How Bizzabo is Making Live Events More Impactful
As more and more business is conducted in the digital world, live events have become particularly valuable, providing companies and their employees, partners, customers and prospects a meaningful opportunity to interact face-to-face. However as events have evolved to become a vital sales and marketing tactic across nearly all industries, the technology used to plan, power and manage events has struggled to keep up.
New York and Tel Aviv-based Bizzabo is working to change the historically cumbersome and disjointed event management technology market by providing an end-to-end, data-driven event success platform. By compiling key assets such as logistics information, marketing materials, website creation, ticketing and sponsorship management into one solution, Bizzabo is enabling companies to focus less on the rudimentary aspect of event management and more on ensuring their events are impactful for everyone involved.
We recently participated in Bizzabo’s $27 million Series D and had a chance to sit down with the company’s three founders, Eran Ben-Shushan, Alon Alroy and Boaz Katz. Read on to learn more about Bizzabo and its data-driven approach to event management.
Give us a little background on Bizzabo. What problem were you trying to solve when you founded the company?
Having participated in many events, we realized how difficult it is to efficiently plan and execute an event, and also how hard it is to measure success. We made it our mission to help all event stakeholders by enabling organizers to create personalized, customized experiences for their attendees and sponsors to analyze and measure ROI, all from one platform.
What’s Bizzabo’s vision of the future? How are you different from others trying to achieve the same thing?
Our goal is for a 1,000-person event to feel like 1,000 uniquely tailored experiences. The data-rich Bizzabo platform enables event marketers to proactively provide such customized experiences and also prove ROI in the same way other digital channels are expected to.
What’s the toughest hurdle you’ve encountered so far, and how did you overcome it?
In our early days, we decided to pivot from a mobile networking solution to an end-to-end event success platform. Change is always challenging, but with this pivot we faced changes in our strategy, product and business model — all at the same time. We overcame this hurdle thanks to a very strong company culture and a strong belief in the power of in-person connections.
What do you know now that you wish you knew a year ago?
It’s so important to be laser-focused on the right market segment for your product. It’s very easy to lose focus when you’re in a high-demand, lucrative market and receive lots of inbound interest about your product, however it’s critical to define your focus areas early and proactively seek growth in those particular segments.
Any other interesting facts about your company, the market and/or your customers?
A piece of data we always find interesting to share is that events make up for 24% of the B2B marketing budget. Additionally, according to our data, the most successful businesses are spending 1.7x the average marketing budget on live events and 80% of over-performing businesses plan to increase their event budgets next year. We’ve found that no other channel can quite compare to the effectiveness of events, and as such, it’s imperative that companies have a way to measure event success and ROI.
