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Sue: Welcome to the 5 Minute Skinny, where we talk about event technology in today's
business environment. I'm Sue MacKimmie, your host for this edition of the 5 Minute Skinny.
Today we have Brad Kofoed, Senior Director of Alliances of Certain joining us. Welcome
Brad.
Brad: Glad to be here, Sue.
Sue: Thanks for coming and visiting us today. So Brad, what are the core values users will
see from integrating their marketing automation platform with Certain's enterprise event platform.
Brad: You got to think about why people do marketing automation to begin with. Marketers
have gotten so sophisticated about how they're tracking the process of lead generation. So,
they're doing email marketing campaigns, they're tracking website visits, search engine optimization,
webinar attendance, white paper uploads, you name it. They're tracking everything very
rigorously so they can track the progress and score that lead in the system. And, what
happens then is about a third of their budget is spent on physical events -- that digital
chain is broken. So, the benefit of integrating with a platform like Certain is now you're
digitizing that last leg of this huge element of their marketing channel. And, by digitizing
it, you can also enrich the profile data in the marketing automation system and you can
seamlessly move data back and forth. So now you can capture what happens digitally at
the physical event, bring it back in the marketing automation system, integrate it with your
CRM system. So now, marketers are truly digitizing the entire process.
Sue: Okay. How is that going to help sales and marketing?
Brad: Keep in mind physical events are often all about how are you going to move a sales
prospect from wherever they are in the sales funnel through the bottom of the funnel. If
they're a raw prospect you want to figure out a way to move them down through that funnel.
If they're close to the end, you want to push them through. By integrating the marketing
automation data with the registration system data, you now know when an attendee or a prospect
shows up at a physical event you know exactly where they are in that sales funnel. So, you
can address them specifically to where they are and make sure they have the experience
that is going to enable you to push that prospect through the bottom of that sales funnel.
Sue: What happens after the event? What do you do with all that data?
Brad: Again, one of the key attributes of an integration with a platform like Certain
is now that data moves over through the integrated connector. So now rather than spending the
next month trying to figure out how I am going to get the things that occurred at the event
back into our marketing automation system and then figure out how we are going to score
it -- that's already happened throughout the course of the event because it's updating
as it's happening in real time. Now you have, the day you arrive home from your event, your
marketing automation system is all-ready up to date, you're ready to roll and get those
leads out to your sales team.
Sue: Is there anything else you want to add in about integration?
Brad: I think this is really the last frontier for marketers to digitize the marketing automation
system. People haven't done it because it wasn't available. It's really phenomenal news.
Just a little story -- recently, I was at a big marketing event, and I saw a marketer
wearing a shirt that said "marketing nerd". Now clearly I do not think marketers are nerds,
but what that tells me is how sophisticated and how important technology has become in
the marketing office. By taking that digitization to the next step to events just makes absolute
sense -- it's where everybody is headed and the response that we're getting from providing
this capability is phenomenal.
Sue: Excellent, thanks Brad. If you want to find out more about integrated marketing and
how to create powerful events, go to our website, www.certain.com, and download our e-book on
integrated marketing. As always, thank you for joining us on the 5 Minute Skinny, your
host for this edition. Thanks so much for listening.