Cvent: The Financial Services and Fintech Sectors’ Digital Event Management Evolution

Both financial services and fintech companies learn that the journey to deep customer engagement is a marathon, not a sprint, and nowhere is that clearer than using events as part of your marketing or sales mix.

Banks, insurance companies, asset management companies, technology and investment research firms have begun to recognize and act on the need for flexible and data-informed approaches to acquiring and retaining customers in event marketing. Demonstrated returns from event budgets can instantly turn clients into loyal advocates. Organizations today demand no less, and understanding what can sometimes be an elusive, data-driven marketing metric is a business necessity.

These are the views of Karen CarterDirector of Corporate Marketing, Europe, at Cvent. She is an experienced marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience in all facets of the discipline. From the agency side, Carter spent his early career as a customer service director for many large high-tech companies and ran some of today’s biggest technology events. She moved the client side and spent over 14 years on Microsoft in varying roles in both B2B and B2C. Recently, she has returned to her roots, and has helped build the corporate marketing strategy in Europe for Cvent, a provider of meetings, events and hospitality technology.

The new customer mindset requires business functions to engage and
co-create events across traditional walls. Events are a key example of an activity with high potential for customer engagement that has disappeared under insufficient attention. Finservfintech marketing and event planning teams regularly conduct joint events, but these events are often characterized by a lack of common goals and inefficient resource sharing.

One recently Forrester The study indicates that almost 75 percent of the financial industry’s professionals feel that their ideas about budgets and goals have deviated significantly from the event management. Most of these decision makers also said that the events were run in silos and lacked the cooperation that is crucial for good results.

Global meetings and events are critical for the financial sector. They serve as both product test sites and a sales pipeline. In addition, product roadshows, investor conferences and community gatherings create face-to-face interactions and provide one-to-punch marketing efforts. They have the potential to generate important business intelligence. Unfortunately, most events in the sector tend to be one-dimensional, or marketers are unable to extract data from these interactions to generate conversion insight.

Fintech disruption has reworked the traditional financial sector in its own form. Open banking, expanded financial access, cloud adoption and digital banking are just some of the changes shaped by the fintech sector. The market waves created by non-traditional fintech companies have pushed mainstream financial players to accelerate the shift towards digital-first, technology-led business models. Marketing and event technologies have undergone extreme makeovers to remain relevant in the new paradigm.

But it has not been easy to take the leap from a passive quarterly webinar that simply “ticks in a box” to a full-fledged interactive online event that provides measurable effect. About 93 percent of respondents in the Forrester study reported that their companies hosted virtual events at some point before the pandemic, with 84 percent reporting that most of these pre-pandemic virtual events were delivered as webinars.

Covid-19 changed all that. B2B marketers and event teams were suddenly required to switch to using virtual events exclusively to deliver the content and create engagement. Now, as recovery continues, companies must transform events into adventure journeys for all customers. The choice of event formats must be adapted to the marketing results.

Instead of using content and technology in discrete, staccato outbursts, marketers, decision makers and technical implementers need to build flow and flexibility into the strategy and execution of events. In order to extract maximum business value, financial institutions must approximate events holistically. And events must not only be seen as tools to better understand customers, but also as markers that can help plot a company’s future roadmap.

For events of this caliber, it is important to upgrade and use digital natives in the workforce, create a content narrative and offer seamless end-to-end, customized experiences for internal and external customers. Such events and platforms become rich sources of calculations, potential customers and conversion opportunities. A healthy return, in turn, helps marketers justify spending on such events. But advisory roadshows and other B2B product marketing events can quickly become a regulatory trap. Therefore, building robust compliance is an overriding requirement for such event teams. Marketers and events working together will make it possible to share skills and expertise to thrive in a post-covid world.

Before the pandemic, several event companies had already automated planning and registration processes in what was primarily a personal event landscape. The rest of the process remained largely manual. For Cvent, headquartered in the United States, the pandemic provided a unique opportunity for the company to leverage its software as a service (SaaS) model and decades of technology innovation and industry expertise to deliver new digital solutions to support more engaging and interactive virtual events. This fast-paced virtual event pivot enabled Cvent customers to maximize the impact of their online experiences and engage with customers and other stakeholders throughout the pandemic.

Over the past two years, Cvent has further cemented its position as a leading, cloud-based, marketing and management platform for businesses; provides the technology and professional support to drive exceptional personal, virtual and hybrid experiences.

For financial institution customers, Cvent delivers tailored experiences that meet basic deliverables such as service reliability, scalability, world-class data collection and data security. Its maximization of compliance and privacy promises well for European customers who are required to comply with GDPR requirements. For asset management and capital markets customers, Cvent offers scalability for replicating recurring events via the template launch with easy launch and brand authenticity.

Cvent’s toolkit for event marketers in the financial vertical also includes custom reporting, which solves the difficult problem of measuring the return on an event. Intuitive user experience from augmented reality and mobile apps help to map the participant’s journey at all touch points during the event and help marketers gather powerful intelligence.

Cvent leverages the weight of the cloud by providing easy, direct access to event data and documentation. The extensive experience of managing large events allows it to anticipate and manage customers’ needs to control participant experience and data.

One customer recently saw the impact of incidents on potential customer generation and revenue attribution by using Cvent products to drive thousands of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) through the use of the agreement tool. And with Cvent’s RFID tracker and mobile app, they were able to capture data from live visitor registration and use the data to quantify revenue. By working together, Cvent enabled the customer to generate insightful event calculations and prove the impact of events as part of their marketing arsenal.

With 20 years of experience working with the global financial sector and collaborating with some of its largest players, Cvent is in a unique position to both observe and shape the role that events play in today’s business environment. This also means taking a certain amount of responsibility when it comes to running a business in a way that is fair and sustainable.

Virtual and hybrid events can support a more sustainable meeting and event industry, while helping to strengthen quantifiable marketing results for B2B customers who are more traditionally accustomed to hosting only large personal gatherings. In the new event landscape, offering a smart mix of personal, virtual and hybrid events can help organizations deliver more sustainable event programs while increasing reach and maximizing engagement across their Total Event program.

Today, Cvent helps tens of thousands of organizations adapt to the new business landscape and create not only memorable experiences, but also measurable ones. By combining Cvent’s robust event marketing and administration platform with metric – driven marketers and planners, organizations will be better positioned to create unique, connected experiences that will drive their business forward.