Checked In with Splash
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Checked In with Splash
A Lesson in Event Content with HubSpot's Katherine Tooley
In this episode, host Camille White-Stern is joined by Katherine Tooley, VP of Global Events and Experiential Marketing at HubSpot.
With over 20 years of experience in the event industry, Katherine has a rich background in creating memorable and engaging experiences. She's been involved in everything from kicking off music festivals like Bonnaroo and Outside Lands to scaling Refinery29's 29Rooms art experience to producing HubSpot's annual Inbound conference.
Throughout the episode, she shares years of expertise, best practices, and strategies for:
- Creating event experiences attendees want to attend
- Crafting dynamic event content using the right mix of topics and speakers
- Aligning event content with company goals
- Extending the value of your event content
- Measuring the impact of your event content
...and more.
Tune in to learn all her tips for crafting powerful event content that resonates with audiences and produces real results.
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Follow Splash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/splashthat-com
Get to know HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
Learn more about maximizing the value of your event content: https://splashthat.com/webinars/dont-leave-event-roi-on-the-table
This is Checked In with Splash. My name is Camille White-Stern and I lead experiential marketing here at Splash. I am so thrilled to have you join today's virtual discussion. We're diving deep into strategies and tools to help you create impactful events that enhance your content strategy, and vice versa. If you've attended any of our recent Splash webinars, you know we frequently discuss the go-to-market motion of event-led growth. Elg is all about strategically using events to drive revenue, growth and expansion, and with an event-led growth approach, events are at the heart of your marketing efforts. The conversations you and your attendees have during an event can help you better leverage other marketing channels, such as media pitching, blog series and social content. This makes events invaluable for your content strategy. Ensuring that your event content is relevant to your audience is totally crucial for a successful ELG approach, but the challenge many event hosts face HubSpot, who oversees the Global Experiential and Events Department, K kat, will be joining me on the stage in just a little bit to dive into this crash course in creating compelling event content. Now let's get into why you're here and tuned in today.
Camille White-Stern:When it comes to planning impactful live experiences, a critical factor that separates lackluster events from wildly successful ones is the content. Now in the event marketing world content is a broad term that encompasses far more than just blogs or videos. Your event content is the sum of the topics, speakers, presentation formats, interactive experiences and engagement opportunities that attendees will consume over the course of your event. It's the substance that educates, inspires and leaves lasting value. So crafting a rich, multi-dimensional content experience is both an art and a science. Get it right and you'll reap the rewards of top-notch engagement. Get it right and you'll reap the rewards of top-notch engagement, stellar feedback and optimal ROI from your event investment.
Camille White-Stern:So today we'll explore strategies to purposefully curating your event content strategy through four key chapters. This is a crash course, after all. We'll start at chapter number one with the state of events and event content, exploring what's resonating or not in the current event landscape. In chapter two, we'll get into how you can define goals for your event content. Knowing the objectives of your event helps you deliver content that aligns with your organization's bigger priorities.
Camille White-Stern:Moving into chapter three, we'll talk about techniques to thoughtfully curate content and experiences across your varied audiences. And then, rounding our discussion, in chapter four, we'll chat about how to measure the impact of your event content. We'll dive into key metrics, measurement tactics and strategies to optimize your content's performance. By taking a purposeful approach to creating rich, cohesive event content, you can really unlock the true essence of event-led growth. And just throwing this out there, while we're covering the keys to creating meaningful content today, we know extending the lifecycle of that content is just as important. Alrighty, folks, as you can tell, we've got a lot to get into today, so, without further ado, let's get started. Please give me a warm welcome to HubSpot's Kat Thule. Hi, how's it going? I'm fantastic.
Katherine Tooley:How are you, I'm doing good. Thanks for having me.
Camille White-Stern:Oh, my gosh, Are you kidding me? Thanks for joining us. I don't know if you understand, but Kat is a legend. She is the goat of all goats. Kat, your career background is so impressive. I would love for you to just take a moment to humbly brag about yourself and give our audience a peek into the experiences that got you to where you are today.
Katherine Tooley:So I've been in the event industry in some way, shape or form for gosh over 20 years now. So I started out at a. At the time was a very small concert promoter called Superfly, based on New Orleans. They were doing a lot of late night shows at Jazz Fest and I actually started off on their booking or programming team there right. So I booked the talent musical talent for a lot of our shows. Superfly also created Bonnaroo and I was privileged to be on the team that originally launched that festival. So a lot of learnings across those first, you know, five to six years getting that festival up, going and really putting it into the larger cultural zeitgeist of music festivals and kind of where it sits now. Also, during our time at Superfly we created other festivals Outside Lands is another big one, a lot that maybe some of you guys haven't heard of. There was a food festival called Guga Muga that did not do as well but, like overall, we were all about trying new things, failing fast and kind of giving our customers what they want. During that time at Superfly we actually had a lot of tech brands and media brands come to us and say that they were really inspired by the way that music festivals had started developing in North America and wanted to take a lot of those experiential elements and start integrating them into their own large scale events and experiences. So also at Superfly, I had the privilege of working with a ton of different tech brands kind of behind the scenes on a lot of their strategy around their own events. So everyone to Oath, which was the Verizon kind of parent company of Yahoo and AOL, worked with Apple, got to work with StubHub and Eventbrite when they were first launching. So I got to work with Google, did a lot of work on their original Google IOS, so just really learned a lot about taking kind of live music festivals and taking the amazing experiential pieces and transferring them to B2B audiences. After Superfly I went over to Refinery29. At the time they had been doing 29roo s for a few years. It was wildly successful, but they wanted to scale beyond their two standalones and they wanted to develop a tour as well as develop out their experiential practice from Refinery29. So I came in there I think it was late 2018. And we worked to scale 29 rooms from two events to, I believe, six and across the year with our partners IMG, and then we also, I think, tripled our experiential practice.
Katherine Tooley:So a lot of times what happened was a lot of brands would come in and say I did 29 rooms last year but it's not really on my roadmap for this year, but we want to leverage your audience. What more can we do? So we would do everything from pop-up experiences to screenings to in-house editorial showcases to our editors. We actually developed the entire retail experience for a Samsung store in the UK. So we were doing all types of things. If you wanted it, we could probably do it. We worked with Adidas to a massive stunt during COVID, where they amplified content three-dimensional and four-dimensional content on the Brooklyn Public Library to showcase their new Stan Smith sustainability initiative. So we really did just a ton of different work for brands because they loved our aesthetic, they knew we could reach a certain audience and you know they wanted more out of their experiential commitment. So I was there for a few years was bought by Vice Media Group over at Vice. Not only did I take over the experiential practice, but I took over the entire content production studio for about a year and a half during COVID, when our primary delivery was digital content for our brands.
Katherine Tooley:And then HubSpot came to talk to me and I was just really inspired by Embay on as an event. My former executive creative director at Refinery had spoken there before. I knew it was super impactful in the B2B world and I really just appreciated HubSpot as a product. I think you know their mission to really help scale. You know small and midsize businesses, you know, got me really excited. I love kind of getting in the weeds and like helping people grow their businesses, grow their careers, and this was right up my alley and not only that, it was kind of going back to my roots. You know it's like I loved making content and content definitely has placed in experiential marketing, but I also loved experiential marketing at its core, so it allowed me to go back and have focus on my craft and to bring my expertise to a new group of people. And yeah, I've been there almost three years.
Camille White-Stern:I mean, I threw it in the chat, but casual, I said it before. I will say it again your background is so impressive and also makes so much sense that you are where you are today. First of all, hubspot could not be luckier to have gotten you on their team, and I love that you get to kind of marry your two passions the content creation and curation and the experiential marketing.
Camille White-Stern:Folks, I told you we're in for a treat today, kat. Let's make the most of our time and start with the state of events today. I'd love to hear your perspective on how the role of event content has kind of evolved. You've seen so much evolution and I'm just curious from where you sit, you know. What value does it provide today that it maybe didn't before, and what are attendees expecting from event content in 2024?
Katherine Tooley:Yeah Well, first I will say I think there's a lot of pent up demand for live experiences in any way shape or form, like you're seeing that, you know, across live music experiences. You're seeing that in B2B form. Like you're seeing that, you know, across live music experiences. You're seeing that in B2B conferences. You're seeing that, just, you know, in hanging out at your friend's houses, right, like I think that we lost it for several years and I think that not only are people trying to catch up on, you know, lost moments, but they also realize the value that those experiences had for them and, you know they want to really encapsulate that and enjoy it more. So I think that that's the first thing, that kind of coming out of COVID, that like we're still experiencing, and I think we'll continue the experience because people don't want to take those live experiences for granted and they want to be a part of them. So that's, you know, statement number one. I would say, like number two, what we're seeing is, you know, like a need for curating to your audiences and your attendees better.
Katherine Tooley:I think a lot of times, especially pre COVID and even during COVID, we were able to make assumptions about our audience and what they wanted from a content standpoint, program it and they would attend, and for the most part, we got it right.
Katherine Tooley:But I think, because there is so much pent up demand and there's so many people using experiential marketing within their brand tactics that you have to be a little bit more deliberate in how you're programming your content for your attendee. The biggest thing that I remind my team all the time about is that one of the biggest resources our customer can give to us is their time, and live experiences take up a lot of their time. Right. It's not just about, you know, watching the content at any hour. It's sometimes about hopping on a plane, leaving their families, leaving their work, leaving their friends to come spend time with us. So we also need to provide that value back to them. They're giving us so much value to us by giving us their time. We need to make sure that the quality of the content is what they're looking for, and a lot of times you need to meet them where they're at and what they need at the moment, not what we as a brand want to feed or give them.
Camille White-Stern:Pre-chat. I need to retweet that from the hilltops. I couldn't agree more. Attendees, I mean people. Right, attendees are people, and just people are much more discerning with how they spend their time these days and I feel like pre-COVID and I feel like pre-COVID, you know, kind of to your point like we could kind of curate content or experiences and we either just like happen to get it right, or I think it kind of relates to your second point, which is like people were, I think, a little more liberal in terms of where they gave their time, how they spent their energy pre-COVID.
Camille White-Stern:Even myself, like I, used to go to several events per week right In person and maybe some virtual, although the rise in virtual events has just been astronomical since COVID hit us. But I feel like pre-COVID it was like totally normal to maybe go to like three, four events per week, especially if I'm already out at the office after work. I'm going to pop by this brand's activation or this, you know, happy hour for people in my industry, and since then people are much more deliberate with selecting the events, especially in person, as I'm saying that they're going to give their time to. So I think it kind of speaks to that need, as you said, to kind of it places a bigger emphasis on the need to create compelling experiences and content.
Camille White-Stern:I feel like we'll get to this a little later. I want to dig into this more. We'll come back to this but I'm kind of curious if we can talk a little bit about okay. So in today's current landscape, we know we need to get the marriage of the content and experiences right, because people are more discerning, and that really starts in your kind of messaging about the event or the experience in the first place. Right. How are you even going to attract the right attendees to register? Then you've got to deliver on those promises, right?
Camille White-Stern:But, I'm wondering if you can kind of dig in with me defining goals for your event and your content and like how does the purpose of the event shape the content you create? Again, you mentioned before like we could kind of like make some assumptions about audience and what they wanted. How has that changed today? How do you think about like connecting the dots between what your goal of the event might be as the organizer or as a brand producing the event, and match that to the needs and expectations of your target audience, so that you know you have the right goals in mind and then you're tailoring that content to align with that specific event objective. It could be driving product adoption or generating leads or just fostering community engagement. But I'd love to kind of pick your brain a little bit on how you approach that today.
Katherine Tooley:Kind of the past way that events were built was off of demographics, right, like pretty. It was a pretty kind of linear way of thinking, like there wasn't a lot of two way communication there when determining, like, what you needed to build. So a lot of kind of the old way of thinking was we know we want to target this certain audience, hear the demographics of it, like age, gender, race, location I would say more like physical kind of identification factors and then you planned an event around that and kind of sort of hoped it worked. I think what has happened actually I know what has happened is that two way communication starts way earlier. Like the way that we approach things even HubSpot as a whole from a persona standpoint is people are multifaceted, right. They're not just like one thing, they are not monoliths. You know, like all people who are ages 18 to 22 all don't like the same thing, right, all people who live in a certain neighborhood don't like the same thing. So we actually approach the conversation a lot earlier and ask questions earlier on. Instead of having very straightforward demographic approach to our audience, we ask questions to our CS and sales team as well as people who talk to our customers and our prospects and our potential attendees all the time, like what are you hearing from them? What are the questions that they ask the most about? What are the things that they're most concerned about? What are the things that they're most interested in learning more about? What are the products that HubSpot has that they want to learn more about? What are the products in general across the tech industry that they want to know more about? And so we start from like a place of asking questions, not so much about developing a strict persona based off of demographics, and then we take those answers and develop content from there. So I would say the kind of two way communication of experiential marketing happens much earlier in the content process than it had previously, where it so. Previously I would say pre-COVID. You got that demographic, you kind of developed an event within that demographic when do they hang out the most? What region should you be in, what are the things that they're into? And then you got on site and you waited for that two way communication to happen about the product or the content or the thing that you're rolling out. And for us we start way, way earlier. So I would say at the beginning we ask a lot of questions if we don't have the answers.
Katherine Tooley:I would say the second thing that really helps us because we do have a lot of historical context. We're a very long running event, right, and BAM's been around for almost 13 years now. So we have all this amazing data, subjective and objective criteria, that we can place against our content planning. So we have all this amazing data, subjective and objective criteria, that we can place against our content planning. So we know from previous years what formats worked and didn't work, what speakers, what topics got the most attention or rated the highest versus ones that did not. So we're able to take that past history and apply some critical thinking to that too.
Katherine Tooley:I would say the third piece is like surveying, right. So we always the first thing we do when an event ends is we survey our audience, like within the hour. We want it to be extremely top of mind. We want to like understand what their emotions are like leaving that event immediately. We don't want them to sit on it for a week. We want to know right then and we're able to take those surveys.
Katherine Tooley:And again, it's a mix of, you know, qualitative, qualitative and quantitative data and we're able to derive a lot of the answers to these questions from that survey too. So it's all like, you know, a back and forth conversation, but it always starts with the customer first. I would say that is our biggest kind of trick and behind the scenes trick that we have in planning content. The other thing is our team is made up of individuals who we also, you know, target and market. They're also, you know, thought leaders and business decision makers and you know really part of their cultures and their communities and so, like even just our own internal team and talking to the experiential team or the HubSpot team at large and finding out what they're interested in what speaker, what podcast are they listening to, what business trends are they up on, what are they kind of seeing around the corner? Just having all that combined together can really help inform your content strategy for your event.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. These are great tips. I'm seeing some questions in the chat. Nicole, I think that Kat answered your first question about how are you asking these questions? Yes, surveying I'd love to know, because I also think it's smart that you say we go to our customers. We also talk internally to you know sales or CX, our internal marketing team as well. I'm curious, like how are you capturing the data from, or like the responses when you're asking those your internal people at your own organization surveys? I understand you know post event you're going to push that out out and you're going to capture that from your customers or your attendees.
Katherine Tooley:Curious like what the actual mechanism is for kind of gathering these insights from your internal team members as well so we definitely work at scale by like utilizing our go-to-market enablement team and the different leads for the various segments of CS and sales team by giving them kind of a standard list of questions to ask you know their segments or their groups, to kind of dig into you know what those answers are and reporting them back to us. I would say the other tool that we utilize a lot for kind of back and forth feedback at HubSpot is Slack. Like we definitely use Slack. We like build Slack channels. We have an inbound idea Slack channel where you know anyone can join and kind of give you know feedback and ideas. So I would say like that's the easiest, simplest way. It's just like getting utilizing your full team like at scale to be able to go and ask those questions in real time and like bring them back together.
Katherine Tooley:As far as, like surveying our attendees, we do, we do stuff very quickly, Like there's two things that we use post event surveys. But the other thing I wanted to add that we use is we have an app that we utilize at InVail where when someone enters into a session or scans into a session, you're able to send them a push notification to rate that specific session once they leave. So again, same thing getting that real-time response. If they are able to rate those sessions in real-time and we're able to make those possible adjustments in real-time if something you know rated low and we have specific feedback on why, and that session is getting repeated or there may be something similar later in the week, and that we're also seeing it at the end of the day like what worked, what didn't.
Katherine Tooley:And I just think people are way more honest when they're given, you know, asked a question in real time once they've experienced it. So I would say there's lots of different mechanisms out there for gathering answers and surveying your audience, surveying your internal team members, surveying your wider company. There's lots of tools in HubSpot you can use if you're a HubSpot marketer. We do send out surveys all the time after, especially after, our field events. If you attended that field event, you checked in, you get a survey immediately pushed to you through HubSpot to rate that event, pretty much within the hour after the event ends.
Camille White-Stern:Love it. Last question on this topic and then we can keep it moving because there's just a few other things I would like to get into with you. But Barry asked any recommendations. Maybe even if you just had one recommendation for questions that just work really well to gathering that post event feedback.
Katherine Tooley:So there's lots of different like. It depends on how robust you want your survey to be right. If you want, like, a really really in depth survey, that's you know a couple different pages or has different sort of like an answer to a question may push you to a different section of the survey. My go to for that is SurveyMonkey, just because I think that they've got a really great like. It's very, very, very. You're able to optimize it for the attendee, for the customer. We have an integration in the HubSpot with SurveyMonkey, so we will use that.
Katherine Tooley:If we've got to build something really really, really complicated where there is multiple sections, that it needs to be. The attendee journey through the survey is different, right For depending on how they answer it. For just like regular surveys, like hey, give us an NPS, like one to 10. Did you like this event? Would you recommend it to other people? We'll utilize our registration software. If we're using HubSpot to register, people will use HubSpot. So for experiential marketers out there, whatever you're using for your registration software, whether it's Splash or any of anybody else, there should be survey components at even a foundational base level that you can integrate into the stack so that people are getting them pretty rapidly after they exit your event.
Camille White-Stern:We definitely practice that philosophy as well. So, folks tuned in today. You will be receiving a post event feedback survey as soon as this concludes, and we greatly appreciate your timely feedback.
Katherine Tooley:I think there was a question about like questions to ask and I will tell you this no one has perfected the list of 20 questions to ask to get the optimal like feedback that you need.
Katherine Tooley:I will say, like in a survey, that like a variety of questions in different ways to answer it are always good. Just make sure that whatever mechanism you're using to answer it is consistent and like easy to understand. Like NPS should always, always, always be measured from like a zero to 10 scale. Like no questions right. Like don't don't try to get too cute with NPS, it'll be too hard to solve. That is a zero to 10 question. Let them rate at zero to 10. But I think that there are times where you know you may want an open ended question, especially a lot of times what we will do to kind of garner and or to understand you know what content played well, is to ask very specific questions at the beginning and then leave an open ended question at the end, especially for those who may not be satisfied. A lot of times they just want someone to listen, right, and so leaving that kind of open-ended field gives them a chance for them to be able to leave their commentary and feedback, but still in a constructive and measurable manner.
Camille White-Stern:Okay, I was going to ask you about, like, how do you kind of pinpoint one key takeaway and for your attendees and communicate that in your messaging up front and then also, like, deliver on that in the actual experience and it kind of relates to the chapter three which I will get into in a moment curating content and experiences for a diverse audience, particularly in the context of a massive event like Inbound.
Camille White-Stern:I am very curious how you approach messaging the value proposition, that key takeaway for attendees, when you probably have lots of different types of people coming to inbound for different reasons. How do you kind of like boil that down in a succinct way? I'm just curious if you can just share, you know or and it also I think relates to, as you said, you're, you've, you have all this historical data, especially for inbound right, that helps you tailor the content and the experiences. And then you're also going through these, the process of like gathering, you know, feedback after a single event. How do you take all of that and say this is what we're going to do, this is what this event is going to deliver, and then effectively communicate that?
Katherine Tooley:Yeah, so we start really early on in the planning process and the number one thing that we do is like align with our peers at the company about what their goals are for the following year. Because I'm a big believer in you know, event and experiential marketing. I can't live in a vacuum. It's supposed to be a supportive structure to other teams within marketing certainly your sales team and your success team as well, right? So it doesn't do us any good to have an event with a call to action or a theme or a focus that is not aligned with the greater kind of hubspot goals, right, and a B2B ambitiously way of thinking. But I think that that can be hard for some people to be like well, hold on, what do you mean? I need to have this like integrated campaign and this integrated event, because a lot of times people see events as like happening in a vacuum, in a silo, away from the rest of your marketing priorities.
Katherine Tooley:And that's not it Like it's actually should be there as like a service to the other marketing priorities.
Katherine Tooley:So very early on I have those discussions with my peers about what their goals are in 2025, what new products they're releasing, what's kind of like the vision or the goals behind those products, kind of the vision or the goals behind the larger hubspot product, what personas are we going after? And and we kind of all agree on those, and that kind of starts the kind of birthing process of like what's the theme going to be for this year? And then our programming team, who really runs, you know, 90% of the content selection at the event, spends a lot of time thinking about what that theme is right. So we have this North Star theme that, like every single topic should feel like it can, it goes into that North Star Right. So it needs to be a little bit ubiquitous and like broad in nature, but it still needs to be tangible enough to like market it and like hang content on it Right. It can't just be kind of this like esoteric thing of like come to HubSpot, you'll feel awesome when you leave, or come to.
Katherine Tooley:Inbound where you'll feel awesome when you leave. It's like no, come to Inbound to do XYZ or leave feeling XYZ. So we kind of start with that North Star theme and we make sure that everyone that we program goes into that larger theme. Last year our theme was the year of customer connection. So it was all about helping our customers connect with their customers and helping HubSpot connect better with our customers, right? So our internal goal was to have HubSpot help connect with their customers. External goal was we want to help our customers connect to their customers better. So every single topic that we programmed at Inbound last year had to do with connection in some way, shape or form, whether it was connecting with your community, connecting with your peers, connections to grow your career, connecting with your customer, so connecting all of your go-to-market systems. So everything had that like connection, connection, connection. So that's the first thing to like make sure that you've got streamlined messaging and content and the marketing will will kind of come out and we'll definitely deliver organically out of that. That term connection was what we really started marketing towards like come to inbound to connect with your peers. Come to Inbound to connect with your peers. Come to Inbound to connect with your new network, come to Inbound to connect with other, go to market leaders and then from there we will get kind of more into micro topics that fit into connection right. That's when, really like, the space planning starts, you know.
Katherine Tooley:So it's, you know, and I would say we never just tag things with like this is just about marketing or this is just about success. We kind of start with an emotion at the top right. So like we want people who attend these sessions to feel more connected with their go to market motion right. Like like we want people who attend these sessions to not be scared about connecting their marketing and sales teams. We want people who attend these sessions to not be scared about connecting their marketing and sales teams. We want people who attend these sessions to like learn more about the culture code and how diversity and inclusion and belonging are key foundational requirements, frankly, to be in business. So like we start with an emotion at the top and then we'll get into, like the tagging system.
Katherine Tooley:So it's like really like it really is like a pyramid of like you start with your north star theme and then you start with the emotions or the learnings you want people to take away from those content sessions and then you can kind of get into the more tactical stuff, like this is going to be a marketing-based session or this is going to be a success-based session, but, but you got to start from the top because, again, our customers are not monoliths.
Katherine Tooley:Like there are marketers out there that are deeply engaged with sales leaders and that they want to be in sales-based sessions because their job is to convert qualified leads over to their sales team and make sure that lead is seen all the way through. So, like they care deeply about sales-based sessions, Salespeople care deeply about marketing-based sessions. Salespeople also care deeply about success-based sessions because they want to see their prospect, who turned into a customer, grow with the company. So and they all care about diversity, inclusion, belonging, best practices, work-life balance, wellness. So we try to make sure that, like we have everything, but it's organized chaos, by tagging them onto emotions and the learnings that we want them to feel leaving those content sessions.
Camille White-Stern:I love it. This is the perfect segue into we've kind of already done it gotten into chapter three. This is the perfect segue into we've kind of already done it gotten into chapter three, like I said, creating content and experiences for a diverse audience. You already shared some really great techniques and kind of frameworks for coming up with fresh and relevant content ideas for your events. I love the concept of making sure you have that North Star but then also bringing in the emotions that you want your attendees to walk away feeling after having experienced a particular session or engaged in a particular, you know activation.
Camille White-Stern:I love that, particularly for a large scale event like Inbound if we can stay here for a moment, I guess I'm curious, like so you have your North Star and you talked about you know you want the end result to be that everyone feels like there's some sort of content or experience that's been tailored for them based on their interests, like you said, and not it's not just like the demographics anymore, right? Like not everyone in a particular age group is necessarily going to be interested in the same exact topics, right? Or, for that matter, not everyone with the same kind of professional title, right, will be interested in the same exact topic. So how do you kind of like walk that line and make sure there's a balance? Yeah, I'm just. I'm curious if you have anything more to add there.
Katherine Tooley:So there's two ways that we program or book in speakers or decide on topics. One, we do have a traditional kind of call for speakers route where we go into that call for speakers generally having an idea of the topics that we want to relate to. We certainly have those themes in place, knowing that, and we open up call for speakers and we have, you know, over 1000 applications for various speakers around the globe that just want to speak at inbound. They've got something to say, you know, they've solved a problem and they want to share it with everyone or they're growing their careers for thought leadership as well. So we take in speakers that way and then we have more of like the curatorial side of our speaker engagement, which is like our programming team actually sitting down and going through, not only doing their own research on who's getting a lot of buzz out there, what are our peer sets doing, kind of, what are the products and the best practices and the tactics and the things that are happening, like in the tech and business world that we should be addressing. And then I would say like the third part is like the internal kind of HubSpot curation of our speakers, like who at HubSpot has something to say, like, who is working on something or has solved for the customer in some way, that we want to get them in front of a wider audience and really develop content behind them. So let's say we book in through those three avenuesnoons. There is absolutely a human motion on top of all that. Right, like, we are very, very, very aligned with not only the themes but our own diversity goals within HubSpot in terms of what we want to see programmed.
Katherine Tooley:So we're very conscious about making sure that we have not only a variety of topics but a variety of people delivering that thought leadership within the space.
Katherine Tooley:And you know we're big believers that, like, we want the people speaking on stage to look like our audience. We have a very diverse audience as well, and that diverse audience comes from diversity in speakers. And that diverse audience comes from diversity in speakers. So my head of programming, courtney Dagger, she's constantly looking over the agenda or the speaker list and she's like, oh, we're kind of weighing a little bit heavy in this area here, not only from a topic standpoint but maybe from a gender standpoint, right, and she wants to call that out to make sure that we're constantly keeping that in mind Because there's just subconscious bias or even just subconscious behaviors. That kind of trickle through in any human being. When you're planning, you know speakers and explaining content, and so we always make ourselves very aware and hold each other accountable to make sure that we are creating extremely diverse lineups. So that goes not only from the topics, making sure that there's diversity in the topics but the person delivering that topic.
Camille White-Stern:I love that so much. That has definitely come up. I've had lots of conversations with people. They're like you know.
Camille White-Stern:as you said, in an ideal world you have a diverse range of speakers or thought leaders that actually represent your audience, and if you don't have that you're, you know, I do think that impacts the ability or the chance for your attendees to really connect with the content or the message that you're trying to deliver on a deeper level. Right, I love that. So and this kind of relates to my next question, which is like just keeping attendees engaged throughout an event Before we get to that, I actually just wanted to add one more comment that I almost forgot to say, which is that everything that you're talking about, kat, obviously you know these are really kind of tried and true frameworks, techniques, best practices that work for a large scale event, like an inbound, but could absolutely be applied to a smaller scale event 100%, we're doing it right now.
Katherine Tooley:We're launching, you know, a smaller event later this year in a different region, in a different country, and we're going. It's not going to be as many, we're talking about 500 to 1000 person events. It's our grow series. We applied the same framework and mechanisms for programming in there. I would say we can get even more deliberate in the weeds on it, because it is a smaller audience with a smaller set of speakers, right, and we want to be even more particular about the persona or the type of person that we're trying to attract in. So, yeah, absolutely, it can scale, you know, up and down as needed.
Camille White-Stern:Love it. Before we move into chapter four, which is critical right. Well, we're going to talk about measuring the impact of your content at events. We have to right Measuring success, and ROI is really kind of the name of the game here. But before we get to that, I'm just curious if you have any additional thoughts on really keeping attendees engaged throughout an event. We know this can be challenging. We hear it from our customers all the time. It's not just about getting people to register and show up, but it's about getting them to you know, become and stay engaged throughout the event. What are some of the unique content formats or delivery methods that you've seen work really well? Anything that you're maybe going to be experimenting with that you can share with us? Yeah, any tidbits here, I think, would be really helpful.
Katherine Tooley:Yeah, I mean, as far as formats go, I think it's really important to have a variety of formats on your stage or throughout your entire event. So for us at inbound, we have traditional fireside chats, we have traditional keynotes, but we also have education sessions and breakout out sessions which are a lot more deep dive in the content, more like hands-on training. So really taking a topic that would normally kind of just be touched on in a fireside chat or a keynote and 2.0ing it right. So we joke around that it's like the graduate level courses of the things that like we're stating on the main stage, if you want to go get the graduate level degree, that you go to a breakout session or an education session. I think also like the variety, you have to know what size your audience, how they're going to respond to the content as well. Like for us on our main stage, which you know could have upwards of 10,000 people simultaneously watching it, keynotes and fireside chats work the best. It gets a little unruly if you do Q&A or if you try to do a more interactive format and you kind of want to keep those sessions quick, fast but also very engaging and entertaining. I would say. You know you get to your smaller stages that are between like 500 to 1000, you can definitely get like more in depth into the content, you can get more into interactivity into your presentation. And then I would say, like your smaller rooms, you really need a high level of engagement, like your speaker needs to be able to work that room to take real time questions, to like engage in a very, very like interactive I'd say like progressive way, like with their audience, right, like I was having a conversation. So you have to kind of devise your format, not only because you think it's interesting, but also because of the size of your audience, right.
Katherine Tooley:We also do things like meetups. So these are micro community meetups where there is typically a moderator or someone that is asking prompts or questions at the meetup to like encourage networking. Right, we're doing smaller talks within our product area about specific product features for small groups of 10 to 15. Specific product features for small groups of 10 to 15, right, because we know that that works best to have a very small group engaged on a very specific feature versus a very large, large audience. So it really you have to define like A what's the goal of the talk? Like what, what's the message that you're trying to get through and B like what's your space plan for it? Because a lot of these things just don't work with small groups and a lot of these things don't work with large groups. So the way that we program things is we'll outline it like this is one to many, this is one to few, this is one to one, right, and we make sure that we have a variety of that program throughout the event, a variety of that program throughout the event.
Katherine Tooley:I think the other thing that people forget about within these large scale events is moments of community, moments of organic networking, like giving people the tools, whether it's through an app or whether it's through something as simple as like putting prompts on lunch tables to get them to encourage conversation. Like most people attend events because they want to network or they also want to meet other people, especially birds of a feather communication. So leaving enough space and time encouragement to network, right, like a lot of times they want to do that on their own. And some things to even encourage networking is we do surprise and delight moments across MBAM, where we'll send a push notification that there's an ice cream cart, you know, in this hallway, or there's a coffee bar that just opened out on the lawn or we're giving away you know some sort of treat, like you know, by the main stage area, and people will come there, they'll stop, they'll start talking to each other, like we provide the venue and kind of provide the prompt, but let them organically meet and network with each other and also just having activities that are beyond just the content sessions. I think that that works well for smaller events that are maybe just one day, five to six hours. They really want to double down and learn a lot at those stages or within those sessions, right, but something like inbound, which is multiple days, long hours, same thing, you know, goes for how you build the space as how you program to it.
Katherine Tooley:Our customers are not monoliths. They don't just want to sit and watch sessions all day long. They want to eat great food. They want to meet great food. They want to meet great people. They want to learn things when they're not sitting in a seat, right, so that might be like interactive play or having a conversation and demo space. They want to take meetings. They want quiet space. So we make sure to program for all of that and like interesting and fun ways. They love photo moments. People still love capturing content for their feeds. They love photo moments. People still love capturing content for their feeds. They love showing where they're at, who they've met, what they're experiencing. Like that can't be discounted right the power of social media and people just wanting to showcase kind of what they're doing at the time. So all those things need to be programmed to and thought about to have a really well-rounded experience.
Camille White-Stern:Well said, and I just I got to give props to you and the entire team at HubSpot that works on Inbound. Truly, you guys could teach a master class on how to engage people throughout One of my you know, last year was actually my first year attending in person.
Katherine Tooley:I was blown away.
Camille White-Stern:It really did not. I'm sure the years prior were as well, but it really didn't feel like a boring, stale b2b conference. It felt like an exciting like festival and also makes so much sense. Your background in festivals I'm, like you clearly have know, had an influence on the rest of the HubSpot team working on Inbound, because it's just engaging throughout. And thank you for the breakdown on just like how to think through and approach that.
Camille White-Stern:I want to be mindful of time and talk about something very important, which is why we do all of this right is because we want to have a positive impact on the businesses that we support. So I'm curious, like what are some of the metrics or methods that you use to evaluate success? You talked about the post event surveys. What other kind of things are you looking at to kind of gauge whether an event is successful or not? And you know you did talk about how you use some of the data and insights from past events to inform future content and strategy. I'm curious, like you know. Last question I'll lob at you is just what are the ways that you're kind of evangelizing event content even after the event concludes? So let's start first with, like, the metrics that matter most to you and like what? Are you kind of reporting to the rest of senior leadership at HubSpot to say this was a successful event?
Katherine Tooley:Yeah, I mean first let me start by saying that there's a narrative that's still out there that started you know way pre-COVID, and I will say I was part of that narrative where it was like experiential marketing events is hard to measure. It's not anymore Like I, when I hear people say like it is because there isn't a A plus B equals C type measurement, that can be very hard. There is not like a linear mechanism to say like this event was successful because all these, you know this person pressed this button and you know it converted to this and therefore it was successful. It doesn't work like that. It's not traditional digital marketing. It's not traditional marketing and where you kind of measure off of reach or the number of eyeballs. It's complicated but there are plenty of measurements out there that, when combined together, will show your success.
Katherine Tooley:So for us, mps is a big one, right. We want to make sure that our customer and attendee is happy, right, that they entered into the event and that they left and want to promote it to other people. So that is like one of our biggest driving indicators. We also look at, you know, number of deals that were created I created coming out of the event, number of meetings that were booked. We look at engagement from our sales and CS team how many people invited customers and then came to the event and actually engaged with those customers.
Katherine Tooley:We look at organic reach. We look at paid reach, we look at a multitude of of things, but we set those like parameters very early on on, like what success looks like. Yeah, we put them together and we enable the full team around it and we create those benchmarks and if you hit those benchmarks, your event was successful and you will know that because you'll feel it too and you're like god, like you can. There is absolutely a different emotion and vibe on site. Nine out of 10 times I can tell you what our NPS is going to be before I even send out the survey you can just tell right and like if.
Katherine Tooley:If everyone is playing their part, if sales and CS are engaged, if marketing is utilizing the space as a venue and a forum to create more content, If everyone is doing their part, like, you can feel that energy in the space right, and then all the metrics will tell you that later. There's so many different metrics that you can use as leading indicators or lagging indicators to show the success of your event and it's all. You may not be able to directly measure it yourself. For instance, if I'm creating a sales field event to help the sales team and I know that the goal of that event is to increase the velocity of deals right, I want to make sure that that deal, that time to close one goes from 60 days to 30 days. I myself, as an event producer, I don't have a way of measuring that, but the sales team does right and as long as we are seeing eye to eye that that is the goal of the event, there is absolutely a way to measure that and that indicates that that event was successful.
Katherine Tooley:But NPS is my number one. We always like to take NPS and I will say, like your, social NPS is important too. We have this conversation a lot internally on whether or not survey NPS is giving the full picture of satisfaction of a attendee or a customer, Because we also find that a lot of times unhappy people will answer the MPS and you don't hear as much from the people who are really happy. Right, but where you do hear a lot from people who are really happy is on social. So we pay a lot of attention to social media listening and we have our own MPS score through social listening that we give ourselves as well.
Camille White-Stern:I love that and we've kind of been talking about it. But are there any other specific ways beyond like post-event surveys you mentioned? If you have like an event app where, like people can like rate sessions on the spot, being able to measure the impact of the content from your events, any other tips for that? That also, I think, just relates to my last question for you, which is, as I said, you know, how do you think about continuing to evangelize your event content long after the event concludes, kind of effectively extending that life cycle of that event? Yeah, absolutely.
Katherine Tooley:I mean we film a lot of our sessions. So we certainly live stream our main stage at InBalm. We're going to continue to do the same this year. So not only can you buy a ticket for InBalm or you can join us on HubSpot, youtube and watch the main stage live September 18th through 20th. So we certainly like make sure that we have that live stream up and going and then post event, we like to kind of release on demand content through our YouTube channel based off of feedback we get from the audience from the year before, kind of knowing what feedback you know or what sessions were highly rated or what does really really well. And then also working with our YouTube channel owners, who are really they're the experts in terms of the distribution of that channel. So working closely with them to kind of curate a lineup of programming that they can continue to turn into cutdowns or smaller content pieces and be able to showcase throughout the year or develop a calendar for showcase throughout the year, develop a calendar for it throughout the year, because not only does that extend the life of the inbound content but it also helps drive subscribers, views and reach potentially to new audiences for our other distribution channels, specifically our video distribution channels like YouTube.
Katherine Tooley:I think the biggest thing that, like, we kind of still debate about internally that you know I don't have the like magic answer for yet is like when to retire some of the content, especially when it comes to business. Right, we have like a treasure trove of inbound content from the archives, but a lot of us would argue that some of the content we released in 2020 may not be relevant anymore. Right, the pace of business, the pace of technology, the pace of B2B and go to market is so fast right now, in 2020, I don't think we had any sessions on AI, and then this year, you know, half of our sessions are on AI. So it's just like even that rapid development, and that was only, you know, three, four years ago. So those things have to be taken into account as well, because you want things to stay relevant and stay aligned with your business.
Katherine Tooley:Your business methodology and your business philosophy may change and you certainly won't want content that does not align with the current HubSpot or the current POV that you're putting out there still remaining. So it's constantly being looked at, analyzed, curated. What worked three years ago may not work anymore. So I would spend a lot of time with your channel owners see what's working for them. Look at your audience see what's working for them, what do they want to hear more about, and then you can clean your content calendar from there.
Camille White-Stern:I love that, Kat.
Camille White-Stern:I'm so sad. I feel like I could just keep picking your brain all day, but I want to be mindful, because you've got just a few major priorities that you're working on right now.
Camille White-Stern:I do want to thank you so much for sharing so many gems and really helpful tactics with us today. I know I'm personally walking away from this chat with some new strategies that I will be putting into practice with our own team here at Splash. Really quick. Are there any just final words of wisdom you want to impart to our audience before you head off today? And maybe, if you want to tack on a quick answer to? We did get a question from Madison. I always feel like I get this question. I'd love to know what your response is. How do you actually get people to take or engage with a post-event survey, Like what would be your top tip for?
Katherine Tooley:Well, you can't make anyone engage with a post-event survey. I would say, if you can. We've done it before where we've given a discount.
Katherine Tooley:If they responded to a survey, they got a discount for, like, a future year's ticket or something like that that can be like operationally hard to kind of track or follow up on, but it can be difficult to get people to answer surveys. I would say if, if there's an incentive that you can give them that you know I'm a big sustainability person to not mail something like if there's something digital, whether it's a percentage off of something or an exclusive piece of content that gets unlocked and they respond to the survey, that's always my best route is to give some sort of incentive. We actually have not given incentives the past few years and like we get a lot of responses right Because I would say like the immediacy of it and sending it out, and like right as soon as the event ends is the trick, because people like giving feedback good and bad and we like getting it. I would say you know that the recency of it is going to be super important to see those numbers increase.
Camille White-Stern:Love it Well, kat. Thank you again. So so much. This was really a delight, and you are a wealth of knowledge, so thank you for lending your time to us today. Thank you, I will see you soon. I am sad I'll be on maternity leave for inbound.
Katherine Tooley:Congratulations and best of luck.
Camille White-Stern:I'll be there in spirit, but the Splash team will be there in person. We can't wait to see you and your team there, and hopefully a bunch of people in the audience tuned into us today will also be in attendance for Inbound 2024.
Katherine Tooley:Yes, Tickets are still on sale at inbound. com, but selling rapidly, so definitely go and grab them. I mean we're only, I think, 95 days away. Oh my gosh, I know we're in, we're in double digits, but we'd be happy to host you all and thanks for having me today.
Camille White-Stern:Of course, get your tickets for I nbound while you can, folks. I truly cannot recommend it enough. You will not regret it. It'll be a great experience and, on behalf of the entire Splash team, thank you so much for joining us today. We live for creating opportunities for marketing and event professionals like you to learn with us and your fellow event marketing peers. I hope you'll join our community so we can keep these kinds of discussions going even beyond today's event. And, truly last but not least, if you're interested in learning more about Splash and how our tool makes it easy to create, manage and execute events that grow your business and amplify your brand at scale, join us next week for Meet Splash.
Camille White-Stern:In this quick 30-minute demo, we will be diving into the Splash product and how much of a game changer it can be for your business's bottom line. All right, folks, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for hanging out with us 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 www. splashthat. com. Until next time, take care.