Scaling Events Across Your Enterprise With Event and Marketing Automation

Posted: 10 Oct 2016 06:00 AM PDT

Planning, executing, and scaling enterprise events presents a complex set of challenges for marketers and event professionals. Challenges can include a large number of attendees and/or exhibitors per event, and large event programs with multiple event types (field marketing events, conferences, and virtual events). Additionally, when you’re planning an enterprise event, language and localization issues arise with global program expansion. So how can you address this wide variety of challenges and come out ahead?

When event automation and marketing automation systems work together to capture rich attendee data and execute flawless events, marketers can leverage that data for personalized follow-up. Below, we provide best practices on how you can leverage event automation to scale your event program so you can capture rich attendee data to inform your marketing strategy, convert leads into customers, and generate pipeline from events.

Leveraging Marketing Automation for Event Success

How can marketing automation impact the success of your enterprise events? Marketing automation systems like Oracle Eloqua eliminate operational inefficiencies, enabling marketers to use fewer resources to get more done. For example, only when your marketing and event automation systems are fully synced can you fully-automate event manual processes.

What are ways you can leverage data from your events into your marketing automation system? When a prospect takes an action, like downloading a guide before their event, this improves their lead score. Marketers can take that lead score and use it to effectively nurture leads during the event. So, if a prospect attends a session and receives a live product demo, their lead score can increase as well. What’s more, event data can be captured during the event to further affect lead scoring, just like online behavioral data.

Additionally, after attendee data has been captured and synced with your marketing automation system, prospects can be flagged for sales teams in their CRM so salespeople can set-up product demos or meetings depending on the prospect’s interest level. Flagging prospects in CRM systems help marketing and sales teams qualify their leads and accelerate the buyer’s journey. But beyond marketing automation, how else can you use attendee data captured at events to convert prospects into customers?

Accelerating the Buyer’s Journey Through Event Automation

You should use event automation to capture as much data as you can at events; including booth visits, event registrations, session registrations, and product demos. Once all of this data is collected in your event automation system, it enables you to personalize and target your prospects and move them along the buyer’s journey. With this information, you can place prospects on email nurture tracks and create omnichannel campaigns that create conversions.

An excellent example of how a fully integrated event automation system can help you streamline your event marketing processes is by utilizing a fully integrated check-in app. That way marketers and registrants experience up-to-the-minute syncing of data and information. Event marketers can then pull reports with real-time data and generate reports during the event. Additionally, marketers can customize questions for attendees based on their interest level and what stage they are in the buyer’s journey. For example, marketers can create a session poll for the speaker to launch mid-way through his or her presentation. This increases engagement and makes it easier for your team to gather essential data regarding audience feedback and interest.

Capturing buying signals through syncing your marketing and event automation systems can fuel marketing efforts during all stages of your event life-cycle. By placing prospects on personalized nurture tracks, marketers generate leads, drive pipeline, and increase Event ROI. Once marketers are able to deliver credible ROI, they are in an excellent position to scale their event program. But in order to scale their events, enterprise marketers must first implement an effective event automation system that meets their company’s complex requirements.

Managing enterprise events requires robust, agile event and marketing automation systems that are easily configurable to your enterprise’s needs and meets enterprise-level requirements. To find out how you can scale your events across your enterprise, read our guide: How Marketing and Event Automation Help You Scale Enterprise Events.