SAN FRANCISCO
Certain Inc., an enterprise event management software company, announced a significant brand repositioning and the launch of a new software category, Event Automation. The move follows the news of Vista Equity Partners’ (who also owns Lanyon) purchase of Cvent Inc. for $1.65 billion.
“Having dealt with integration, when you’re integrating five or six companies together, it’s hard to innovate,” said Certain CEO Peter Micciche. “Being based in San Francisco, we have the luxury to create disruptive capabilities … we have the ability to move much more quickly and build opportunities.
“From our point of view, Vista’s acquisition of Cvent narrows the field at the enterprise level … sure there’s options for smaller companies and associations, but if you have a large enterprise need, it’s down to Lanyon and Certain period. There’s nobody else. So we’re ready to take action.”
Similar to marketing automation, Certain’s Event Automation is designed to help marketers and event professionals market events more effectively across multiple online channels and automate complex repetitive tasks associated with the management of events. With Event Automation, marketers can automate, personalize, and measure events and marketing activities across the entire event lifecycle, so they can grow revenue faster, boost attendee engagement, and increase operational efficiency.
Certain aims to help brands create personalized attendee experiences while capturing rich prospect data before, during, and after the event. For instance, advanced reporting capabilities on sessions and speakers allows marketers and sales teams to see which sessions prospects attended.
Certain Event Automation builds upon its core enterprise event management feature-set (which includes a full-scale event app and other meeting services) to include three new capabilities for data-driven marketers to streamline event marketing and provide measurable marketing results.
Event Intelligence:
Certain’s Event Intelligence solution enables marketers to embed their event data within their marketing automation platform, providing a 360° visibility into their events. Event Intelligence supports a deep two-way marketing automation integration with Oracle Eloqua and Marketo as well as Salesforce CRM integration. The solution enables pre-configurable email campaign capability, actionable attendee engagement insights, advanced attendee engagement scoring, and real-time tracking/reporting.
Buyer Engagement:
Certain’s Buyer Engagement capability is facilitated by a customizable interface, complete branding control, personalized event experiences, and a responsively-designed mobile app to improve attendee engagement and participation. The mobile app enables event planners and marketers to send customized notifications to specific attendee types, segment push notifications and pages, customize the look and feel of the app, and capture additional data with interactive polling.
Enterprise Scalability:
Through Certain’s Event Replicator, event processes, integrations, and branding elements are captured in an event library for on-demand event creation. The Event Replicator is a core capability for enterprise scalability that allows marketers to transfer rich data into marketing automation or CRM systems.
Certain hopes its Event Automation platform and marketing technology will change how events are marketed in the future. And for meeting and event planners that means less time worrying about tracking ROI and more time focusing on the quality of the meeting at hand.
“We can now collect specific attendee information in real-time before, during and after the event … if an attendee is walking out of a session, then a planner can fire off an invitation on the attendee’s phone to build upon what they just experienced,” Micciche said. “It’s about offering attendee options that allow them to accumulate related knowledge and connect them with the people they want to meet.”
More information on Certain’s software line-up is available on its website.
