The Secret to an Awesome Event: Your Weekly Innovation
The events industry is in trouble. Last year, a survey conducted by Eventbrite and Hubspot found that despite ballooning event budgets, 51% of event organizers saw no increase in event attendance. 14% even saw a decrease.
The problem? Most event organizers say it has become hard to hit their attendance and ROI goals. They need creative ways to drive the right people to their events.
This is the story of an emerging startup that helps its clients hold great events. It’s also about how they stay at the forefront of event marketing, and what their own clients need to be successful.
evvnt — the London-based events marketing software — is changing how events are marketed. Their goal is to help event organizers increase attendance and excel at their jobs in an increasingly virtual world.
How does evvnt do it? By bridging online and offline worlds. They optimize online advertising on the right websites to market in-person events. Instead of broadly sharing an event across the web, their software targets more than 4500 event listings websites. These websites are categorized (comedy, nightlife, etc.), so event organizers can reach online readers with relevant interests.
When a customer signs up, evvnt promotes their listing, then sends the customer an analytics report within 24 hours. This report shows which listings drive the most traffic, so customers can see which ones add the most value. The result is better advertising, greater interest, and more attendees.
“Organizers want to market events, and listings publishers want events content,” explains Philip Lardi, Product Manager at evvnt. “We see our role as bringing them together.”
evvnt’s clients range from global giants like Informa to small comedy clubs in northern England. But serving such diverse clientele comes with challenges. “We have clients with very different needs; a nightclub in London uses evvnt differently than a conference organizer in the Middle East,” says Lardi. “Keeping ourselves at the forefront of these changes means constantly growing the company vision and reevaluating how our product serves our users.”
evvnt’s customers love the product. Some love it so much that they offer frequent feedback on how it can improve. But without a way to manage each idea, their product team knew that these insights would get lost.
That’s why evvnt needed a way to capture and score their own customer feedback. They now use idea management capabilities in Aha! to aggregate all feedback from customers and colleagues alike.
“Our staff as well as our customers submit new ideas to us daily,” says Lardi. “Having one area where all this feedback can be organized helps me understand what the most important needs are for the business.”
In less than three years, evvnt has promoted more than 1 million event listings. And just last month, they were named a flagship launch partner of Eventbrite Spectrum — a collection of extension tools for event organizers. It’s proof that their big idea is gaining momentum in the marketplace.
Richard Green, evvnt’s CEO, attributes their exciting growth to merging online with offline worlds — and capturing customer feedback. The result? Better events for all of us.
How do you create buzz for your events?
In this series, companies share their unique approach to innovating with Aha! Read more of their stories here, and write your own using the hashtag #BigIdeas.
