Modern Marketing Experience: Make Every Moment Count at Your Events

Learn how National Instruments Cut Event Resources in Half while Increasing Demand by 50% at Modern Marketing Experience 2017

Imagine managing 2500+ events a year or nearly 7 events a day. Now imagine managing these events in 65 countries around the world. Sounds like something out of a bad dream doesn’t it? But if you’re an event professional in a large enterprise, chances are these stats aren’t unfamiliar or even scary. In fact, they’re pretty run-of-the-mill for those who manage in-person events at large companies. As any event marketer will tell you, events aren’t easy. But for large enterprises, they are especially challenging. Next week we’ll be heading out to Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience 2017 to talk about how large enterprises can drive better results from events.

Of the many challenges enterprise event professionals face, one of the most difficult is managing the budget for enterprise events. Marketers on the whole spend roughly 30% of their budgets on their events. Indeed, although companies are spending more money than ever on events, they are still not fully quantifying return on investment. In fact, according to a recent Aberdeen report, 69% of marketers say that tracking ROI for events is their primary challenge. For enterprises, planning, executing, and scaling events is often a long process with unique challenges including:

• Large and ever-increasing number of attendees and/or exhibitors per event
• Substantial event program(s) with multiple event types, such as internal and external events, conferences, or virtual events
• Localization issues with global program expansion
• Advanced session management from call for papers to scheduling requirements

Moreover, if you’re an enterprise event professional and need to scale your event program globally, your registration forms will also have special requirements, such as language specific fields.

Beyond this, in order to manage a large number of high volume events, enterprise event marketers also need a robust event platform that can check-in many guests quickly, painlessly, and enhance the attendee experience. Indeed, with such a high volume of attendees, it’s difficult for enterprises to create personalized attendee experiences. With so much at stake, it is critical that large enterprises maximize every moment with their attendees because in those intent-driven seconds when your attendees are trying to get something done at your event — whether it’s attending a session, watching a keynote, viewing a demo, or chatting with your sales rep at at your booth — brand loyalty is won and lost.

A case in point is National Instruments, a multinational company headquartered in Austin Texas. National Instruments experienced all of the typical enterprise event challenges before they adopted Event Automation. Prior to adopting Certain, events were taking up as much as 48% of their discretionary budget, and they were manually sending over 6000 event-related emails a year.

However, by leveraging the bi-directional integration with Event Automation, National Instruments was able to:

• Seamlessly sync with marketing automation, transferring data securely with PCI compliance
• Automate critical event management tasks with event templates and cloning Capabilities
• Provide user-friendly online registration, agenda management, appointment scheduling capabilities, and session management and attendance
• Enable branding control and customizable admin or user dashboards across the globe

In particular, Helena Lewis, Global Manager of Marketing Operations and Technology at National Instruments, leveraged the integration between Certain and Oracle Eloqua to syndicate and automate email communications by standardizing templates for event landing pages and registration forms. This freed up her team to optimize marketing campaigns that drive registration and demand generation. In so doing, National Instruments generated phenomenal results:

• Cut their resource drain on events by 50%.
• Decreased their lead follow up time from 14 days to 1 day post event
• Decreased the number of resources involved in follow-up from 8 to 0 (fully automated)

What’s more, 50% of their demand is now coming from events.