These Are The 12 Best Event Marketing Tools. Your event management software should support your needs wherever you and your attendees on any device. However, as a group they offer limited coverage of the event management tools space. Composite scores are thus shown below only for tools listed on four or more of the top eight ratings sites. A broad-featured tool for small to midszed companies, Attendease provides functionality for registration with promo codes, event email marketing, mobile apps for attendees, event-specific website development, event portfolio management, attendee tracking, and surveys. Certain Users generally applaud the broad feature set of this event management platform for midsize and larger businesses, particularly the dashboard, custom reporting, registration, accommodation management, travel module, and native mobile app. An end-to-end, cloud-based event management platform for midsized and larger companies, with capabilities for venue sourcing, registration, event website building, event promotion, surveys, budget and project management, room management, and a native mobile app. All support event strategy and planning, staffing, integration with CRM and other systems, event marketing, registration and lead capture, agenda creation, speaker management, payment processing, room booking, badging, surveys, and reporting. Users generally laud its comprehensive functionality, though reporting limitations and complexity are common complaints. RainFocus An event marketing platform focused on workflow management and using attendee data to drive personalization, insights, and engagement.
Though digital marketing dominates headlines, event marketing remains the indispensable mainstay of brand promotion and lead generation across industries and company sizes.
According to recent research, live events remain the top lead generation source for B2B marketers. Writing in Forbes, John Hall contends ” the power of face-to-face interactions in strengthening connections is lost in the sea of statistics around social media growth,” noting events offer unique business benefits such as building trust, making the brand more approachable, and offering a unique customer experience.
Meanwhile, consumer event marketers value the opportunity to create one-on-one engagement, bring their brand messaging to life, and share memorable experiences.
Big Expectations from Rusty Tools?
Yet while the universe of marketing tools is exploding, with popular digital marketing disciplines continuing to draw new entrants (for example, there are now more than 200 different marketing automation platforms available), event marketing technology fails to keep pace inside many organizations.
It’s not unusual to see event marketing groups managing processes using spreadsheets; legacy platforms not built to work with today’s more modern cloud and on-premises applications; or disparate point solutions which may not be properly connected and each of which has a different look and feel.
Ideally, event teams should have tools that take the drama out of scheduling and execution by managing the end-to-end workflow from planning and logistics through registration / lead capture and follow up, whether for a single large event or a busy calendar of smaller regional happenings.
What to Look For
Fortunately, there are established and emerging tools that can help event marketers operate more efficiently, keep pace with expanding expectations for measurement and ROI, and integrate with in-place CRM and other systems to fully capitalize on the value of events.
Which system is best for your company depends on several factors, including company size (the best system for a small company that participates in a handful of trade shows and conferences each year won’t work for a global enterprise) and industry (certain industries have unique event management requirements, such as support for ride & drives in the automotive sector).
Nonetheless, there a few characteristics you should look for in an event management platform whatever your company’s specific needs:
– Comprehensive functionality: the software should enable end-to-end event management, yet be flexible enough to work the way you do.
– Integration: your event management platform should connect to other key systems in order to minimize duplicate data entry and manual processes. These include reporting, finance, CRM, and sales automation applications.
– Scalability: particularly for growing midsize companies and larger enterprises, the software should scale easily to support the size and frequency of events your team manages.
– Customer support: “expect the unexpected” is a cliché almost invented for event managers. Flights get cancelled, shipments get misplaced, reservations get mixed up…things happen. Even the best software is of limited value without a dedicated, responsive support team backing it (and you) up.
– Mobile functionality: events are, by their nature, remote. Your event management software…
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