As optimism in events craters due to financial and political concerns, one topic makes students “light up” during Splash’s “Event-Led Growth” masterclass.
“Templates for returns on investment [ROI], or anything about how to measure impact,” said Zach Napolitano, the teacher who helped build the course curriculum. “People light up the chat in our webinars with that stuff because it’s a difficult thing to get started on.”
Put simply, events are expensive.
Setting up a booth and flying a small team to a single conference can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
It’s an effective way to get right in front of your audience, but for many reasons, measuring that booth’s exact impact is a tough nut to crack. Trying to grind that nut down into digestible morsels for the head honchos at the office is even harder.
“Events tend to be the biggest line item in most marketing budgets, but from our experience, they’re the least understood from a measurement perspective,”
said Napolitano, who’s worked with event marketers across various positions at Splash for over a decade. “For everything in marketing, you’re on the hook to measure it, but events so often exist differently, where they’re measured on good vibes.
“If you can’t show that your events are producing revenue impact for your business. If you just say, ‘We gave out a lot of swag,’ or, ‘A lot of people showed up,’ that’s fine, but because events are expensive, you’re gonna get a lot of pushback from financial channels asking where’s the impact,” he added.
A Numbers Game
To fix this, Napolitano and his team at Splash have created a two-and-a-half hour masterclass on “event-led growth.”
The on-demand course is made up of 18 video lessons, with quizzes sprinkled throughout. Upon completion, students earn a certificate and a LinkedIn badge they can use to pad up their profile.
The course is free for customers of Splash or CVENT, which acquired Splash last fall, making it widely available to a wide swath of field marketers already.
For Napolitano, it all starts with the name.
“First thing we wanted to do was educate the audience that what they were doing is probably event-led growth. It’s bigger than just going to events,” he explained. “We wanted to plant our flag and say you’re doing this already, and the results we’re seeing across the board are incredible.”
Next on the list are templates for ROI calculation.
“Take that topic, simplify it, and arm our event marketer with the vocabulary to explain it,” he said.
That includes making sure registrations, check-ins, RSVPs and any other metrics can be synced back directly into your company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, or into a marketing automation platform like Marketo.
“CRMs are the source of truth in your business,” Napolitano said.
Part of the course teaches you how to explain your success to your company’s revenue leaders. To do this, Napolitano recommends using “multi-touch attribution.”
“Everything gets a different weight,” he explained. “Events should get a high weight, and that would help in the calculation of the total influence you had on different sales.”
This isn’t to say event marketers are on the hook for all the extra work.
“We don’t view this as something that a marketer is going to come in and set up on their own. We view it as a team sport, where you’re working cross-functionally with people in your business to pull it all into the same framework,” he said.
That’s one of the key things Emily Dilbeck, a field marketing manager at UnboundB2B, took away.
“Internal buy-in is everything – your sales team can make or break your event ROI,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post praising the course for delivering “some serious nuggets of wisdom.”
A Year in the Making
The course was the brainchild of Napolitano and former Splash CMO Kate Hammitt, who is now Head of Marketing.
Preparation for the course started a year ago.
“It felt really big and scary, but also exciting because I’m really enthusiastic about these things, and the learning part of my job is what excites me the most,” Napolitano said.
The course combines their knowledge from years in the events industry.
Napolitano knows a thing or two about event marketing. He was one of the first few employees hired at Splash, a well-known event management software, back in 2013.
In those days, the nascent company was doing all it could to attract talent.
“They had job postings that made it seem like they had more jobs available,” Napolitano recalls.
Eventually, he applied for a “freelance social media strategist” role.
“A made-up job,” he admits. “I was nowhere in my career. I was kind of desperate. I thought maybe if I work at a startup, it’ll get me a lot of experience really quickly.”
It worked. He would wear many hats at Splash over the years, working in teams across customer success, copywriting, and finally, marketing.
“What made me good for working on this is not just my experience working in all these fields, but that my number one passion is the education aspect of the job,” he said.
Splash’s “Event-Led Growth Masterclass & Certification” starts at $249.99. Vendelux readers can access the course for 50 percent off with promo code ELG50. The course is free for Splash and CVENT customers.
