AMA: Salesforce Vice President, C-Suite Marketing, Kexin Chen on Event Marketing Strategy

Despite working at a Fortune 500 company, we're relatively simple. We use a good amount of our own technology (IE: Marketing Cloud for invites at large scale events, Salesforce CRM, Slack, Tableau). For event logistics and project management towards an event, we primarily use Google spreadsheets and Quip. We've also explored Asana to support this as well. We also have our go to agencies and vendors for event production and work with them via Slack. Given how big our event portfolio can be across ...Read More

For ROI, it's helpful to know what the outcome of the event is meant to accomplish (IE: generate, progress, and or close pipe).Can impact the content strategy and the audience criteria you target. It can be for both, but having clarity here also helps with aligning your criteria for ROI. We currently look at the spend efficiency of a program so that is looking at our Marketing Pipe divided by the total cost to run the program. To ensure we are efficiently spending, I also keep an eye around Host ...Read More

For large scale events, create different content focused on the key buyers you know will attend and their key objectives. It may mean you have a range of break out sessions from deep dive workshops, 1:1 expert meetings to thought leadership roundtables. Having a good attendee survey tool to check on whether you were resonating with the different audiences will help you optimize over time.  I like to remind my team that the follow up is just as critical as the event itself. Having custom follow u ...Read More

This can be a challenge, but generally once you have one or two, the rest become easier over time. A few approaches to consider: Run analysis to understand who is relevant to the audience you're targeting and would be a hook for them to see. I've worked with social media agencies to look at specific handles for the key contacts I'd like to target to then analyze in aggregate who were the top commonly followed influencers and then worked to book those luminaries/thought leaders/authors to speak a ...Read More

Being in B2B, I personally find B2C to have the best experiential marketing. I truly believe you can find inspiration for events in your day to day life. It's about creating memorable moments. Customers now expect the experiences they have in their personal life to carry over to the type of ease and seamless experiences offered as a guest at work events as well. If you have a budget, doing something as a team building like a trip to Disney Land for recon can always spark some good ideas ;-). To ...Read More