Notes from Forrester's B2B Summit

In this episode, host Camille White-Stern shares her top learnings from Forrester's B2B Summit in Austin, Texas. 

She covers:

• The most engaging activations and events at Forrester
• Tips for standing out on the conference floor without a booth
• How to maximize your event budget and presence through partnerships
• Connecting events to your larger content strategy

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

This is Checked In with Splash. Hey friends, welcome back to Checked In If you're a newbie to this show. I'm Camille Whitestone. I lead experiential marketing at Splash and absolutely love helping other marketers reach new heights of success and unlock new levels of career growth, all by breaking down the keys to impactful event marketing and the steps required to impactful event marketing and the steps required to achieve event-led growth. This is going to be another short and sweet episode recapping my learnings and observations from Forrester's B2B Summit, which recently took place in Austin, texas. Today, I'm going to share the most interesting and engaging activations tips on standing out at a conference, whether you're sponsoring a booth or not, how to maximize your budget and presence through partnerships, and a couple other takeaways to help you fuel your content strategy through events and vice versa. Okay, so first, what were the most interesting and engaging activations, besides the events Splash hosted, of course? Well, I have to shout out Bethany and EJ and the entire Sixth Sense team for their Club Six activation. They had so many incredible experiential elements at Club Six, including a margarita bar with mocktail options, very inclusive, a custom leather activation where you could make things like a chic bag tag. They had AI portraits going on an espresso bar with a barista and tons of space to take meetings, which is mostly the name of the game when you attend a conference. Not to mention they had yummy eats, great drinks. The energy and engagement was super high. I was really blown away by all the little details that they put into producing Club Six. So kudos to the Sixth Sense team. And then I also got to shout out our friends at Webflow. Their happy hour with Outliant was also super successful, and they didn't even necessarily reinvent the wheel. They just had all the key elements that make for a great experience a great venue, awesome food and drinks and, most importantly, they focused on getting the right people in the room, which is honestly the true value for attendees braving a happy hour during a conference. Well done to the Webflow team Matt Taylor and Marie Dinkle, trevor and Lindsay Y'all crushed it, ok.

Speaker 1: 2:34

So next let's talk about standing out on the floor without necessarily having a booth. So, of course, something that worked really well for the Splash team was activating our take care kits. I would say, in general, offering something tangibly valuable to the people that you're trying to engage with, whether they're customers or prospects, can really go a long way. We did this through a wellness themed take care tote bag that was chock full of different goodies, from healthy snacks, water, to a wellness journal, some nice lavender mist spray to help combat the Austin humidity. I live in Southern California where it is not so humid, so that was quite shocking for me, I must say. In addition, I would also just recommend thinking through how you and your team on site can wear something that helps you all stand out and can even serve as a conversation starter. So again, shouting out the Sixth Sense team. They were really coordinated. Day one they were all wearing their turquoise or teal colored shirts. Day two was a navy color theme For Splash. Of course, we had to rock our Splash denim jackets, which are always a crowd pleaser and, like I said, a great conversation starter. They really helped us make a splash, pun intended.

Speaker 1: 3:59

All right, let's keep it moving. So how can we think through maximizing your budget and presence through partnerships? Let's think about how we want to pull off and pull in the right partners, plan ahead, leverage partnerships where they actually say yes, and I'll also just be real, because it's one of our values here at Splash and share what I think we could have done better, what I could have done better and will be doing better in the future, moving forward. So okay, first tip here is something that I admittedly learned firsthand the hard way but sharing is caring, so I'm going to be vulnerable and share with all of you. You can plan the most awesome event or experience, but if you wait too long to get the right partners involved, they sadly won't be able to capitalize on the opportunity you're presenting to them. So my pro tip here if you do nothing else, make your partnership asks early. You don't have to have all of the details of your event planned out and 100% locked in when you start making those asks. If you're still in planning mode, that's okay, but don't wait too long to ask the right partners to get involved. I'd even go so far as to say that even one quarter ahead is maybe pushing it when it comes to planning partner events, especially for a third-party conference or trade show like Forrester B2B Summit. Think about it People have their budgets committed ahead of time. They have to know who they're sending on the ground to attend. There are so many moving parts that make it possible for an organization to show up to a conference or trade show. So many considerations. Make those asks early, get to the details later if you need to. I cannot stress that enough. Okay and finally, let's talk about how we can fuel events through content and how your content strategy can also inform your event strategy.

Speaker 1: 6:04

Around a conference or trade show like Forrester, I was really proud of our team. We hosted the Splash Strategy Suite for the two days that we were there during the conference and we decided to go big or go home and bring in our own content and activations to complement what was going on at the conference. So we had a great stage in our space. We had a planned panel breakfast that we captured the content, video and audio, you know it which was a live event that we also captured content from. Just to make that abundantly clear, we also did live podcast recordings in our space. So we were really thinking through how can we marry our event strategy with our content strategy.

Speaker 1: 6:51

I had several meetings with Rebecca Miller on our team, who runs content and mark comms for the Splash team, and we thought about some themes that would be relevant to our audience at the conference but also beyond right. So creating evergreen content that we can repackage, repurpose and continue to promote through other channels. There are lots of ways that you can think about bringing the right messaging to your audience at your live events and then, like I said, repurposing them for other content channels, and you also might think about testing new messaging and seeing how that's landing with a live audience and then developing content from there. So lots of ways you can go about that, but I would say, don't sleep on your content game when you're planning your in-person presence at a conference like Forrester B2B Summit. There's so much value that you can get out of that A violent saying. But you can kill more than one bird with the same stone, and I promise you the rest of your marketing team and your go-to-market teams will thank you for thinking so strategically and generating content that will fuel your other marketing channels long after the event has concluded. So those are just some of my thoughts and takeaways from Forrester B2B Summit.

Speaker 1: 8:13

I'd love to hear from y'all what were your favorite events and activations that you attended. If you were there, how do you think about standing out whether you have a booth or not at a conference and listen? Any partnership tips or any people who want to partner with Splash at an upcoming event? Let me know. You can reach out to us. You can find me on LinkedIn Search. My name Camille Whitestone.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Give Splash a follow on LinkedIn as well, and you can also always email us the podcast. That is podcast at splashthatcom. And until next time, take care. 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 wwwsplashthatcom. Until next time, take care.