Today, we announced our $28 million Series A funding led by Westbridge Capital and Unusual Ventures. We’re very excited about what this funding means for our vision of supporting and celebrating Event Marketers, and we invite you to check out the details of the funding on Business Insider.

Instead of just announcing the funding in another press release, I wanted to shed more light on the future of B2B events and where B2B marketing is heading.

I started my professional life in the boring hinterlands of manufacturing in a consumer product goods (CPG) firm. The fascinating part about working in CPG was that storytelling around the product mattered so much more than the product itself. While I could bring cutting-edge innovation into the product, it simply wouldn’t matter if the marketers were not able to craft a great story around it.

Humans are drawn to storytelling, to personality. We don’t want to just buy any jacket, we want to buy Patagonia for the beautiful story around it. History is filled with examples of how great stories triumph.

Somewhere in the rapid evolution and expansion of B2B companies and their marketing budgets, we seem to have missed this point. For the most part, B2B marketing was about sniping prospects with ads and purchased emails. Those mediums are crowded and now represent a race to the bottom. There are no winners.

I saw this first-hand in my life in AdTech. Companies poured millions of dollars into finding new customers without building any real connections with them. It was clear that marketers were looking for a new medium to tell their stories.

Over the last two years, we’ve had the fortune of working with pioneering event leaders in B2B marketing. We’ve powered many game-changing digital event strategies for inspiring startups such as Alyce, Lever to unicorns such as Drift, Clari, Salesloft, ThoughtSpot, Lattice to public behemoths such as Zuora, Microsoft Github, Amplitude, Pure Storage and Zscaler.

Our biggest learning was that this wasn’t a stopgap arrangement but rather a fundamental transformation of events as a marketing channel. Events now span the full B2B go-to-market funnel.

It's not about that one giant conference in a destination city anymore. Digital events are being used by our customers to build relationships with their customers and prospects at scale and meet them where they are.

Especially today, when marketing teams are under pressure to be creative with limited budgets and chase ever-escalating growth targets, digital events—when done well—present a great channel for them to stand out.

Our customers have done a wide variety of events and experimented with multiple use cases to drive buyers across the funnel. From recurring top-funnel webinars to large user conferences in a hybrid format to ABM-style experiential field events, one thing is clear—events are thriving.

We have seen our customers drive millions in pipeline and brand impact by harnessing the power and reach of digital events and the insights we help them and their sales teams draw. This propelled us to grow 10x over the past year with 150+ customers using us.

We are going to put these funds to work and do more of what we have done best so far—listen to our customers.

You will see us investing in ease of use while building tools to give organizers more power in their day-to-day. Soon, organizers will be able to build beautiful registration pages, sell tickets, launch check-in and badging for hybrid events, build robust event hubs, and more.

We will continue to make massive leaps in everything related to analytics, integrations, and workflows, helping event marketers showcase their impact. You will see innovation coming in our hybrid event stack (software and hardware), and first glimpses of our foray into in-person event use cases.

We have also seen a great organic pull towards our event marketer-centric programming. We will invest heavily into Event Marketers Live, bringing educational digital and hybrid fireside chats with event marketing leaders to life. We will also revamp our flagship program, CMO Diaries.

We believe we have early signs of a great community building around our message. So, we will invest in creating more high-impact programs to help our event marketer friends learn and bond together and ultimately arm them with the knowledge to exceed expectations at work.

We find ourselves in the midst of a much bigger movement, which takes us back to our first point about storytelling. We are seeing the rise of marketing teams wanting to become media companies.

For media companies, their content and their story is their product. They are exceptional at not only creating content, but also at finding ways to distribute it effectively to the right audience. They own their channel and their captive audience.

The smartest B2B marketing teams operate like media companies. They think of their content and their story as their product and are primarily concerned with building an audience—regardless of the audience’s sales intent. They use content to educate, entertain, and enlighten their audience and then turn around and use this engagement as a gateway to long-term sales.

They are doing it through videos, podcasts, live streams, digital events, and in-person events. Then, they’re distributing their content and using it like a magnet to build a community around their message. And they do it with increasingly lower reliance on paid ads and purchased email lists.

They know that as long as they are focused on bringing value to the end consumer, they are going to build a strong reputation and real relationships. And they care about brand engagement as much as they do about pipeline impact.

Goldcast powers a small but mighty part of this revolution today, bringing the event marketer’s creativity to life. We are, however, making foundational product investments to enable marketers to build audiences across other channels. Imagine having an in-person conference digitized with software and hardware from Goldcast. Then, recordings and transcripts from that event are used to create a digital event, a podcast, and follow-up social posts, creating a single connected brand experience. We are excited to take this small but meaningful step in that direction!

If you want to attend an event we are hosting on how can B2B brands think like a media company, register here.

Finally, thank you! To all our customers who took a bet on us in the early days. And to all of the Event Marketers who trust us with your events. We truly appreciate your business. We understand how stressful working in events can get, and our entire team is working hard to make you successful.

We started Goldcast by cold emailing 200 Event and Field Marketers. 75 of them took the time to respond to us and helped us understand their pain points. The thoughts and ideas that they shared remain at the core of what we do today.

If there’s any feedback that you ever want to give us, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly at palash@goldcast.io. We are very excited to continue the momentum and build a product and a community purpose-built for B2B Event and Field Marketers.