Director, Enterprise Sales at RainFocus, an insight-driven event marketing and management platform.
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From the outside, it may seem like marketing, sales and data fit perfectly under one umbrella. However, in many organizations, these three important elements are drastically disconnected. In particular, silos have caused event marketers to struggle with providing measurable ROI and fully understanding customer expectations. The domino effects of these issues have left some event leaders confused by evolving event audiences.
Marketers have created new ways of connecting with end users through in-person, virtual and hybrid events, as well as social media. The next challenge is effectively scaling their growth with limited access to proper data that helps determine which channels or sources have had the most significant impact. Through integrated omnichannel solutions, marketers have slowly overcome some of their resource gaps. But a few still remain.
For example, along with data, sales performance drives the volume of budget investment in events, yet sales forecasting is still siloed from events. The solutions to this disconnect aren’t necessarily easy. After all, event marketers can’t loop sales in without integrating them into the entire process from the beginning.
Without a unified ecosystem or a true understanding of the full suite of data, gaps develop between marketers’ approaches to digital marketing and event marketing. Combining all three is necessary to close the gap and connect the entire customer journey, which will help provide better content recommendations for event attendees, accuracy and overall profitability for marketers.
Silos Weaken Events And Data Utility
Digital transformation has led to significant market innovation in event technology. It's enabled marketers to connect with their target customers on a deeper level. However, this has led to a rise of disconnected, one-off events. These events have a short-sighted focus on using single-use technology to meet a specific goal, which effectively makes them disposable in the long term.
This approach isolates events and their role within core marketing initiatives, weakening the potential for technology to improve attendees’ and customers’ experiences. Disposable events continue to the issue of separating sales and marketing, ultimately rendering data useless. These shortcomings have since led marketers to understand the importance of connecting—not disrupting—marketing, sales and data.
Marketers Must Prioritize Data Integration
With the end of cookies, third-party data will likely become a thing of the past. Marketers will need to go directly to the source by collecting data from consenting customers themselves. As we move closer to this reality, marketers must take appropriate steps to fortify their funnels through integration. Combining all the data and developing a deep understanding of the customer data profile (CDPs) will likely require a single platform for the event channel (Full disclosure: RainFocus offers this service). Therefore, weaving CDPs into the martech stack is essential for delivering the deep insights that enterprises need to drive real-time personalization at scale.
Data serves as the glue between marketing and sales. We already see this fusion occurring in omnichannel strategies, which can be most successful when data, sales and marketing flow into one location. Introducing an integrated platform from the start of the customer journey eliminates uncertainty. It also allows marketers to track customers' actions, previous purchases and preferences so they can optimize the experience in real time.
All of this isn’t easy. Organizations that want to steer the events industry will need to connect event-specific data to the CDP, enabling the orchestration of more personalized, timely and relevant activities for the right person at the right time. The first step of data integration is to identify what data marketers currently have and where it lives. This can lead to developing a data management strategy framework to outline what’s possible and offer customized recommendations on what to do next.
Centralizing marketing, sales and data processes in a single platform has vast capabilities. For example, it can host project management and data exchanges, create data standards and provide reference architecture—all while securely collecting and analyzing first-party data. Rather than using separate tools to address disparate data needs, marketers who utilize a platform housing a CDP can help reduce friction throughout the customer journey.
In 2023, event marketers who bridge the gap between marketing, sales and data can avoid falling victim to disorganization and a lack of usable insights. One option for creating a seamless customer experience is combining first-party behavioral event data with best-in-class marketing technologies. Doing so allows marketers to drive personalization at scale, accelerating qualification, lead conversion and closed sales deals.
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