Creating winning online and live events.
Adobe uses own solutions to drive attendance, inspire attendees, and generate pipeline following Adobe Summit conference.
46K
In-person and online Adobe Summit attendees received personalized engagement
Objectives
Drive attendance to Adobe Summit by targeting potential attendees with personalized messaging
Align marketing teams to support complex campaigns for a hybrid event
Identify and prioritize sales leads using known information about attendees
Accelerate open opportunities
Results
46,000+ in-person and online Adobe Summit attendees
Improved efficiency and visibility into marketing requests for all team members
Generated thousands of marketing qualified leads from personalized engagement with Adobe Marketo Engage
Held more than 1,100 customer meetings
Bringing together customers, partners, and experts from Adobe and other leading global brands, Adobe Summit is one of the company’s premier annual events. Every year, thousands of people attend Summit to be inspired by fellow experience makers, learn how to improve their experience workflows, and catch sneak peeks of technological innovations.
“One of the advantages we have at Adobe is that we own a lot of the technology needed for marketing, personalizing, managing, and measuring the success of our events. For Summit, we use as much of our own technology as possible in as many possible ways,” explains Mike Stiles, Senior Corporate Event Manager at Adobe who leads strategy, content, and marketing for the event.
After back-to-back online events, Adobe Summit 2023 returned to in-person while maintaining online sessions. This hybrid format maximized attendance by giving people the flexibility to choose the type of sessions that worked best for them. The new format was a great success, with more than 10,000 people attending in-person, 30,000 attending online, and thousands more watching presentations on demand.
From a marketing standpoint, running a hybrid event is like running two events in one. With a need to drive both in-person and online attendance, Adobe marketers had to make sure they were sending the right messaging to the right audiences to encourage registrations. Registered audiences then required different types of emails leading up to the event: schedules and maps for in-person attendees, links and login instruction for online attendees, and recommended in-person or online sessions based on each attendee’s interest.
Many teams, including demand generation, marketing operations, campaign operations, and sales, needed to come together — and leverage technology — to deliver the best messaging and experiences.
Adobe Workfront served as a central hub for managing the many complex marketing campaign requests. Adobe Marketo Engage was used to promote registrations and keep attendees and hosts up to date with the event schedule, program updates, and news, including directing attendees to the event website created using Adobe Experience Manager Sites. Adobe Analytics measured attendee behaviors as people accessed information and optimized personalized experiences delivered by Adobe Target for audiences created with Adobe Audience Manager. The team also leveraged Adobe partner RainFocus to manage registration and schedule building for the event.
“Marketo Engage makes it easy for us to target audiences, build campaigns, and manage thresholds to deliver highly relevant, personalized messages and nurture leads from more than 46,000 attendees.”
Brittany McKeighan
Head of Demand Generation, Automation, Adobe
Personalizing messaging for 46,000 attendees
The team used Marketo Engage throughout the event: from tracking registrations to delivering pre-event content across a variety of channels and generating leads post-event. CRM data, website behavior data from Analytics, and interactions with email campaigns and landing pages were pulled together to create a 360-degree view of potential and registered attendees.
“There’s so much we can do with Marketo Engage,” says Lesley Simon, Campaign Operations Specialist. “We have the freedom to design emails, build out landing pages, and then filter down the audience to make sure that people see the most relevant information.”
Marketers started with registration campaigns aimed at getting people interested in Summit, such as offering early bird pricing or announcing keynote speakers. Adobe Target used audiences created by Audience Manager to show potential attendees content that might inspire them to come. Select emails led to Marketo Engage landing pages, from where viewers could click on more detailed information across the rest of the Summit website, created with Experience Manager Sites. Analytics and Target helped marketers determine whether audiences were responding to the content, helping to close the loop on end-to-end content management.
As all attendee information was pulled back into the marketing automation platform, sales representatives could check whether key people from their accounts were registered and reach out with suggestions to attend either in-person or online.
Attendees who registered for the in-person or online event received a welcome email, followed by suggested sessions based on information they looked at on the website. Machine learning algorithms then helped identify the most relevant video session for any attendee. Attendance information, such as which sessions people attended or booths they visited, was also fed back into Marketo Engage to help the team better understand what types of technologies and solutions interested customers.
“We were constantly looking at Analytics data to check that our campaigns were connecting with audiences and making tweaks on the fly,” says Brittany McKeighan, Head of Demand Generation, Automation. "Marketo Engage makes it easy for us to target audiences, build campaigns, and manage thresholds to deliver highly relevant, personalized messages and nurture leads from more than 46,000 attendees."
“We had so many people, teams, and vendors working on Summit messaging. Workfront kept us organized and efficient so that we could meet the demand for personalized marketing content.”
Chiyomi Kuroki-Hirano
Marketing Manager, Adobe
Keeping teams aligned through complex campaigns
To keep up with the fast-changing marketing requests, marketers used Workfront as the central hub for managing all event components, from planning projects, managing requests, and facilitating asset reviews and approvals. In the past, teams managed projects manually with spreadsheets, but with the increased complexity of the hybrid event, the team knew that they needed a better way. With Workfront, all requests were tracked in a single location. This helped people find content for approval faster and minimize the chance that requests would fall through the cracks.
“With the dashboard, we could see the status of every request and adjust priorities or resources as needed,” says Chiyomi Kuroki-Hirano, Marketing Manager. “We had so many people, teams, and vendors working on messaging. Workfront kept us organized and efficient so that we could meet the demand for personalized marketing content.”
Identifying and prioritizing leads for more efficient sales
After the event, the marketing team aligned with sales to surface customers who were ready for sales interactions. The first 48 hours after the end of the event are the most effective times to connect with customers as new information is still fresh in their minds. But with tens of thousands of attendees, sales representatives need to focus their attention on top qualified leads.
Marketo Engage helped to identify thousands of automation qualified leads (AQLs), which marketers then narrowed down to marketing qualified leads (MQLs) based on behaviors and interests. Marketers combined this information with tiered audiences to create priority lists that helped sales representatives use their time more effectively.
“Marketo Engage, Analytics, and Workfront helped us support a very complex program to surface behavioral signals and identify leads, driving significant pipeline from one of our biggest events.”
Christine Barsegian
Senior Manager, B2B Behavioral Analytics & Activation, Adobe
All attendees also received email messages after Summit. Leads near the top of the funnel received emails about rewatching sessions on demand, while emails to leads further down the sales funnel directed them to a landing page with several pre-recorded demos. Attendees who watched demos were then passed on to sales, who could offer more information about the products of interest. This personalized approach drove engagement long after the event was over.
“Our goals during Summit were to drive attendance, expand customer conversations, and then support sales by driving qualified leads,” says Christine Barsegian, Senior Manager, B2B Behavioral Analytics & Activation. “Marketo Engage, Analytics, and Workfront helped us support a complex program to surface behavioral signals and identify leads, driving significant pipeline from one of our biggest events.”
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