How Event Teams Can Get Marketing On Their Side

Event directors know that communication is not just an aspect of the work they do; it’s at the very core. They communicate not only with their attendees and event presenters or facilitators, but also with colleagues in other departments. In the ideation phase of planning an event, it’s beneficial to have representation from any team that will be involved in the execution in the room at once, collaborating through every stage of the process. This doesn’t always happen, though.

Event teams regularly realize this too late and are unable to effectively plan with other key departments, including marketing.

It is mutually advantageous for event and marketing teams to collaborate, but the reality is that it can be tough to get buy-in from marketing. Marketing professionals often view events as a valuable but ultimately separate part of the business. Instead, they prefer to focus other dominant marketing channels and tactics, such as paid search and media buying. Since many events are attended by individuals who are ideal customers and those that marketing is likely targeting, what is preventing event teams and marketing from tight collaboration? The answer is: most event teams lack data. In all other channels, marketing relies on vast amounts of data to quantify progress and success, all while syncing up with external systems like Salesforce. Event teams are often unable to provide the type of definitive numbers that marketing typically works with to show the impact of events.

Here’s the truth: without high-quality, holistic data, marketing teams will keep viewing events as siloed efforts. But event directors can turn this pattern around. Here’s how:

Spotlight Data

Event directors understand the importance of using data to guide planning their events. This approach to planning should be a priority, but can be challenging when actionable data can’t effectively be gathered.

Outdated or siloed software solutions hinder the collection process. This doesn’t need to be the case. Open up those communication channels by collecting data on attendees that will benefit not only the event teams, but your company as a whole.

Collect quality data with an up-to-date CRM

Your event-marketing platform should be able to integrate other marketing systems such as Pardot and Salesforce. These integrations can help show where potential customers were impacted by events on their path to purchase. RainFocus captures complete attendee behavior over their entire lifetime and makes it available through systems that combine it with external information from other marketing channels. RainFocus was built from the ground up around these integrations — with the idea that attendee data shouldn’t be limited to just one event or stored in just the RainFocus platform.

When an event team’s technology seamlessly integrates in with a CRM, all departments get a complete data set of a customer’s participation at events and interactions with traditional marketing channels. Marketing teams can greatly benefit from this kind of information. It helps them understand the patterns and behaviors of clients.

1. Set up regular meeting to share cross-functional data.

2. Clarify what KPIs event teams use to measure success and how marketing can benefit from that data.

3. Share your findings! The comprehensive reports that CRMs are able to run on attendees help to bring marketing teams in sync with event teams. These unified data sets lay the groundwork to determine the impact and ROI that events truly achieve.