doing this. Customers want to know if it's worth going, if it's worth the spend and if it's worth the whole entire production around their event, and it's really important that they're tracking this following the event as well, to make educated decisions for the following year.

Danielle Geisler: 12:56

While tracking the customer journey and understanding ROI of events, we also get led into trench number four, which is following GDPR and data privacy laws. In an era of heightened data privacy concerns, event marketers must navigate the regulatory landscape with caution. Gdpr, otherwise known as the General Data Protection Regulation, has ushered in a new era of accountability and transparency regarding the collection and processing of personal data and other data privacy regulations ensuring that their events are ethical, transparent and respectful of attendee privacy rights. And this isn't so much of a fun bubbly trend as we might see in the others, but it's something that customers must do in order to stay compliant and continue with their event marketing and reach their goals. I must admit I saved the best for last, and this is truly the icing on the cake for these five trends in event marketing for 2024, and that is that customers are using event-led growth.

Danielle Geisler: 14:18

Events are no longer just a component of their marketing mix. They are becoming a catalyst for growth In 2024,. Forward-thinking companies are leveraging events as strategic opportunities to drive business growth, acquiring new customers and foster deeper relationships with their existing customers. Whether it's hosting thought leadership summits, industry conferences or experiential activations, event-led growth has become a cornerstone of modern marketing strategies. We found in a recent study that 70% of teams are utilizing event-led growth and 46% of those not using it are planning to adopt it in 2024. In conclusion, the landscape of event marketing is constantly evolving and it's important that you stay on top of the latest trends in order to be successful. By prioritizing quality leads over quantity, understanding the customer journey, tracking ROI, following and complying to GDPR and data privacy regulations, and embracing event-led growth is going to help you navigate the tides of change that we're seeing and unlock new opportunities for you to continue to grow in 2024 and beyond.

Camille White-Stern: 15:46

All right, folks. That's it for today. If you enjoyed today's episode or are a fan of the podcast in general, please let us know. Support this show by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, leave us a rating. We so appreciate feedback we receive about the show. So if you ever want to get in touch, you can email us at podcast at splash thatcom or, better yet, join our Slack community, where you can message me directly. Last but certainly not least, if you're a marketer using events to help your business grow and want to learn how Splash's platform can take your events to the next level, like we have for MongoDB, UCLA, Okta, Zendesk or even Sweetgreen, visit our website at www. splashthat. com. Until next time, take care, thank you.