How events are helping marketers cut through the noise

When the 2020 pandemic canceled in-person events, marketers took to other channels like virtual events, social media, and more. As a result, digital channels got incredibly noisy, and that hasn't let up. Now, Fast forward 6 years. Marketers are turning to in-person events to help cut through all that noise.

In this episode, we're talking to Tara Corey, SVP of Marketing at Optimizely, about using in-person events to cut through the noise and build community. Welcome to Conversations with MarTech. Hello, I'm Tara Corey. I'm the SVP of Marketing at Optimizely.

I've spent most of my career being a bridge between marketing and sales and also the operations. I consider myself a bit of an operations imposter. It's sort of where I found myself thriving through most of my career and wound up leading marketing operations and then moving into leading our demand programs at Qlik, a data and analytics company, which has brought me to sort of a full marketing role responsibility. All right.

So thanks for joining us today. We are accustomed to message bombardment. It comes from just about every angle. It's been that way for quite some time, but what makes the content overload that we're experiencing now seem so much louder and ever-present than it has been before?

My goodness. I think it's just, there's content everywhere we look. Particularly our phones, our computer, out in the world, every channel and every, I think, company and organization is vying for our attention at every moment that we possibly have. So, I mean, I feel like it's constantly around us everywhere.

And I think with AI, it is just making content creation so much easier, but it's also getting worse as we go forward. Right. Right. I feel like, you know, when one brand starts to scream, its competitors try to out-scream them and out-scream them and it makes the whole thing worse.

But is there an advantage to being the brand that maybe doesn't try to out-scream everyone else in the market? Yeah, I absolutely believe that. I mean, you probably see it too. Every, Everywhere I look, everything is looking very similar, especially on, on that topic of AI.

I see AI playbooks left and right, AI content creation, AI, you name it. These playbooks and frameworks are popping up everywhere. And a lot of them look exactly the same from a, even just how they're trying to attract your attention. So I really believe that the brands that are going to stand out and catch attention in a different way, but also keep your attention in different ways that are more human connected storytelling, I think will actually win out at the end of the day.

Okay, so on that point of human connections, it took some time after the pandemic, but most people seem to agree that in-person events are back. Is, is, you think that's the desire for human connection that you can get at an event, or is, you know, related to the content overload on other channels that makes an event seem maybe a little calmer. Yeah, I, being in a martech company, I feel like we do a ton of events and we're seeing a lot more traction, I would say, on our events.

And when we've just recently polled our audience and what they want the most out of events, and it's that human connection and the networking, connecting, hearing what their peers are doing. That is their primary reason for attending events. So I absolutely think in-person and human connection is being sought after more than ever. Okay.

What type of in-person event experience seems to be resonating with people, like in your experience? Because the traditional trade show, right, the big exhibit hall with its, that has its own content overload with people making all sorts of noise at all sorts of booths. So what is it that people are looking at? I've heard people say the small dinner of like-minded executives is like a big, big winner these days.

What's been your experience? Yeah, I see. So we recently just did that same thing, a CMO roundtable we did in Austin a few weeks back, and it was amazing, right? We had amazing how when you bring 12 people kind of randomly selected by myself and our, and my CEO, the connections that people had already, like just walking in the room, people knew each other in certain cases.

But we had such a nice dinner. It was about 12 of us and just, uh, we didn't talk just about AI, which was great. We talked about lots of other things at the same time and content and how the world is changing. And that, so I think small curated, really high-end dinners, I think are working from a marketing perspective.

And then just leaning into more like other experiences that people can enjoy as as a group, right? Those different experiences, I think, are also gaining in popularity. Things like, you know, how do you - we're thinking about like sit around a campfire and talk, right? That storytelling, like those types of experiences and other events that we're seeing, like we did an event at the Sphere, was really popular.

So different event, different experiences that people wouldn't necessarily indulge on themselves. Yeah, I had - I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with someone, and we were talking about the value and the cost of like taking people to high-end sporting events like a Formula 1 race or an NFL game. And you know, you get the suite and you do all the stuff, and they said at the end of the day, when you get together a bunch of people who work in the same industry, all they have to talk about is work, right?

So the conversation starts Absolutely. What do you think the future of events is gonna look like? If we're gonna have this conversation one year from now, do you think that, you know, a lot of what we've talked about here is gonna change? So, I mean, I think some events will continue on.

I believe that we are going to spend more time like personalizing events is what I would see right now. Like some of these events, you've just got so many different personas and titles and so forth, all mixed in that it kind of waters down some of the content. I think we'll wind up seeing more curated by persona and job functions so that it's actually more personalized and relevant than ever before. I think the bar for personalization and relevancy is going to continue to climb, and that should, I think, carry itself through event experiences as well.

So that's almost like maybe applying an ABM strategy to events the way that we've applied it to social ads and programmatic ads. Absolutely. This episode of Conversations with MarTech is brought to you by Semrush. Meet your unfair advantage.

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org/semrush-coupon or scan the QR code. We have a pretty big mix, I'd say, of industry events, hosted events, curated smaller CMO roundtable types of events that we're doing. So it's a pretty big - we've done roadshow events as well. We've got a large customer event too that we do.

It's called Opticon. We do once a year in New York and then we have it also in London. So it's a big event mix. We're also mixing in now that we've got our AI platform has taken on so much traction.

We're also investing our mix of events that we're attending is also shifting. And again, we're really trying to ensure that we are stand, trying to stand out and create different experiences and personalized experiences at our events as well. One of the things that we've been adding to our industry events has been a custom perfume machine where people can make their own scents and personalized scents based on, you know, filling out, you know, a questionnaire and coming up with their scents.

And it's wildly popular. And we've looked for all different ways to work with some of our existing customers and really create personalized events as well. What are you doing to ensure that your events are delivering value to the audience and they're not just like a pitch, right? They're not just come and hear about how great Optimizely is.

And I'm thinking here of what's sort of happened to the webinar over the years, that it has gone from a lot of potential of the online discussion that was so available to people because of the online format to a lot of like 40, 45-minute long sales pitches. Yeah. So I believe firmly in like, you have to show like the proof, right? And so really having customers tell your story is, is one of the best ways to do that.

So it's less of a pitch and more customers sharing how they're seeing success and getting value. With the solutions that you provide. So wherever possible, trying to bring in customer stories to be able to tell them, tell that on your behalf, working, we're also trying to bring in more of our internal subject matter experts, but external SMEs and influencers into our programming, both from a content and events and speaker perspective as well. Yeah, and Nick, one thing that has really made it easier to do that is LinkedIn, social media in general has made it easier to identify the people, right?

That you can go out and find someone to say, hey, this is a person whose perspective would really be valued at one of our events. Yes, absolutely. And like those micro influencer types of programs where, hey, they may have a smaller, it's not always about the quantity over the quality. If they've got the right audience and even if it's a smaller audience, but it's the right audience, then great.

Like that may be better than somebody that's got a 100,000-person followership, but if it's not completely the right audience, you may be better off with some of the micro influencers as well. Yeah, I mean, I've done small group events and it was really eye-opening just to hear people talk about their problems and then, you know, someone mentions a vendor like, you know, we had that problem and we did this and everybody's like, how do you spell that? What's their URL? Right?

Like, It's a, it's, it's sort of guerrilla marketing or influencer marketing, like you said, it's just, it's word of mouth. It's the stuff that marketers have struggled for years to try and get into. Yes. And if I look at, I think I shared earlier, I spent a good portion of my career in marketing operations and investing in technology.

And a lot of that was done through, you know, having conversations with people that I trust and who are they using to solve problems? And even now, if you've got the, I don't even know if the term Rolodex is, uh, so outdated, but you've got your, your list of people that you'll go to and tap and get their perspective on how do they solve this problem, what vendors have they used. And most of my investments, large investments, and when I'm looking to change, um, vendors and agencies, I'm always asking my network who they recommend.

Yeah, what's impressed me, I think, is that those online communities have been able, you know, they were doing it before the pandemic, but then post-pandemic too, that they translate into in-person communities, right? You can 365 days a year be part of the online community and then go, hey, we're getting together. Here's the place. Here's the days.

Let's do it. And, you know, you don't see a lot of people saying, nah, I'm good. I'll just sit here in the forum. It's funny because I've been thinking a lot about how do you build, you know, how do you build more of that community?

And if I think about it, just our daily day, our regular days, right? Day in the life. You spend more time working than doing anything else in the course of the week. And although I've got, you know, friends and, you know, family and so forth, having people that you can actually connect with that know what your day-to-day is like on a regular basis is so like comforting at the same time.

Like there's nobody in my neighborhood or my family that has any idea what I do and what the day in life is like. So it's so enjoyable when you get to connect with people like that, that like, you get me, right? You understand exactly what I'm going through and, you know, what the board is asking for today and what the CEO's requests are and what is marketing doing? You know, everybody gets those questions.

And so those communities are really powerful. Yeah, I think with the exception of people who like married somebody who was in the same line of work, we all feel that same sort of like You people get me, right? It just feels good, especially when you spend so much time working in the course of a week. It's nice to have people that understand.

It's the essence of community, right? It's people having something in common and you put them all in one place. And, you know, like I said earlier, that's what they're going to talk about, right? Like you're with family and friends, you talk about the show you're watching or your kids or whatever.

But when you're with people who are in the same line of work, you talk about work. And that's - Yep. Makes sense. I don't know if you were, if this was shared in advance, but one of the things that we are doing, we're in the process of rebranding at Optimizely.

And as much as, you know, we're going through a visual identity and changing, like looking at our top level positioning and messaging, I've been very clear. It is so much more about not just about catching attention, but like, how are we keeping attention?, right? And engaging with the right audience to, um, really help progress them through, um, their journey.

And so it's been interesting that it - about how we go about catching attention, but then more importantly, again, keeping attention and the types of content that we're looking to invest in, um, going forward, which is leaning more into kind of the create - more creative side. Editorial content, like I said, influencers, but really, really having fun with it. It won't be unveiled until a little bit later in the spring and early summer, but it's been a really fun project to rethink what marketing and content and creative could look like in with the world of AI, obviously being an AI company as well.

Yeah, that's, so that's really interesting because when we think about a rebrand, I think a lot of people Still, even though we know it's only a part of it, you think about the color palette, you think about the logo, you think about the copy on the website. How much thought do you put into how that's gonna translate into like the type of events you do offline? Oh, we are absolutely thinking about the, how do we change up our events and create more of that full-on experience that we, that we were talked about earlier.

And when we've done a lot of outside-in perspective in this rebrand leading up to it, right? So that meant talking and polling to customers, prospects, and so forth across, across multiple industries. We conducted a ton of interviews. And then as we went through the rebrand and we were starting to test some of the early messaging and concepts, we reviewed that with other CMOs in our network as well to just to see how some of this was landing.

Overall, it was really positive as well as getting tips and tricks on rebrands in the, in, into the future. And spoke with one of the CMOs and she gave such great advice on it's not just about like the colors and the messaging, but it's like the how you're fully making people feel. And she's like, and embrace all of the senses, right? Like, you know, looking at the sound even, even sounds at events, or like the, if we're the food that you're serving, to the smells, you name it, like incorporate it all.

It was like very, very interesting feedback. But we're trying to take some of that advice into our rebrand approach. Well, a lot of brands don't think about scent, but you've got a perfume machine. We do.

We already have that even before the rebrand. There you go. So an Optimizely scented perfume that you can spray at your events and everybody will go, I smell Optimizely. And exactly.

And the interesting part is I recently went to Universal with my - Universal Studios with my kids. My kids are older. So I've got a 21-year-old, a 19-year-old, and a 15-year-old. And it was a quick, long weekend, which turned out to be longer than a long weekend.

But anyway, story for another time. And we got there. They love - we love riding roller coasters. And it's an experience we've done multiple times.

And they're like, we just want to do it one more time. Me, I'm already nostalgic. Probably the last time I'm going to be down in this experience when there's not significant others and everything else. It was our core 5.

And, you know, thinking about the rebrand as I'm walking through the park and they have it all. They have all of those pieces down to a science, right? From the sense to the food to what you're, how you're experiencing like Harry Potter World, so immersive. Like how can we do more of that in like B2B marketing, right?

That's full immersion experience that you want to create and the feeling that you want people to leave with. And since your kids didn't want to hear about it, you had to come back to work and find another CMO and talk to them about it. They're like, mom, you're boring me. I'm like, but you don't understand the smell of the Butterbeer.

Tara Corry, thanks for joining us on Conversations with Mardek. Thank you for having me.