Speaker’s Corner: Featuring Thomas Hesse, Founder & CEO at DREAMSTAGE

Two projects come to mind: ImageCon 2021, Cloudinary’s 5th annual visual media conference, and our hosted event series, which we run all over the world for customers and prospects.

In both cases, we had to figure out how to take what are historically in-person events and translate them into engaging virtual experiences with a team of just two in-house event marketers, counting myself.

ImageCon is our flagship customer summit. In 2021, more than 1,700 people across 107 countries registered for the two-day event, which included 20 virtual sessions designed to help retailers unleash the full potential of their visual media.

Our hosted event series included about 8 virtual events across North America and EMEA markets. To drive up attendance and engagement, we hosted unique virtual cooking and mixology classes, wine tastings, tequila pairings, and more, with celebrity chefs and bartenders such as Marcus Samuelsson, Julio Cabrero, and Amanda Freitag.

There was no playbook on how to launch these initiatives virtually. It took hard work, creativity, and careful planning.

ImageCon was a success, in part, because we secured high-quality speakers and focused on providing true value to attendees by creating sessions to optimize their usage of the Cloudinary platform to improve their business. We featured customers in the content by doing customer spotlights. We also improved the production level of the summit by partnering with an agency.

I am proud we were able to pull off a high-quality event of this scale while managing 30 other events for the year.

Prior to the pandemic, our hosted event series consisted of in-person dinners and intimate happy hours. We wanted to recreate these virtually, without making them feel like webinars. We succeeded, in part, because we invested in high-quality talent to attract participants and create fun, memorable moments we probably could not have pulled off in-person.

We also took pains to make the events as easy as possible to attend, for example, by mailing guests meal kits or drink kits with everything they needed to participate. Of course, everything was branded, right down to the salt and pepper. We know our attendees’ time is precious, so we encouraged them to involve their family and were sure to include enough food and/or drink to share.

After the experience, we broke out into small groups, allowing people to network with peers and Cloudinary team members, who led discussions on relevant industry topics. Thus, attendees topped off a great culinary or cocktail experience with valuable learnings that could help their business. In fact, I see us continuing with some of these virtual events even after we have resumed in-person ones.

For ImageCon, we measure brand lift and visibility and return on investment. We consider how many customers attend the event, and how their retention, renewals, and cross sales metrics compare to customers that did not attend the summit. While I cannot share exact figures, I can say we saw a significant increase in all three KPIs, and that the event helped our sales team close deals with new clients and expand customer relationships with upsells and upgrades, thereby directly contributing to revenue. We also increased event engagement metrics year-over-year. Additionally, we received positive feedback from our customer success and sales teams who heard directly from event attendees.

Our on-demand event content is now a powerful sales enablement tool for our sales team, who share session recordings with prospective customers, as well as existing ones who are considering adding on a new capability. We will continue to measure the performance of this content.

For the hosted events, we evaluate success by measuring pipeline acceleration. So, we consider where event guests are in their consideration process before attending the event. We use the event, and event follow-up, to help move the prospect or customer to the finish line. We usually see prospects who engaged in marketing campaigns were more likely to close, and close faster, than those who did not attend an event.

While this is harder to measure, we know our event series keeps the Cloudinary brand top of mind and deepens our relationship with customers. We document the positive feedback we receive from attendees and sales reps for internal use and marketing purposes.

The biggest challenge was probably keeping event attendees engaged virtually. People are subjected to so many Zoom meetings — you need to offer something of true value if you are going to convince them to volunteer for more screen time.

Another challenge was creating an event strategy against a backdrop of so much uncertainty. I have seen industry colleagues invest resources in planning in-person events, only to have to rejigger in the final hour. I made the decision from the onset of the year to plan for virtual events, given our small team and resources. This allowed us to create more effective and engaging virtual events from the start and maximize our budget.

Nothing beats in-person events, and I am excited to be moving forward with these in 2022. But I plan to continue with digital and hybrid events, as well, for a number of reasons. When done right, they can be more memorable than in-person ones, and certainly more convenient. They also allow me to engage people across a wider geographic region (all of Europe for example or across the US), which leads to cost-savings and unique and widened interactions for our attendees.

Building a proprietary virtual platform to support our events has continued to effectively drive and expand our education, training, customer and internal programs.

Nothing will replace face to face events, but these programs provided rich content that enabled people to learn more about our platform, hear success stories from our customers and get hands on with our products. All important components for our user base and those considering our offerings.

We have expanded our overall attendance virtually by greater than 150%. In addtion, we had a greater global reach and increased net new attendee pipeline.

Creating connection - Virtual is great for pushing out content, but the energy you get when your face-to-face and the connection(s) you make or deepen cannot be mirrored in a virtual environment no matter how hard you try.

Drift was very quick to pivot during the pandemic and spun up a new event series that began in April of 2020. These events became quarterly, and were a key driver of leads for our marketing organization. This was extremely important during a time where live events (which we had relied on heavily) were no longer happening, and yet our goals had not been adjusted accordingly. I'm very proud of the team and all of their hard work in creating this event series, and for continuing to drive necessary leads for the sales organization.

As noted above, these events were a huge cross-functional team effort spanning the entire marketing organization. Without the hard work of many teams, the events department wouldn't have been able to execute this very successful series for events.

This virtual event series has driven over 36,000 registrations, an average of over 5,000 per event. The series has influenced over 300 opportunities, and driven over $1.5M of pipeline for our sales organization.

Just like most event professionals, these last 2 years have been an extremely challenging time. Aside from having to learn new platforms and engage virtual audiences (which we all know is VERY difficult), one of the biggest challenges for me was watching the impact of COVID on this industry that I've come to love over the last 20 years. So many colleagues that had become close friends over the years lost their jobs, and it was a time of turmoil and change for the industry as a whole. I'm grateful to have been employed throughout the pandemic, and I'm looking forward to the ongoing recovery of this amazing industry!

One of the projects I’m most proud of in 2021, was a two-day virtual event featuring interactive discussions on best practices in the field of career services, panels with leading thinkers in higher education, keynotes and Q&As with authors and policy makers, and networking to create connections for all attendees.

We sent out pre-event swag kits to create excitement leading up to the event. These kits helped our 68% attendance rate (given the average is between 20-40%) as attendees engaged on social through our swag kit campaign. Additionally, we saw an exceptional chat engagement of 8,608 total chats and 74 questions via the Q&A tab.

Number of attendees and engagement parameters.

The biggest challenge from an event marketing perspective was engaging companies through sponsorship activations for our event. With virtual having lower engagement and interest for attendees, it made it challenging to offer value add for companies. I had to find creative ways and non-traditional ways to engage them.

Imagine Digital

Collaboration of great partners internally and externally but ultimately great content is what makes any digital event stand out and be successful.

18,000 unique visitors, 100k page views, 19,000 registrants

Determining creative ways to engage with attendees virtually and create a meaningful event that isn't like all the other virtual events going on at the same time.

Architected, implemented and executed 12 weekly live webinars translated into 10 languages.

The webinars allowed us to keep in touch with our customers on a consistent basis so we stayed relevant even though we could not meet face to face.

We connected with over 20,000 customers and consistently received high NP and Box scores. We also recorded overwhelming repeat attendance (up to 60%).

Uncertainty of whether an event would be live or transition to virtual.

AWS re:Invent 2021

Collaboration, Communication, Organization and strong from support from my direct manager and Executive Leadership.

30k in person attendees

I was new to the company and many of the broader team were new as well, first IRL event since Covid shutdown - health & safety concerns, travel issues which impacted our speakers.

SnykCon 2021

Our annual conference truly embodies one of our core values as a company; One Team. It took an actual village of Snykers to ideate, build and execute this virtual event. It also pushed the collective team to practice what we preach so to speak in another one of our core values; Think Bigger. We set out to achieve some lofty goals and by supporting each other and driving towards the same end goal we were able to create some true virtual event magic. The conference delivered in numbers, content, programming, and production.

Our success was tracked based on a set of key metrics and KPIs, but the ones in particular that stand out are our registration goal and developer audience engagement; mainly centered around hosting Snyk's first ever Capture the Flag competition for our developer audience. While we knew 10,000 people would be doubling our registration year over year, we were confident we could get there. By opening day of the event we had broken 12,000 registrations. A large part of that registration number was driven by this pre-conference activity called Capture the Flag. This is a fairly synonymous activity in the security industry, but adapting this for a developer audience and hosting it on our own for the first time was no small feat. Our inaugural Capture the Flag garnered more than 2,500 participants!

Continuing to reinvent your strategy and approach to virtual events has been a constant challenge since covid began and 2021 was no different. Making sure that myself and the greater team stay nimble and creative in our brainstorming sessions while also allowing space for repeating what's been working was a fine balance that we continuously aimed for throughout the year.

While we had the pleasure of working on some amazing client events, I'm proudest of our techsytalk GLOBAL event where we brought together 1,500 event professionals in an innovative virtual format with engaging round tables, case studies, hack sessions and more.

2021 really gave us the opportunity to try new ways of engaging audiences before, during and after so we were able to extend the lifecycle of our events and really make an impact!

We were able to triple our event revenue through sponsorships in 2021 and keep our attendees over the 1,500 mark, even in the midst of Zoom fatigue and Covid-craziness.

I think it's the constant evolution of our jobs while maintaining work/life balance. While people are working from home more than ever (not a new thing for me), it seems the demands for productivity are only getting higher and higher and balance is very hard to find!

I led the complete reinvention of the SAP global events portfolio for both 2021 and in preparation for a return to in-person/hybrid models in 2022.

We started with a complete understanding of our marketing and business priorities globally and within specific geographies. We then spent a significant amount of time understanding the data both about who we need to target and why; as well as performance, demographic and engagement data from our 2019, 2020, and 2021 events. Any decision we made was grounded in data and business context.

Impact against objectives. Objectives are the foundation of event portfolio strategies. Each event is designed to achieve specific objectives and performance against those is what we evaluate success upon.

Ongoing impact of COVID restrictions against plans. Additionally we went through a significant marketing reorganisation in 2021 which impacted almost every team and the way we made decisions and worked with each other.

I led the planning and execution of i4cp’s 2021 Next Practices Now virtual conference, which was held annually at the Fairmont Scottsdale prior to the pandemic. I am proud that I was able to virtually deliver an engaging, inspiring conference when C-level attendees were used to networking in-person. Our speakers included the Chief People Officer at Moderna; Chief Talent, Diversity & Inclusion Officer at Adobe; CVP HR at Microsoft; professors at MIT and Stanford; and former VP HR at Amazon and Starbucks. This conference ranked #9 on the 51 Best Future of Work Conferences list.

This conference was incredibly successful, attracting high-level executives at Fortune 500 companies and earning much more in revenue than the in-person conference. This event was a success due to my refusal to stick with the status quo. Many organizations were hosting virtual events, so I wanted to offer a valuable, interactive experience that stood out. I researched coffee break activities and hired BaristArt, a world renowned latte artist who has been on Good Morning America, Food Network, and Us Weekly. His coffee designs were a fan favorite and helped break up the day in between conference sessions. I also ordered custom bobbleheads as a thank-you gift for each speaker.

I utilized data sets to quantify success following each event. I analyzed the number of registrants, no-show rate, sales conversion rate, total time in the meeting, and overall engagement. For instance, I ran a biweekly event series with guest speakers ranging from the Chief People Officer at Zillow to the Global Diversity Officers at Google and American Express. I measured attendance over time to determine which speakers and topics were of the most interest and which marketing platforms were most successful at promoting the event.

2020 and 2021 were years of immense change and unpredictability for the event industry, due to COVID-19. With over 250 in-person events in my toolbelt from my time managing B2B events at Deloitte, I pivoted and spearheaded the transition from in-person to virtual client events, training a team of Zoom Producers. The greatest challenge was combatting Zoom fatigue and providing a memorable experience that reflected positively on our company’s brand despite the limitations of a virtual environment. I learned to be more creative and utilize annotations, polling, gift boxes, and UberEats vouchers to deliver unique events that ultimately generated sales.

Xandr Connect - Xandr's largest owned and operated event

This event is a massive undertaking that our entire marketing team and our sales people support and that level of collaboration really shows in the output each year. In the last 2 years, we've had to pivot this event to virtual and with that challenge, we've learned to focus our content development on the utmost relevant topics and trends that our clients care about. With the amount of virtual events taking place, it was important for our clients to know that we valued their time and any commitment they made to join our sessions and the feedback we received reflected that.

Numbers of attendees, email data (opening, clicking through, etc.), level of engagement whether it be through survey results, how long attendees stay through content, or their involvement in Q&A.

Going through another year in the pandemic, it made it challenging to prove what else I could do when there was so much uncertainty on the future of in person vs virtual events.

My company's first ever virtual conference, and first ever in-person event, amidst the pandemic.

I was very intentional about making our virtual event as interactive as possible, since the in-person element was missing. The addition of live, rather than pre-recorded, elements was a game changer. For in-person, being extremely respectful of personal health and safety, putting myself in our audience's shoes of what I'd expect, and ultimately keeping things small was highly effective.

I started at this company 8 months ago with no events or field marketing department. The one virtual webinar that was spun up before I was on the team had decent attendance for the company size. However, after I started, our first virtual conference had 5x the number of attendees than the virtual webinar. Huge growth for our company.

Being able to pivot last minute to shift events from in-person to virtual is a humbling skill. Having to cancel after all the work you put in is hard, but also to keep those RSVP'd contacts engaged if you do cancel. It's a scary feeling - and I had to make some close calls even as I was about to board a plane to the event.

Both of my pride and joys last year was Education Summit and Nonprofit Summit that are our premier Salesforce.org events.

We listened to our customers and brought content they really wanted. It really is all about the quality of content and not about the quantity of content. With such a tight community it is hard to pick sessions and remove others - but it's looking at the program as a whole and making decisions accordingly.

With Nonprofit Summit hitting over 17K in registrations and Education Summit hitting over 10K - these were Guinness Book of World Record numbers for these industries. We opted out of paying the 80K to actually have it published, but to me and our internal teams we knew it was big!

Team morale has been the biggest challenge. Events people are not built to do virtual only events. A lot of us picked this line of work for the people that get to experience what has been created as well as the people we get to see onsite work their magic. Without back of houses that are physical or late night hotel room run throughs of the following day, that final click of the off button is just not as satisfying as a glass of wine and some tears over an expo all humming and beeping from tear down. Keeping the team going and adding a new sense of belonging has been one of the toughest challenges.

We were proud of the Greentech Festival Berlin, which had nearly 15,000 people in attendance on sit); Greentech Festival Launch NY 2022, and Greentech Festival Launch Singapore 2022

We managed to capture the attention of a high-level political and business audience, which led to strong media coverage of the happenings at our events.

We managed to attract over 18,000 attendees globally and had a media reach of over 800 Million across all our projects.

Bringing back physical audiences after people became accustomed to attending digitally/hybrid during Corona.

The MarTech Summit Series

After years of running virtual summits, cancellations, and postponements, we finally brought The MarTech Summit to locations we've been planning to for years.

The number of attendees at the Summit and the on-site feedback that we received.

Our biggest challenge was to move fast and adapt along the way. The COVID-19 situation is different for every country, not just concerning the Government guidelines but also people’s attitudes. We had to ensure we complied with the rules and ensure our summit experience delivered what we had promised the attendees.

My team has successfully continued producing virtual events and programs, which continues to be our organization's number one lead generator.

We started our webinars, roundtables, and podcasts during COVID and have continued refining and improving the processes.

Our webinar retention continues to trend above the industry benchmark.

The rising costs across the event and meeting industry.

Pulse and Pulse Europe

Bringing our largest US and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) conferences back to in-person since 2019 was our greatest achievement in the past year. Our Pulse community was so glad to be back together again.

Pulse US attracted 3,500 in person attendees, and another 1,000 virtually. Pulse Europe attracted 1,000 in-person attendees. The energy levels at both were off the charts.

Navigating in-person events in a post-covid world was our biggest challenge.

I'm the Product Leader for both Salesforce+ and Event Technology at Salesforce. I'm proudest of the launch and stabilization of Salesforce+: Salesforce Brand Experience platform.

Salesforce+ directly tackles the reality of an event experience being built ground up for a digital attendee. It respects user behavior of short content available over longer periods of times rather than myopically spending all the energy to maximize time-on-platform for a short amount of time.
It caters to top and bottom funnel marketing tactics using progressive gating strategies while marrying the grittiness and authentic event content that makes event content unique. Salesforce+ also creates a bridge for in-person attendees to come back and continue their journey into new experiences like original series, jumping off points to learning and an entryway into our permanent communities in Slack.
Also, it doesn't hurt that we were the first Brand experience platform that married a B2B Streaming service and a virtual events platform seamlessly, with more content types to come!

While we can't share actual numbers, we've brought millions of users and event attendees to our platform. Marketing pipe has been the highest it's been and we've attracted a whole new set of users to our platform in addition that traditional events have struggled to engage with: audiences that are new to our brand. With our platform we are able to build, move and engage audiences no matter where they are in their journey with Salesforce. And, do so in a way that is thoughtful and personalized.

Our biggest challenge was interpreting data and fighting the confirmation bias that we all have. Like all MarTech functions we count all the things, but counting and summarizing isn't the same thing as correlating. We want to be able show that both 1) What we build gets used and 2) What gets used generates results. Turning our traditional analytics into correlative predictors is a journey we're on and represents the largest challenge we faced in 2022.

DPW Amsterdam

2022 was a successful year for DPW, with us hitting a major revenue milestone: one million euros in annual revenue.

1000+ people attended DPW in 2022.

My biggest challenge in 2022 as a marketer was learning about procurement. Sometimes it's not easy to market an industry that you have no idea about but when you're up to the challenges, you can learn a lot and push boundaries.

Elastic's Internal Events Program (Sales Kick-Off and ElastiClub)

Our internal events were our first major foray back to in-person events following the pandemic. As a distributed company, it was important to bring our colleagues together to reignite our unique culture, celebrate our successes (that we had to celebrate alone behind a computer screen), and also to build relationships that would drive collaboration and success in the upcoming fiscal year.

Our biggest highlight was the successful execution and coming together of 1,000+ employees at the same time across 16 global cities that reinvigorated the energy among our sales team and created strong momentum into our Q1. The success came from the positive survey feedback responses for working diligently to get team members back in-person and reinforcing our unique culture celebrating individual and team success. It's hard the quantify the value of employee engagement and enablement but we know it was a contributing factor in achieving our company goals and employee retention during the Great Resignation.

Our biggest challenge was the balance of the "in between". We were moving forward planning and executing in-person events which we hadn't had for 2 years while also maintaining an online virtual program. In addition, the scope of the SKO program was executed across 16 global cities at the same time from both in-person and remote locations. From India to Singapore to Denver, Chicago, Austin, Orlando to Paris, Munich, Amsterdam and many more, it was a challenge that none of us had executed before. To add to the challenging parameters even more, the team had 8 weeks to execute the entire program from beginning to end.

WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2022

Due to the circumstances that we were in, we were still confronted with the Corona situation at the beginning of last year, and at that time nobody knew if or in which form events could take place again in June. I am super happy that we were able to organize and host our WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin so successfully. For me, it was the first time I was responsible for this event, as I only joined WeAreDevelopers as VP Events in February 2020. The main reasons for the success are agile event management, a great and motivated team, a brilliant speaker line-up and most of all our partners - who believed in us - and all the attendees who wanted to join us again.

The highlight is a combination of the number of attendees (10.000+), the number of sold tickets, the number of partners (exhibitors & sponsors), the number of positive responses on all channels and also the hybrid component, during the event and even afterwards (on-demand consumption).

The biggest challenge was the planning uncertainty due to the Corona situation and also limited budget.

Gitex, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, October 14-18, 2022

First time we unveiled HPE's new brand strategy and look. It was exciting to share with a new audience especially on such an international stage.

2022 was an amazing year, as it was the first time attendance numbers rivaled pre-pandemic levels. People were so excited to see each other that at multiple events stakeholders asked that we extend the event hours, as people didn't want to leave. My budget took a mini-hit, but it was very much worth it!!

Increased cost due to supply-chain constraints and staff reductions in the service industry were some of the challenges that we faced in 2022.

SHRM Talent Conference & Expo, SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2023, SHRM INCLUSION 2023

I was asked to step into the Event Marketing Manager role in mid-January 2022 to try and turn the tide of low registrations. With Talent in mid-April (and only 258 registrations at 12 weeks out - 19.8% to goal) and Annual in mid-June (with 2,914 registrations at 21 weeks out - 19.4% to goal), I needed to quickly learn the quirks and audiences of both conferences, establish email and DM lists, a search and paid media strategy, a content plan that would drive registrations, and a process to announce our keynote speakers and entertainment (along with any contractual restrictions). Goals for attendance were split around 70% virtual and 30% in-person due to lingering issues from the pandemic and the new variants (travel restrictions, mask and vaccine mandates, and work from home environments). More on this later.
Even though it cost me time (and still getting all marketing channels firing), I took a few weeks to gather a lot of data on these conferences (previous attendees, what prospects would look like pre- and post-COVID) and established my plans, 1P lists (previous conference attendees and behavioral-based SHRM prospects, 2P rented lists, and 3P Lookalike lists from list brokers mirroring our previous attendees and prospects). We put these plans into play during the last week of February 2022, just a month before our early bird pricing break for Annual conference was scheduled to expire. We increased registrations for Talent to 598 (now 46% to goal from 19.8% just 5 weeks prior) and Annual to 4,773 (now 31.8% to goal from 19.4% just 5 weeks prior).
At the end of March 2022, with all of my plans and strategies in place, we increased our Talent registrations to 1,100 at 2 weeks out (now 84.6% to goal from 46% just 4 weeks prior) and Annual to 7,730 at 11 weeks out (now 51.5% to goal from 21.8% just 4 weeks prior).
Our Talent conference sold out of hotel rooms for in-person registrations and came in at 1,387 (106.7% to goal, with revenue also exceeded).
Our Annual Conference ended with 15,763 paid registrations (105.1% to goal with revenue exceeding goal as well). For Annual, we more than doubled the number of registrations from 11 weeks out to the date of the event.
Our final numbers for in-person vs. virtual registrations actually flipped in the opposite direction, and ended up more like 77% in-person vs. 23% virtual, which brought in more revenue (in-person registrations cost more than virtual) and created an atmosphere where people in the HR industry felt like they could return to in-person events.
I led my team marketing our INCLUSION conference using the same strategies and tactics, and we sold out in-person registrations 6 weeks prior to the event, and ended up at 117.6% to goal, again leaning very heavily in in-person attendance.
These strategies were adapted slightly and in place as we started marketing our 2023 events in Q3 and Q4 of 2022, and registrations were well ahead of historic (pre-pandemic) pacing by the end of 2022.
Meanwhile, I had two additional events (the Employment Law & Compliance Conference and the Workplace Policy Conference) to hit as close to goal as well (these were at the end of February, so I only had 6 weeks to get as many registrations as possible). All of this was done by my team of two (a senior marketing specialist and myself) and a full-time contractor (who had to be onboarded during the same timeframe and was later hired as a full time employee).

Exceeded both attendee and revenue goals for our 3 largest conferences (Talent, Annual and INCLUSION), and defied expectations that we'd flip and re-adjust the in-person vs. virtual registrations (from a goal of 70% virtual and 30% in-person to 77% in-person and 23% virtual).
The increased registration numbers provided a platform where our Sponsorship and Exhibition team also exceeded sponsorship and exhibitor revenue goals.
We collected video testimonials (another project I spearheaded) at our Annual Conference and everyone we spoke to was humming with excitement. Engagement was through the roof to the point where we saw a 2.5x increase in those registering for our alumni rate vs. the previous year.

Marketing is my second career (I had previously been a project manager and production director) and being asked to step into this Event Marketing Manager role that is responsible for such a high revenue goal was intimidating, especially since I had only been with SHRM for less than a year prior to taking on this role and I only had less than 5 months to hit such a high Annual Conference goal when jumping in.
I had a great team and a great boss (Tina Beaty, VP of Marketing) who put their faith in me and the tactics and decisions I made, and it solidified that marketing is in my blood... despite coming to it later in my professional career.