Splash’s Event-Led Growth Strategy: Balancing Repeatable Success with Fresh Ideas

Camille Arnold [00:00:00]:

Why is it important that some of these events are in many ways easier to execute so that they can be scaled? Right? Because when you find something that is working, then you want to replicate that as much as you can. That also, I think, helps with the internal business use case of we can easily scale this event program.

Alyssa Peltier [00:00:22]:

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences? Well, that takes a village, and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews [00:00:35]:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu [00:00:36]:

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier [00:00:37]:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to part two of our conversation with Camille Arnold. She is a marketer and fellow co-host of Checked In with Splash podcast. So, let's jump right back into our conversation.

Camille Arnold [00:01:02]:

Okay. I am so glad you brought this up, Alyssa. First of all, I will just say if you're not already investing, I think you should double down on these types of meetings, events, experiences.

One of my first hot takes that I want to share is that I think simple is a misnomer. I understand why the term simple events, simple meetings has come to be, I totally get it in relation to or comparison to your huge, large-scale, flagship events. In some ways, logistically, they can be simpler, your smaller, repeatable events. But in other ways, like for example, getting the right people in the room, your targeting or your marketing strategy for those events can be just as complex, if not more complex, because to get great ROI from a VIP dinner series, for example, that you only have 20 seats at maybe, you have to be so targeted, so specific versus your large user conference where you can really almost spray and pray, go really broad on your marketing promotion strategy, and it's less about making sure you get the right people in the room. Of course, you don't want randos there, but you can be more flexible versus your smaller VIP dinner series, just as an example.

And so, I think that it's not accurate to call them simple meeting, simple events. And listen, I've personally never run a 5 or 10,000 person conference before, but I've run hundreds of smaller, repeatable events or event programs, and I can tell you, nothing about what I have done has ever felt simple. I think the only time I've felt the term or the word simple applies is going back to my point earlier around what are the major requirements of event-led growth? Having the right tools in place, having the right event technology that integrates with the rest of my MarTech stack, and that's where I'm able to simplify my processes, but the events themselves don't inherently feel simple to pull off.

Technology can make your life so much easier, that is very, very true. With the efficiencies gained there, I'm reinvesting my time and energy into other parts of the process to make my event really successful. Like I said, are we targeting the right people? Maybe it's really easy with the right technology to find and book your venue and figure out the actual experiential components. And it can be really easy to spin up your landing page and make invitations and registration really super simple. That doesn't mean I'm over here twiddling my thumbs. You know what I mean? So, that's my first hot take is I would ditch the simple.

Alyssa Peltier [00:04:17]:

Felicia, I know you and I have talked about this, so I'd love your perspective on it as well.

Felicia Asiedu [00:04:21]:

Yeah. The thing is, I was listening to what you said and I was like, yeah, I hear it because actually the work that goes into it, there's a few things as an all-around marketer that's never going to be simple because of the things we've discussed. You're building up. You're forging relationships. I think because you have an event-led growth mindset, that's why that event is never simple because there's a lot of work that goes into thinking why, who, how? That mindset takes that event to being from simple to actually quite complex.

But my view on it is when we start to remove that word simple, I look at certain meetings I might have where they're like, "Why are you running so many events?" Literally, this is what we get questioned on. "There's 100 events you're running." And I'm like, "Yeah, but some of them is easy." I need to be able to justify to my internal organization not every event is made the same, so don't look at me saying I'm running 100 events. I'm probably running, I don't know, one very detailed, very complex, but the rest of them are a lot of effort, a lot of time. Then there's some that are in the middle, that are a significant amount of time, but I could do it. There are some at the bottom end of these that are easy-peasy, and I want the organization to recognize that so that I'm not challenged, "Hey, why are you doing this marketer dinner?" Well, because I know some marketers and we can have dinner and talk about the hot topics. It's not that hard.

And especially when you forge relationships with venues and people that are willing to host you and they're like, "Just come. Bring your people." I guess I'm lucky I get to use the Cvent technology all the time, so I can just be like, "Boom, I'll just spin up a page." I'm spoiled. But I have used Splash in my previous slides and the reason why we use Splash is because it was easy to use and so it was just like, "Boom, I'm going to a dinner." Set the page up. So, there can be simple. I think there's a space for it, especially when it comes to justifying your budgets and looking at your volumes and things like that, but I like your explanation though.

Camille Arnold [00:06:21]:

I totally hear what you're saying, and what you're describing I so agree with. I guess, I just am in the habit of using a word like repeatable or scalable in place of the word simple because I think that's the goal, right? Why is it important that some of these events are, in many ways, easier to execute, so that they can be scaled, right? Because when you find something that is working, then you want to replicate that as much as you can. That's the only thing that I would add there. I totally agree with you. I just like to reframe it as scalable or repeatable.

And to your point, that also, I think, helps with the internal business use case of we can easily scale this event program. We did this dinner 10 times in 10 different markets. Actually, you probably could do a very small scale, maybe not a dinner, maybe like a breakfast series, right? Like 10,000, 10 breakfasts across 10 different markets, and you see some success from that, right? Let's say you get, I don't know, 3, 4X ROI. Then you can go to your leadership team and say, "Okay, so now here's the business case. Here's why I need $50,000 to do this across 50 different markets." Okay, let's show the results from that. And then all of a sudden you're running hundreds of breakfasts across hundreds of different cities and markets, and there you are practicing event-led growth.

Felicia Asiedu [00:07:54]:

I'm with you. And I love it because it becomes programmatic. That individual event standing alone, potentially we could throw the word simple away, right? But the minute you make it scalable, repeatable, it becomes programmatic. What is that program yielding? I love it.

Alyssa Peltier [00:08:09]:

Yeah. The program itself being tied to ELG is what aids in the complexity of it, right? Because it's now driving business forward.

Rachel Andrews [00:08:17]:

A lot of times, and this is maybe why, Camille, you don't think it's like a simple meeting is we like to customize things, customize content, customize the experiences, handhold whoever's going to the event to do it, but when you reach that scalable side of it, you want to make sure that yes, it's great to scale, but you want to make sure you never get stale, because we ran into that. We scaled our simple or repeatable events program up to hundreds of lunches, hundreds and hundreds, and after time it was great, but then we oversaturated the markets.

You almost need to also think about that when you're thinking about scaling that program is, okay, we can scale it for six months and then we need to reformat the program, or we need to revamp our marketing strategy, our hook to get them there needs to be different, because if it's the same hook for two years in a row, same content, people are going to not, they're going to start not coming. It's almost like we went back in time and we had to do it again and then scale it back up. You almost need to bake that into your repeatable processes like, okay, we know we can repeat this up until a certain point and then we have to refresh and bake that into the process.

Felicia Asiedu [00:09:38]:

Agreed. I know exactly the program you're talking about, Rachel. And one of the reasons why I think I feel so almost passionate about don't make it complex, don't make it all programmatic, is because I'm in the field, I love trying stuff. I really do. My local audience, when I say, "Hey, we'll do it in French because I want to reach my Parisians." Fine, let's go and try something random or I'm going to go and go to a wax museum and do something. I don't always love the business getting in my business.

Alyssa Peltier [00:10:05] :

I couldn't relate more, Felicia, because I actually sit in the sales function, and so I'm even thinking about, okay, maybe there is this difference between this more programmatic ELG function, then there are these sales dinners that I help the field put on, they're more business development, but of course, they need to be aligned to ELG as well. They are revenue driving. So, in my mind, I'm even having this conundrum where I'm like, it always needs to be ELG, it always needs to be programmatic, but then, Felicia, I'm having this same exact feeling to you where I'm like, but we also need to be ad hoc and we need to be able to go on the whim and have these dinners and then it's not tied. It's such a good conversation.

Camille Arnold [00:10:43]:

Okay. You guys, you're speaking my language. I agree with everything you're all saying, and I'm going to sound like a freaking broken record. This is one of the things you need to think through when you're evaluating event technology, to integrate with your MarTech stack, because the right platforms are going to allow you both scale and agility. You need to change the venue for one or hundreds of an event within a program. It should be easy to do that. Or the language, like you said, Felicia, or tweet the experience like you said, Rachel. Maybe it's not a lunch anymore. Maybe we're done with the lunch or we're scaling back on the lunches and we're going to start doing some different type of experience, right? Like tour a bunch of breweries and then sit down and do a beer tasting and talk about our problems, our shared challenges, right?

So, I think this is, again, one of the major requirements. It's all possible. What you're talking about, it's all possible within the umbrella of an event-led growth strategy, but it's not possible if you don't have the right tools in place, or it is, but it's just a lot harder, right? You should be able to have a platform, shameless plug, like Splash or Cvent Essentials that allows you to be super flexible with your event strategy. If you need to make a change at the turn of a ... What's the saying?

Alyssa Peltier [00:12:12]:

Drop of a dime.

Camille Arnold [00:12:13]:

Drop of a dime. Thank you. I haven't had enough coffee yet today. Your tools that you're using should work with you, not against you. Those are the things you need to think about. Does this tool allow me to simplify, to some extent centralize or democratize your scalable, repeatable, programmatic, whatever you want to call them, events? Does it allow me to have a brand forward moment with my audience? These are the components that you should be thinking about because that's what's going to allow you to scale without getting stale. I think that's a new saying that we should say.

Felicia Asiedu [00:12:50]:

Oh, I love that.

Alyssa Peltier [00:12:51]:

It's funny you say that, Camille, because I'm over here saying, are we really debating about the word simple or are we really debating the word repeatable? How repeatable is a program without compromising the freshness, without compromising a new brand appeal? How repeatable can we make this thing before it gets stale? And you just hit the nail on the head there.

Felicia Asiedu [00:13:12]:

I'd hate to sound like my broken record, but I'm also going to add, I think what I'm looking for is ELG with things that aren't necessarily always repeatable as well. I want my ad hoc in the ELG. We did something random. We may not do it again, but maybe it fits the purpose of the random events. So, the group of people that I'm going to invite to these random events, which are now suddenly not becoming random even as I speak, I'm going to invite them because it serves a particular purpose, to delight them, which means that the business will know I'm not expecting immediate revenue off of that group of people because of that event. They'll know that it was a brand affinity-type relationship build event because it has its place within the program of ELG. You've basically converted me is what's happening here.

Camille Arnold [00:14:04]:

It's working. It's working. Yeah. No. Testing, iterating, experimenting is, I think, a fundamental aspect to event-led growth as well, right? How do you know what's the new event program or the new standalone? I don't like the word random, Felicia, but we can use standalone. Sometimes you're not ready or you don't have really enough data to justify launching a whole new program or series of events, but how could you get there? You have to start with one at least. So, I'm totally with you. I think that is part of it.

Rachel Andrews [00:14:41]:

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be the naysayer here. You have to be a little cautious. And trust me, I love Felicia's random test events because they actually inspire ... They're not random, sorry, ad hoc, standalone, whatever you want to call it. We had this for years of just these standalone, ad hoc. We put them in this special event category and then at the end of the year we were looking at all the attribution from the special events. We're like, "What in the hell are special events?" Then we have to define them.

But I think that there needs to be space for the testing. There needs to be space for that, because if you don't test and learn, you're never going to evolve your events program and then you're going to what? Scale and stale. You got to be able to test it. But I think what's going to be hard for the data people is where the hell does this go? Where the hell does this get tracked? Maybe it just doesn't for a minute. Maybe we do track it, but it's in this, sorry, standalone category, which is basically the special events category.

Camille Arnold [00:15:41]:

I think there is a way to do that. If you have the right tools, then you can have the necessary integrations. And then you got to work with your marketing ops people or your revenue ops, whoever owns, really, your MarTech stack, and can set up the proper fields in your CRM and/or in your marketing automation platform, right? You should be able to have that visibility into the data, whether it's a standalone or a scaled program. It's possible.

Alyssa Peltier [00:16:12]:

Yeah. And look, there's only a limited number of stages in the customer journey that you'd be mapping to anyways, right? If it's a brand awareness event, it can be measured in one way. If it's a conversion event, if it's a lead gen event, if it's a customer event, if it's a loyalty event, we're talking about somewhere between 5 to 10 kind of stages of quantification here. So, there's got to be a container for you to put those test events in that say, "I hypothesize, I predict that this is going to do something for my brand and this is how I'd like to measure it, and these are the data points that I'd like to look at in order to prove that measurement." Right? So, I think if you have that container built out, your ELG can move towards those things and you can still be flexible and testing and iterating and creative, while also still having that scientific brain in the back of your mind.

Felicia Asiedu [00:16:58]:

That is so on point. Yeah.

Alyssa Peltier [00:17:01]:

Ladies, I feel like we could literally talk for a week on all of this. This is so fun. We're giggling about marketing strategy over here, which is always entertaining.

Camille, we can't thank you enough for joining. Certainly would love to have you back and we would love to join your podcast as well, Checked In. But with that, I would just love to wrap this conversation this week. Thank you, Rachel and Felicia, of course, for co-hosting with me, and Camille for joining.

Camille Arnold [00:17:28]:

Thank you for having me.

Alyssa Peltier [00:17:33]:

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews [00:17:42]:

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Felicia Asiedu [00:17:52]:

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Rachel Andrews [00:17:59]:

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Felicia Asiedu [00:18:10]:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier [00:18:19]:

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.