How The Drum Saved +100 Hours Of Event Marketing Labor

The Drum has a simple mission: inspire marketers to change the world. However, it can be difficult to make that message hit home when the company’s day-to-day tasks mainly consist of publishing hundreds of articles. In order to avoid the noise and make sure that the company’s core message was getting through to their readers, The Drum embraced a different marketing channel: event marketing.

The Drum launched a massive event strategy, including the multi-national, conference Do It Day, to completely embody and directly reflect the the company’s commitment to empowering marketers to change the world.

Setting Up For Success

The objective of “Do It Day” is to bring awareness to a particular global issue through creative campaigns from talented marketers. Issues that were tackled in the past include domestic abuse, mental health, and sustainability. This initiative is separated into two separate days: Hack Day and Do It Day.

On Hack Day, marketers come together in teams, choose a specific brief to work on, brainstorm campaigns, and pitch their idea to a panel of judges. After a winner is chosen, all other teams are invited to helping the winning team bring their campaign to life. For the next four weeks, everyone works together to execute on the marketing campaign that will launch on the official Do It Day. From Hack Day to Do It Day, all parts of this initiative are designed to help marketers realize that they can apply their professional talents to directly impact the world.

Lack of Resources

With an event goal as intricate and multifaceted as Do It Day, The Drum knew they needed the proper resources for a successful event. Unfortunately, The Drum initially did not have the right resources in place to live up to the expectations. Do It Day required complex processes that the team simply could not provide in-house. Each task proved to be more difficult than the next. Creating an event website meant asking help from their already very busy development team. Manually collecting registrations meant using a third party tool that wasn’t integrated with their main website. All of these methods were taking up a lot of time, making it difficult to create a smooth, on-brand event experience. The Drum’s conference administrator, Talloulah Matthews, witnessed first hand how difficult it was to create an exceptional event without the right tools.

“We did not have the skills or power to perform key event planning tasks, resulting in ineffective time management.”

As a result, the live events team went on the hunt for the perfect event management software to increase their levels of efficiency, productivity, and impact. They needed a solution that would automate manual processes and create a much smoother onboarding experience for attendees. At the end of the day, The Drum’s main focus was to completely “wow” their fellow marketers and the first step in achieving that was to make sure every step of the event planning process carried over smoothly.

Building Event Marketing Processes From Scratch

On many fronts, Bizzabo proved to be the perfect platform to help The Drum carry out its mission. The software was able to address each one of their main pain points. They were able to customize and create their own beautiful event website, ensuring that their brand and messaging stayed consistent.

As an online publication, it was important for The Drum’s brand to be highly visible across all event collateral and touch points. From the event website, to email marketing templates, to the online polls, The Drum needed a solution with strong customization capabilities that would allow their brand to be positioned front and center.

However, what’s the point of a stellar event website if the registration process is clumsy and unintuitive? Another key benefit of the software was that the registration flow was significantly improved compared to their previously fragmented system. Prior to using Bizzabo, the events team dealt with registrations without a proper system in place which thus made the process much more tedious and prone to error. With Bizzabo, registrants enjoyed an intuitive front end experience while the events team enjoyed a rich backend experience that allowed them to access useful attendee data.

Bizzabo’s features eliminated key inefficiencies during The Drum’s event planning process, leading to both higher productivity and profit.

Results That Help Change The World

With a powerful event management software and full commitment to the mission, The Drum brought their vision to life. Talloulah Matthews, The Drum’s conference administrator, was particularly happy about using Bizzabo. “We were impressed at how the Bizzabo software thoroughly addressed every step of the event planning process.” Her positive review was further solidified by impressive post event metrics that exceeded expectations. A number of KPI’s experienced significant improvement in a short period of time.

The conference team increased registrations by 20% as well as saved over 100 hours during the event planning process.

All of these achievements made it possible for attendees to fully immerse themselves in the spirit of Do It Day. Marketers came together to create innovative campaigns surrounding the issue of sustainability, ultimately walking away with the assurance that their work had in fact made a difference.

With the right systems in place and processes fully optimized, it is reassuring to know that people can truly make an impact on the world with skills that they already possess. Bizzabo just felt lucky to be a part of the story.