At an events company running 250 events per year, Service was responsible for booking the venue for each event and kept a spreadsheet to themselves of what venues they were trying to book. Each event required a Marketing campaign that included 5 emails and 1 piece of direct mail over the course of 2 months leading up to the event. Marketing Campaign Managers kept their own spreadsheet of when each touch point needed to deploy. As a result, during weekly meetings, the company Executives, Marketing Director, Service Director, and Sales Director had to spend all of their time figuring out which touchpoints in each campaign had or had not been deployed. This siloed approach to booking events and deploying marketing campaigns made it difficult for the company to forecast revenue and registration results against the company budget.
We created a collaborative Google Sheet for Service and Marketing to lay out the schedule of potential events, reverse engineer the deployment date for each email and direct mail piece in each event campaign, and calculate revenue and registration results against the company-established goals.
The Service Director would update the status of each potential event and check a box once the event was officially booked so that Marketing knew they could begin their campaign execution process.
Marketing Campaign Managers would mark each campaign touchpoint as completed once it was successfully deployed.
We provided read-only access to the Marketing Director, to company Executives, and to the Sales Director to ensure accuracy of information.
This transparent and systemized approach to booking and executing each event's marketing campaign allowed all stakeholders to have real-time insights into the process.
Marketing became able to play their campaign lists in advance of each event being confirmed so they could start their campaign immediately once the event was booked. In addition, as they analyzed event data, we discovered that the average customer purchase their event ~30 days in advance.
Sales was able to coordinate their efforts so they supplemented Marketing's campaign.
Company Executives no longer had to chase down information to understand the current stage of each event's booking and campaign execution status.
Weekly meetings evolved to discuss strategies to boost registrations and revenue per event instead of gathering metrics.