Challenge

• Many enterprise software companies rely on user conferences and physical events to set the tone for their year — provide opportunities for up-close interaction with products, partners, customers and analysts.
• For years, cloud-based company Domo has held its annual Domopalooza summit in Utah, bringing together data, analytics and business professionals across numerous industries for feature announcements, Q&As, and networking.
• In late February, with their 2020 conference less than a month away, the team at Domo assessed what was happening with the global health crisis, and made the decision to pivot to a 100% online event for the first time in Domo’s history. In a matter of days, Domo pivoted to completely reinvent Domopalooza.

Solution

• Rather than impose limitations on their presenters and viewers, Domo sought to optimize their virtual setting and take advantage of all that an online can entail. The planning team built an agenda that could combine live and pre-recorded segments, with ample opportunities for audience interaction. Aiming high, they also set ambitious goals for attendance.
• Domo chose to make LinkedIn an integral component of the virtual event strategy, using its advanced targeting capabilities to deliver tailored promotional messaging for different roles and functions, while also re-streaming Domopalooza footage on the platform and interacting with attendees via social media.

Results

• The typical in-person Domopalooza event draws a “couple of thousand customers,” according to Chief Strategy Officer John Mellor. “So, we set a stretch goal for 10,000 viewers on the day of the event, because we thought, why shouldn’t we?”
• On March 18th, when the big day arrived and 24 hours later, more than 12,000 people ended up watching the event. “Four or five times what we would have had in-person, which was fantastic,” says Mellor.
• Not only did going digital help live attendance, but 214 event registrations were attributed to LinkedIn, filling Domo’s pipeline with quality leads.

Bringing authentic engagement online

• One hallmark of Domopalooza, says Mellor, is the “intimacy and rawness” experienced at a conference where Domo’s actual product developers are getting on stage, answering questions from customers, and sharing candid insights. Replicating this feeling in the virtual space was an essential focus.
• Stitching together live moderators with pre-recorded segments helped maintain an organic atmosphere, and the Domo team made concerted efforts to offer a “behind-the-scenes” perspective. This included one feature where they visited the location of a national customer in automotive parts and services business, demonstrating first-hand how actual users incorporate Domo into their daily operations. “You can’t even do that in an in-person event,” Mellor notes.

Knowing your audience

• The ability to leverage LinkedIn for audience segmentation played a key role in helping Domo align its promotional messaging and content for the event.
•  For example, they divided their contact list into executives and practitioners, highlighting the most relevant value props for each audience in their communications. “It just aligned really nicely with the way that the segmentation on LinkedIn works,” says Crystal Hadaway, VP of Digital Media & ABM Programs.
• To assist with an optimized virtual event experience, Domo utilized many tools including LinkedIn marketing partner 6sense, which helps with segmentation through predictive scores and display advertising.

Going global

• Not only did the online setting help Domo reach far more people than the standard physical event, but it also helped the company reach far more geographies. “We were able to have attendees from over 80 countries, which we never would have gotten with an in person meeting,” Mellor observes. “There are some pretty significant benefits to reaching a worldwide audience practically concurrently.”
• To make the event more accessible for people around the globe, Domopalooza was re-streamed 12 hours later for Asian Pacific audiences, including a version dubbed in Japanese.

About Domo

Domo’s mission is to be the operating system for business, creating a new relationship between your people, data and systems. By getting data into the hands of everyone across the organization, Domo helps you reimagine how business can be done, creating new business opportunities and a measurable competitive advantage. Domo works with many of the world’s leading and most progressive brands across multiple industries, and is led by a management team with tenure at the world’s most well-known technology companies.