Data-Driven Event Management with Lawrence Coburn (DoubleDutch)

Lawrence Coburn, CEO of DoubleDutch, joined us in the Bowery Capital studio this week to discuss "Data-Driven Event Management: The MQL Motherlode." DoubleDutch is a SaaS platform for live engagement marketing, empowering users to manage events of all types and collect / analyze critical data from them that teams can use to drive marketing and sales. In today's episode, we discuss the history and current state of event management, and how technology is finally enabling its evolution into a true marketing channel. You'll learn more about Lawrence and his experience building DoubleDutch, as well as gather key tips on how to build an event management strategy for your company that has a measurable impact on your marketing and sales efforts. What events are effective at driving leads vs. nurturing them vs. bringing active opportunities across the finish line? How much should you spend on each and how to do you maximize your Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) when it comes to event management? What other data signals can you gather from your events and how can organizers, attendees, sponsors and exhibitors all benefit? We'll cover all this and more.

Organizing events is a centuries-old marketing strategy. As Lawrence describes, however, event management has barely evolved: just get all your stakeholders in one room and talk to them. Event management is logistically challenging, usually requires even C-level executives to invest significant chunks of time, and can be expensive. It's probably the only marketing line item where a large amount of spend without a deep understanding of return is tolerated. Even today, plenty of highly sophisticated companies probably don't have good answer for why they spent $X vs. 20% more or less on a particular summit or conference. In large part, these shortcomings exist because it's difficult to collect the requisite data. With the help of modern SaaS tools, or even just a dedication to collecting key data signals onsite, however, you can take the first steps toward building a data-driven event strategy that can serve as a rich source of MQLs and effective medium for nurturing leads or customers.

In today's episode, Lawrence walks us through his framework for data-driven event management, highlighting the benefits not only for the organizers, but also the attendees, exhibitors and sponsors. Even if you're a pre-Seed startup with few resources to spend on management tools, however, you should build your event strategy from the ground up with a focus on data collection. As we'll learn from Lawrence, that will enable you to better measure the true impact of live engagement on your funnel. Give our episode a listen to learn more. Until next week!