Events marketing is a critical component to driving growth

Cultivating relationships and building personal connections sit at the center of marketing. It’s what allows organizations to better understand their customers and prospects, communicate value in a more genuine way, and build strong foundations that can better establish trust.

One of the most important ways our marketing team, here at Webflow, builds true one-to-one relationships with prospects and customers is through events. Whether it’s user conferences, trade shows, community meet ups, or intimate dinners, the ability to carve out time to connect with our audience face-to-face is critical to generating brand awareness, driving demand, and accelerating pipeline maturity.

The core challenges we’ve faced with event marketing

Anyone who has ever worked in event marketing knows how big of a logistical undertaking it can be — especially when customizing the format or scaling the size.

Events is not a one-person job: it requires support from executive stakeholders, IT, marketing operations, content marketing, field marketing, and external partners and vendors. As a result, managing these logistics across teams and tools can quickly spiral out of control.

Let’s look at two of the primary challenges our team faced when initially building out our events program.

Cost

The cost of the average events platform has skyrocketed. Upon evaluating 5+ different solutions that had most of the functionality our marketing team needed for event management, the average cost of bringing on a new tool was roughly $40,000.

Control

In order to have the autonomy our marketing team needs to run in-person and virtual programming, we needed solutions that give us the ability to own every guest interaction. This included the ability to:

• Build new landing pages
• Check-in users digitally
• Access data for reporting

Scaling our events program has added a layer of complexity

Over the last six years, our team has scaled our events program from one, in-person user conference, to a virtual user conference, to multiple user conferences in a single year, plus multiple industry events, private programming, and gifting programs. As a result, the challenges of cost and control multiplied year-over-year.

Scaling events is a sign of success — but requires precise execution

Growing your events program year-over-year requires a continued level of detailed and thoughtful execution, as well as agility. The tools and systems your teams use can dramatically impact your success, and below are a few must-haves for any marketing team growing their events program.

Customize the user experience by event type

A holistic events strategy encompasses a variety of event types — from high-touch roundtables and hands-on workshops to flagship industry conferences. Event teams need the ability to customize the user experience based on varying needs in order to consistently craft memorable experiences.

Stay within budget

The cost of events can quickly multiply, and with marketing teams being asked to reduce spend where they can, event teams need to ensure they’re proving out the ROI of their programs, including their event technology investments.

Accurate event reporting and data

Event teams need access to the right event metrics in order to continue to gain insights about your customers and the overall event experience. Having access to this data is what will empower your teams to optimize your holistic events strategy.

Our team needed a solution that could support their variety of event needs & goals

As our marketing team began to scale our events program, our delivery gap was widening. The reality for most companies is that even with the most talented and well-resourced developer & marketing teams, executing a high volume of events and programming quickly is extremely challenging.

Even if your budget increases at the rate of your requirements — which is a battle in and of itself in today’s macroeconomic environment — the chances you can hire enough people to do everything you need at the speed and scale your business & customers requires is slim.

This was certainly the case for our own events team, who pinpointed the various requirements they needed to successfully scale our events program.

Our events solution checklist

After identifying the widening delivery gap in our events program, our team began searching for a solution that could help us successfully scale the number of events we executed — without compromising on quality or sacrificing speed.

Ahead of our evaluation, we pinpointed a number of features and functionalities that are critical elements for successfully managing and scaling our events program.

Essential technical capabilities for event management

Front-end

Design‍

• The ability to develop visually-stunning, branded event landing pages
• Flexibility to customize experiences as needed
• An intuitive user experience

Operations

• Form building and submission capability
• A built-in calendar function

SEO

• Standard URL structures
• Tracking links / UTM support

Back-end

Guest management

• Real-time data syncing
• Automation functionality for event details and comms
• Visibility into guest details

On-site tools

• In-person check-in support
• Badge printing
• Live data syncing for guest check-in and attendance

Reporting

• Dashboards for data reporting
• Searchable lists
• Data export functionality

Integrations

• Simple connectivity with automation tools like Marketo
• Seamless data integration with CRM tools like Salesforce for post-event lead tracking

The various cross-functional stakeholders involved in the platform evaluation process  

Stakeholder alignment is a critical part of making major business and operational decisions. Depending on your team and org makeup, different functions may need to be informed of decisions. Below is a snapshot of the core functions involved in our event platform evaluation process.

Evaluating solutions that could successfully scale our events program

With our checklist in hand, we put together a cost-benefit analysis of third-party events platforms vs. building a native solution in-house. Doing so allowed us to understand what tradeoffs and additional value would come with a build vs. buy approach and helped us identify three key benefits that tipped the scales in favor of building a custom events platform with Webflow.

1. Cost savings

Leveraging our existing stack and in-house team to build and manage events would save us $40,000, as well as precious engineering and web team resources, which can be devoted to other high-impact initiatives.

2. Time-to-launch acceleration

Extending the power of our existing marketing tech stack would eliminate any learning curves. Additionally, we could reallocate time spent on training and change management to running stunning,  brand-building, revenue- driving programming.

3. The ability to scale programming with ease

As we planned to scale the number of events we would run year-over-year, the ability to quickly stand up landing pages became non-negotiable. Additionally, with an in-house solution, we  could avoid price hikes third-party platforms often impose for increasing the number of events conducted annually.

The decision to build a custom, native events platform

Taking time to reimagine what’s possible with our existing tech was a short-term effort that ultimately yielded long-term reward. Rather than spending time on procurement, onboarding, and training team members on how to use yet another tool, we were able to extend the power of our core marketing stack in innovative ways. This ultimately saved us significant budget and people resources — without having to compromise on our business needs.

With creative thinking and flexible, marketer-friendly tools like Webflow, teams of every size can extend the power of the visual-first CMS to build innovative, custom solutions for you business. Not only will it save you time and money, but it will also empower your marketing team to create integrated, connected experiences, faster.

Setting up our native solution with seamless integrations

Part of the reason we were able to leverage Webflow’s visual-first CMS is because of how seamlessly it integrates with other solutions. The ability to extend the power of our solution using Webflow Apps and integrations was critical to delivering on our events team’s needs.

How we use Webflow & integrations as a native events platform

We built our events platform with Webflow in just 6 weeks

Without a need to go through vendor procurement, onboarding, or training, our in-house team was able to stand up a fully-functional and custom events solution in just 6 weeks.

Our final result: visually stunning event webpages for every event type

By extending the power of Webflow, our marketing team was able to leverage the visual CMS to quickly stand up custom event pages with forms that seamlessly sync with our database tools — giving our teams real-time data and insights.

Continuing to manage and innovate our in-house solution collaboratively

As bugs arise, updates are needed, or support tickets are escalated, standing up systems that keep all key stakeholders in lockstep has been critical to success and scale. Creating avenues like a Slack channel have helped our teams move quickly, together.

Additionally, as we continue scale our events, maintaining agility as our team grows as well is key, which is why we’ve built out a number of enablement materials so stakeholders can work primarily autonomously.

With powerful website tools, the opportunities to innovate are endless

The true value and power of a modern web development tools lies in how your team is able to adapt and innovate the functionality to best suit your unique needs. With flexible, extensible, marketer-friendly tools, the sky’s the limit. Rather than adding further bloat to your tech stack, uncovering new ways to leverage the tools you already know and love doesn’t simply save software costs — it gives marketers a greater sense of control an autonomy to build the brand experiences of their dreams.