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Vidyard’s Fast Forward Virtual Summit was an annual on-demand event prior to 2020, and it became a quarterly event in 2020. These events have always been virtual, so Vidyard has a lot of experience in this virtual arena.
Vidyard was founded in 2010 as a product that allows users to easily record and send videos, and it was perfect for salespeople who could no longer go onsite during COVID-19 and were working hard to make valuable prospective sales connections anyway. Needless to say, Vidyard’s business exploded in 2020, so their quarterly virtual events became more important than ever as lead magnets.
Vidyard uses Marketo, a very popular and powerful CRM. In the past, they had used an event platform that required them to manually enter their attendee information into Marketo. This was a task that was a very heavy lift and extremely time-consuming for Kristine Browning, Vidyard’s Senior Email & Campaign Delivery Specialist. In the process of getting the information into Marketo and then sending it to Salesforce, several things would break along the way, so it was just an inefficient experience in getting data into their trusted tech stack.
In addition, it was very difficult for Vidyard’s event attendees to move from speaking event to speaking event, and there was virtually no attendee interaction. They wanted an event management platform that made it easier to get their event attendee data into Marketo while also improving the attendee experience in every way.
They also wanted the setup of the event to be easier, and Kristine personally wanted the day of the event to run more smoothly than their virtual events had in the past. Given that their last event had 4,800 registrants, they knew their existing event management platform solution wasn’t going to be scalable for their needs, and they needed a new vendor partner – fast.
Having developed a robust Marketo integration earlier in the year, Accelevents provided Vidyard with the ability to pass analytics over to Marketo for strategic campaign outreach. This seamless Marketo integration was simple to execute and took far less time to import data than their previous solution. Moreover, Vidyard was able to immediately see how their attendees were interacting with different areas of the event and determine which marketing bucket attendees could be placed in for the most effective lead generation programs. The setup was easy and quick, and Kristine was able to set it up with Accelevents' support materials and minimal support assistance.
As far as Vidyard’s desire for increased attendee engagement and ease of use, Accelevents was able to offer networking opportunities, chats and Q&As, and downloadable materials. Moreover, Vidyard had previously used an event management platform that managed each speaking session by emailing different Zoom links per session, which created a very clunky transition from session to session. Fortunately, the Accelevents event management platform served as a virtual events ecosystem for their event, a “home base” platform with speaker events, exhibition halls, and various types of chat rooms branching off of the home base in a way that makes it extremely easy and intuitive for attendees to navigate. Vidyard’s new integration with Accelevents allowed them to embed their very own product into the platform, which allowed increased tracking in Marketo. These types of analytics were another big push to move to Accelevents.
Vidyard shared with us that the positive outcomes for this most recent event were many and that their experience ended up being night and day from their previous vendor. Here are a few areas where Vidyard experienced a superior experience than past virtual events:
Vidyard was shocked at the very high engagement they had utilizing the live chat feature with their attendees. They were quite surprised how much this feature was used throughout the day of events. In addition, they were told by their speakers how much they enjoyed the experience because of the ability to see how many attendees were present and the ability to answer questions live-time because of the chat functionality.
When it came to looking at the event data, Vidyard was able to use the data in a number of really creative ways. For example, they liked to look at attendees by which segments they were in, based on the information the attendee provided. They were able to follow the behavior of attendees in these segments and help them best understand how to bucket them in Marketo to run appropriate and highly targeted lead nurturing campaigns.
They also did one session where they featured their own product and upcoming enhancements. They were able to take the bucket of decision-makers and see which of them attended and how long they stayed, giving them valuable information on the interest level of each of those attendees. In addition, it was valuable to see if one attendee joined multiple sessions – this was critical to them. Says Kristine: “Accelevents has more analytics than our previous vendor – you can’t even compare it.”
With Vidyard’s previous event management platform, support was not a strong priority, so getting responses to questions about event platform setup might take hours or days before they were able to connect with anyone. With Accelevents, the support was quicker than Vidyard could have expected. Said Kristine: “As far as support goes, the Accelevents team went above and beyond for us. We got near-immediate (within 30 seconds) action. We always felt like the Accelevents team was listening to us. With our previous vendor, saying you have 24/7 support is great, but who can wait five hours for a response when you’re in the middle of an event?”
Kristine reports never having before not been stressed the day of one of their virtual events. With Accelevents, however, she says she wasn’t, which was a weird feeling! She reports that the setup of the event was super easy, and she had no issues whatsoever, despite being limited in her design skills! With their Accelevents data, they watched it seamlessly flow through to Marketo into actionable research data.
The best part was they were able to still market to event registrants who didn’t attend after the event and had many people still accessing the content up to 30 days out from the event.
Vidyard’s event experience using Accelevents for their virtual event can best be summed up by Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard, who said,
“It’s the best virtual event we’ve ever had, and this can be attributed to Accelevents.”
Our powerful event technology helps event organizers create engaging events in any format. If you prefer the virtual event space we’ll host your next virtual trade show, summit or seminar.
If you’d like to set up a hybrid event we’ll streamline your check-in, help with badge printing and provide everyone with mobile apps. Contact us to discuss your upcoming event needs.
