Feature
LAS VEGAS — DoubleDutch, a provider of mobile applications for events, conferences, associations and trade shows, is integrating with Marketo and Salesforce to advance its mission of bridging the gap between live events and digital marketing
The news was announced today at Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit here.
Headquartered in San Francisco, DoubleDutch aims to transform event attendance to a digital experience. Founded in 2011, it has raised $78.5 million from investors like KKR, Floodgate Fund and Index Ventures.
“The next step as we see it … is to connect the data that we are capturing from the show floor into the rest of the marketing cloud.”
Marketo and Live Engagement Marketing
The platform uses a discipline DoubleDutch calls live engagement marketing, turning live events into digital social experiences that can be tracked and measured to increase engagement and return-on-investment (ROI). A big part of marketing budgets goes to events, yet companies usually have no way of measuring results, DoubleDutch claims.
“Live engagement marketing is, how do you apply digital marketing principles to the live event experience and how do you bring the event ecosystem into the rest of the marketing stack?” Coburn said.
“There’s in term in [NFL football] called the red zone. We see events kind of like that, where all year long you’re running your sales and marketing programs and email campaigns … and you’re driving people to these events. These events are incredible funnel accelerators. This is the moment where everybody is in the same building … This is the time you have to score.”
DoubleDutch’s event apps take a social network approach, showing users features like event activities, profiles and messaging. Attendees can, for example, look up who else attended a session they went to or find other talks a certain speaker might be giving. DoubleDutch considers all of this behavioral data their “signals,” Coburn said.
“What we’ve been focused on is getting people to use the app all the time, and we’ve been pretty successful at that. We are now averaging 37 sessions per event and over 38 minutes of usage, so during the course of an event folks are living on our app.”
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
6
The Future of Social Media: Emerging Trends and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve
The impact of emerging technologies like AI on social media
Webinar
Jun
7
The Building Blocks of Personalization
This webinar will explore how personalization can create powerful ecommerce shopping experience.
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
DoubleDutch is making this data stream of 70 signals it tracks available to other systems of record, such as Marketo. Signals can include bookmarks, page views, comments and content and speaker ratings. Coburn says integrations with other services are in the works, mostly focusing on CRM and marketing automation.
“From a marketer’s perspective, we’re adding 70 new signals that did not exist before that into these new marketing systems that can now be integrated into the rest of your marketing programs,” Coburn said.
Personal Event Guides
DoubleDutch also sees these signals as indication of what people are interested in, so the engagement platform also uses that data to build “journeys” and make recommendations on what to do, who to talk to or where to go.
“We think we can build something very similar to a concierge or a personal assistant or Google Now to help every attendee have a personal guide through the event experience,” Coburn said.
The live engagement platform also includes: a live engagement studio for organizers to configure the app, a lead manager which injects signals into Marketo and Salesforce, an exhibitor portal for managing leads and connectors to other systems.
“I think the core problem for the history of the world for the last 850 years has been zero visibility about what’s happening at the event other than anecdotes. That problem is starting to get solved because of mobile, because of beacons, because of software overlaying on top of these worlds.”
