Goldcast

Katie Dunn is one member of the four-person demand gen team at ThoughtSpot. Positioned directly under the revenue marketing team, her remit is simple: If it drives revenue and can be scaled across the organization—Katie’s responsible for it. Whether that’s an ad campaign, direct mail, or of course, webinars, and virtual events.

With a firm eye toward scaling the company’s integrated marketing campaign, Katie works closely with the field events team to ensure ThoughtSpot’s event marketing strategy drives greater demand and pipeline.

We sat down with Katie to find out how she scaled her flagship event Beyond, an annual customer event to drive demand with new leads and prospects.

With offices as far-reaching as Silicon Valley, London, India, and Japan, Katie and the demand gen team have become experts in reaching multiple audiences through digital events. She and the team host two webinars per month, pre-recording the webinars to reach multiple audiences in multiple time zones.

“Given that we have so many different offices, we tend to split our webinars with different go-live times in various areas. Goldcast makes that super easy.”

But while the team’s monthly webinars are easily replicated and scaled, when it comes to ThoughtSpot’s largest annual event, there’s a lot more planning involved.

As the company’s flagship in-person event, Beyond is the data and analytics event of the year. After running the event virtually in 2020, the pressure to bring it back bigger and better than ever was on. Katie and her team were eager to re-introduce the in-person format and get back to the face-to-face networking everyone missed. 

Only this time, the events team at ThoughtSpot had more formatting options at their fingertips.

When Katie came into her role, she was thrilled to find that the events team at ThoughtSpot was already using Goldcast.

In some of her past positions, Katie didn’t have access to a best-of-breed event marketing platform—and she knew her audience could tell. “Let’s just say it’s night and day,” she laughs.

She also wasn’t thrilled about the extra work she and her team had to do on the backend in order to execute core tasks, like sending customized emails to attendees.

Now armed with easily customizable and scalable digital event options, Katie and the team were able to broaden Beyond’s reach beyond the customer-only in-person format and drive virtual attendance among new prospects.

"Whether they were able to make it to Vegas to join us in person or if they preferred to join us virtually, we wanted to make the event a seamless experience for our attendees.”

As an expert in scaling an integrated marketing approach, Katie was thrilled to take their front-running event straight to the desktops of new leads and prospects who weren’t yet ready to make the commitment to fly to Vegas.

Within three weeks of promoting it, nearly 1,000 virtual attendees had registered for Beyond.

“What's really great about having that virtual component through Goldcast is that we were able to reach prospects and scale lead gen.”

To kick off their virtual offering, Katie used Goldcast’s simple, visual customization features to create a seamless brand experience from registration to follow-up.

With multiple fonts and colors to choose from, she and the team are able to easily differentiate their event campaigns. “My favorite thing is the customization on the back end. You can make every event feel different.”

The team sends all event reminders through Goldcast, including:

• The registration confirmation email
• What to expect email (~10 days later)
• 24-hour reminder (day before)
• Here's your magic link (day of event)
• Follow up email

In the future, Katie plans to run some A/B testing to see what timing and cadence works best for a large-scale event like Beyond. But for now, she’s happy to see virtual attendance consistently trending upward.

Attendance for Beyond 2022

• 911 in-person attendees
• 1,140 virtual registrants
• 615 virtual registrants attended live – nearly a 50% show rate

Tracking event ROI within an integrated marketing strategy like ThoughtSpot’s isn’t always cut and dry. To measure her success, attendee experience, engagement tracking, and sponsor experience are the three core areas Katie focuses on.

From there, she and the demand gen team are hyper-focused on two things:

1. Do the campaigns perform?
2. Do the campaigns scale?

“Obviously, registration number is super important, but the second follow there is how many people attended live. That's going to inform how SDRs follow up. Virtual attendance is a key indicator of someone's interest and helps sales tailor follow up.”

Those touchpoints turn into pipeline and pipeline of course, turns into business. Of course, experience matters too.

Katie wanted to make sure the team at ThoughtSpot could easily share relevant content with the audience live in real time. The ability to instantly kickstart relevant conversation in the chat, with teammates and sponsors on-hand to interact, was key.

But equally important, was the ability to track registrant and attendee activity in real time.

“In the Analytics, you can see how you're trending with registration. You can actually see where you had a spike in registrations because you had an email go out. It's like a full, complete view where you're getting registrations in from.”

And of course, there’s tying these event and engagement metrics back to pipeline and revenue goals. By using Goldcast’s Salesforce integration, Katie was able to see exactly how Beyond contributed to the company’s bottom line. 

Beyond 2022 Virtual Event - Pipeline and Revenue Influence

• 1,000+ leads generated
• 644 MQLs
• 357 SALs
• 17 Meetings Booked
• 11 Opportunites Created
• $1.56 M Pipeline Created
• $4.27 M Pipeline Influenced

As one fundamental part of a focused and revenue-minded team, Katie loves Goldcast’s embedded marketing automation and email tools. “If you're in marketing operations, Goldcast is next level.”

While she’s glad to be able to create events herself with no dedicated design help, she’s also happy that other team members can jump in when needed. “The ease of use is incredible. Everything is right where you need it.”

Goldcast’s user-friendly features proved especially useful when Katie was out of office recently for summer vacation and her boss had to temporarily take over the team’s events.

“She doesn’t have a lot of experience and she was able to go into Goldcast and make the update and do it herself.”

But Katie and the team at ThoughtSpot know that help is always there when they need it.

“That's what I love about Goldcast. The team is so open to feedback. You actually listen and take into consideration what your customers are saying. It’s a quick email to your CSM and you actually know that your email is going places.”

While there’s still work to be done to create a cohesive hybrid event strategy and continue fueling the team’s integrated marketing approach, Katie’s glad to have the tools and support she needs to keep her events as customer-centric as possible.