On September 21st, I had the chance to host an insightful webinar: Unlocking the Open Event Platform. Here are 3 things I learned about how integrations impact data and drive insights.
I recently had the opportunity to moderate a conversation about data, integrations, and the open event platform with event marketing leaders from two of our incredible partners, Adobe and Brightcove. I spoke with Jamie Lewis, the Principal, Business Development Manager at Adobe, and David Bornstein, the Field CTO, Global Sales at Brightcove.
Jamie has been in the martech industry for 15 years in Technical Consulting and Business Development. His team at Adobe is responsible for developing partnerships and integrations with leading software companies that solve key use cases for their customers. The Adobe Experience Cloud is a tightly integrated suite of applications built on the Adobe Experience Platform and delivers everything the modern marketer needs to create personalized experiences at scale.
David has spent the past 25 years helping businesses monetize content, market products, and educate their employee base with video. He helps customers understand the art of the possible and create long-term visions to meet and exceed their business objectives. As the global leader in video for business, Brightcove integrates with event platforms and other vendors like Adobe to deliver production-level video and capture engagement metrics.
Both Jamie and David have years of experience building their own tech stacks and partnering with other companies via integrations. Throughout the discussion, our speakers pulled from their expertise on data and integrations to offer high-level advice and tactical examples to help event organizers maximize their data and prove ROE (return on event).
Here’s a quick recap of some of the highlights.
1. Integrations Contextualize & Unify Data
Integrations help you to maximize your tech stack by connecting the tools you use everyday and allowing data to flow freely among them. They open up the doors to gather more data than ever before and to create context that gives meaning to data. Each tool adds another layer of context to help you create a 360 degree view.
For example, Bizzabo’s Event Experience OS can integrate with a video solution like Brightcove to track additional video engagement metrics and connect that data to other data in the OS. To add another level, Bizzabo’s OS can also integrate with Adobe to leverage a CRM like Marketo and contextualize attendee data in the OS with our customer, prospect, or account data.
“If you're planning a hybrid event, you want to know who registered? Who attended? What sessions did they attend? Did they go to the keynote? All of that information is going to be captured by our partner application, then brought back to Marketo via the integration. And then we're able to synthesize that data with revenue data, opportunity data, and we can start to build a model and realize how well our events are performing.”
- Jamie Lewis, Principal, Business Development, Adobe
2. The Open API Allows Event Teams to Curate Their Martech Stack & Differentiate
There are three benefits of the open API. First is the ability to customize your martech stack. You can build your integrated ecosystem from the ground up to serve exactly the purpose you need and collect the data you want. With the open API, and with experienced developers to help you, there is no limit to the number of integrations or how uniquely they can be customized to work for your organization.
“The open API, application programming interface, gives you a lot of freedom and possibilities to create integrations, you typically can get everything you want done with a custom API.”
- Jamie Lewis, Principal, Business Development, Adobe
Another reason the open API is so powerful is that it allows you to differentiate and stand out from the competition. By crafting your own data architecture, you can ensure that you’re collecting unique data and contextualizing that data in a way that is proprietary to your organization.
“One of my favorite quotes is from ‘The Incredibles,’ where the mom says ‘everybody is special,’ and the son says, 'well, that's a nice way of saying nobody is.' And so you want to differentiate. If everybody uses the same native integrations, you have the same insights as everybody else.”
- David Bornstein, Field CTO, Global Sales, Brightcove
The third benefit of the open API is that you can integrate with strategic partners that help you amplify your brand and reach your goals. Who you associate with says a lot about your company to your customers and the market, so it’s important to leverage partnerships that you feel are truly aligned with you.
“We use our API capabilities to integrate with the best companies out there so we can create that state-of-the-art marketing stack for our customers.”
- Jamie Lewis, Principal, Business Development, Adobe
3. Integrations Allow You to Iterate and Prove Event Success
Data seems to be the holy grail. But it’s not so much the data itself that we’re after but rather the stories it tells about our events. Event experience leaders know how important it is to prove ROE to executive leadership and organizers want to understand event success as deeply as possible. That’s why turning data into insights is key to creating an event strategy that continually works to help you achieve your business goals.
Adobe, for example, uses a variety of event attribution models to draw meaning from their event data.
“You can do first touch attribution - did this event bring me new leads? Did I eventually close deals? You could do multi-touch attribution and divide up all the successful engagements throughout that opportunity lifecycle, or you can do custom attribution and weigh different activities more or less. So the key is to synthesize your activity data with your personal and account information and the opportunity data together. And that'll allow you to calculate the ROE of your events.”
- Jamie Lewis, Principal, Business Development, Adobe
With integrations, you can get much more granular about how successful the event was which allows you to iterate and make better decisions based on more thorough information.
“You're making real business decisions on your data, like, 'I am not going to do a physical event next year because my virtual events have been so successful.' Have they really been that successful? How do I validate that? In a lot of cases, they are. So it's really iterating on that.”
- David Bornstein, Field CTO, Global Sales, Brightcove
Takeaways:
Integrations unleash the power data in many ways. They make data more accessible, more meaningful, and more connected. They also allow organizations to partner with strategic companies and vendors to better serve their customers and differentiate from the competition.
To get an even deeper understanding of how to evaluate and implement integrations, prove event success, and level up your data, you can watch the full webinar on-demand.
