Eventory is a company that offers technology that unveils your event’s full potential. During the coronavirus pandemic, Eventory provides enterprises with the best technical support to manage everyday challenges. Here is an interview with Barbara Kozanecka, the marketing manager of Eventory. She will tell us more about this company.
Let me just give some quick background information on Barbara. She is a Polish marketer, her primary focus was language and she found marketing and PR a long her language journey. She realised that language was her passion, but it was maybe not a career. She felt inspired by PR and marketing and so she decided to follow that path. In doing so she recently came up with a new idea for events marketing.
What does Eventory do?
Eventory created a platform for event and meeting management. The purpose of the app is so you don’t need different apps for all your other events, you can find every event on one platform. Before the pandemic, we worked on conferences, congresses, and summits, as well as with corporate clients. Now, we brought everything online. We believe that when our reality is changing, we should adapt as well. So we are tackling the same events but as adapted events. As well as big conferences and congresses, our clients conduct plenty of internal meetings and events. They use our technology to streamline the entire process to have better engagement. Working online and offline, we always focus on attendee engagement and creating a better relationship between employee and his or her employer.
This platform is an app or is it a web application?
It’s a platform for the organizer. It’s connected in real time with the app. So, whatever you do on the platform, like make changes, it’s automatically updated within the app. The app is both in English and Polish. However, the platform for the organizer is exclusively in English. It’s free to download on iOS and android.
After participating at one event do you get notified for other events too?
Yes, this is possible. It mainly depends on the organizer and how they want to communicate the event. If the event is organised for a similar public then yes, you could get notified. As I said before it is important for the organizer to keep the communication going and keep their community up to date. If an event is organised by a different organiser then it possible that people will not be notified, but you still have the “discovery” option in the app where you can look up different events you may be interested in.
Are there other companies that are doing the same as you?
There are competitors on the global and Polish market.
How do you differentiate yourselves from your competition?
You need to keep people entertained and engaged in whatever you’re doing. Even if it’s within the company or at a conference. We have the standard features like, an agenda so people can know exactly what you’re doing, and you have inbuild messenger.
We have some cool features that other platforms don’t have, for example we really focus on the analytics and on the engagement. I believe that we might be the only ones who have live questions in the app and voting options. So, if a speaker for example would ask a question, you can vote on your answer and you will then be able to the results live on the screen. We also have a new feature coming this year. We are going to have a platform for tickets. To do that we have integrated with Eventbrite. With this feature we will be purely independent. It is very exciting. We are always trying to include new features that might help our clients and expand our platform. Especially now, we worked hard to adapt our tool for online reality. For example, we’ve wanted to give our clients a meeting space online, so we integrated with Zoom, Webex etc.. It took some effort, but very fast we were able to create similar conditions to successfully conduct events online.
What is your role in this in this company?
I focus on attracting clients, as a marketing manager. To raise brand awareness, because we are a start-up. However, an old one because we’ve been on the market for years. We are just broadening our awareness on the market now.
In the Polish market?
Specifically, right now yes. We’re thinking about covering firstly our Polish market and then expanding. However, we do work with international clients already.
What are the actions that you take on digital marketing level or on social media level?
Right now, we use different social media accounts. We are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. And each channel has a different purpose. Instagram is less formal. We mostly focus on our company life. It also shows a little of what we do, like Eventory on tour. On Instagram, we don’t publish any sales content or anything, it’s more like employer branding. Then LinkedIn is purely business. Sometimes, we do post something that is a little less business-like, just to show we have a different side. This lets us show that we are just people and not robots behind our profiles, but LinkedIn is still our main business platform.
Do you also do ads? Or just posts on the social media page?
We do use ads on social media, but not branding ads. We mainly use ads to promote a webinar or if we just published a new book. We will then target the people we think would be interested in our services, to attract new people from our target group.
So, when people download the app, they come on your list to get message?
Yes, they do. We engage with our users though content and email marketing, we also like to talk to them personally. But right now we focus on online communication, as we have no other choice. We do this to emphasize the importance of a relationship between us and our customers. We don’t want our communication to be very robotic. To do this, we like to also meet with everyone as much as we can and engage in a conversation. This helps us create a real connection with our users, so they feel like it is a human to human connection and messenger to user communication. This can take more time, but it’s also more effective.
Is Eventory also creating a community?
Yes, we are. Community is one of our main keywords. Having a good community is a big help when planning or doing an event. Your community world either be interested in the event or they could spread the word. For the organiser a community is great, because you want the same people to come to your event. By using our services, the organisers of events have database of people to use to either advantage, they can also community through our platform with their attendees before during and after the event. This way they keep the engagement and communication going.
Having a community is one of the pillars in my book that I am writing, so it is interesting to hear your take on a community. Your platform offers organisers a community where they can stay at the top of people’s minds, by being able to constantly communicate with them.
Of course, and people like to exchange ideas. It’s really good to ask them what they like and give them the opportunity to give their feedback. After all it’s all about pleasing your client, if they don’t like it, or are not interested enough in what you’re selling or you’re saying, it’s just not going to work.
Having a community is great, but how do you find new clients? Do you use ads or social media posts, or does it happen through people sharing your platform or using hashtags?
For us is sharing really important, this is how we create brand awareness. This happens mainly through LinkedIn, I will share something on my own personal wall, with an extra personal message. I do this so that is does not seem like a marketing message. I really like to use webinars as a form of communication and marketing. It creates a personal touch; People can see who I am through the webinar.
Yes, but you need good content to share and to use in a webinar to make people share your posts, especially now because there is a lot of content out there already.
Exactly. It’s very important to create the right content. When I was at a conference in San Diego at the university, they talked about how much content is out there, and how our brains deal with it.
I think it was said that we receive 34 gigabytes of information every day, but this is not possible for a human brain to process. So, we automatically filter very quickly what we think is important or what not to pay attention to. You just look for the content that is directed to you. Over time we have developed banner blindness, this also has effects on billboards. This is why the right and useful content very important is.
And how do you make this content. Do you focus on wanting people to learn? Or do you want people to be passionate about your content?
It all depends on what your target group wants. So, it’s good to educate, but it is as equally good to give your target group content on exactly what they are looking for. You can do this by studying and analysing your target group, find out what they like and dislike, their interests, hobbies and so on. This is also how you start to build your community, if people like it they will come back for more.
Earlier you spoke about webinars, which webinar software do you use?
We’ve been trying a few different softwares. Recently, we integrated with Zoom, so we are using mainly this tool as it is compatible with the whole platform.
I am using Zoom too, but only I for meetings not for webinars...
Actually, it’s pretty good. It has some fun features like, you can hold a Q and A session and a hand rising session. This is great when you have a lot of participation and engagement. It is great to have a two-way communication with your participants. As I have said a couple of times, this is a key element for us.
Did you ever do the webinar yourself?
Yes, I have a few times. In our team, we have several people giving webinars as well.
And what is for instance a subject or topic?
Well one subject I like to talk about is experiential marketing and how to do it right. It’s a really interesting field of marketing. I have two examples that do it well and are my favourite. Netflix is one, they are absolutely killing it. I don’t know how they keep coming up with such creative marketing ideas. The second example is Red Bull. They are a great master of experiential marketing and engagement. When they covered the first free fall from space, or the media stunned The Netherlands, when people had to hitch hack and the only currency they could use was Red Bull cans. Everyone was sharing it and the media coverage was huge. During the pandemic, we are focused on knowledge-based webinars, where we guide our clients on how to move their events and other activities online. For example, we organized one on the subject: How to effectively implement online meetings and events during the crisis? It turned out great, and we got positive feedback from attendees.
Do you write a blog?
Yes, we do, it’s eventory.cc/blog. We also publish in magazine; we have a good partnership with Harvard Business Review Poland. We published different interesting articles. For example, an interesting article was about effective meetings, how you can create an effective meeting in a corporate environment. We also publish on a few Polish portals that focus on marketing and we published on marketing donuts.
Do you measure the effectiveness of all your channels?
Yes, we try to track how all our different channels are influencing the traffic on our website. To do this we use a few different tools. We use Google Analytics, for our general tracking. We use Heap, this tracks our content very well. Our last tool is Hotjar, to see how people are interacting with the website.
Every now and then, traffic just comes from random places. Very often an attendee to an event saw or heard of the app and thought “I need to have this in my company”. This is also part of building a community because once you’re an attendee at one of the events, you’re already an Eventory user.
Is there a quote or something related to a company that you like and that really represents your message?
We use a quote that is related to events, relationships and business. “Relationships are built during events; Events build relationships and relationships build business.” This is a perfect sum up for what we stand for.