As one of the leading startups in event marketing software, Splash is primarily known for helping businesses create landing pages, sell tickets, and manage communications for all their events. But as a recent announcement infers, the company has been quietly making moves to build on their reputation among the tight knit community of B2B marketers.
An estimated $500 billion are spent on events every year, but the industry has been slow to adapt to digitization. This dire need for automation and optimization appears to be coming to an end given the recent announcement from Splash.
The company recently announced a $7 million series B round led by Ascent Venture Partners. With this influx of cash, the company is looking to raise the profile of the event marketing space among B2B marketers and continue to build out technology that demonstrates a return on these massive events spends.
“Every marketer knows that nothing converts better than an event — marketers that use Splash know exactly why their events convert and how to optimize that spend for maximum ROI,” said Ben Hindman, cofounder and CEO of Splash. “We are excited by the support of our investors and growing roster of clients; it is a sign that the space has finally matured. In-person Marketing is finally as trackable as digital. In the past year alone, we have more than doubled our client base, more than 80 percent of these new customers are marketers that use our enterprise platform to transform their event programs into a high-performing channel.”
It appears as though the market is ready for event software to take its place in the marketing stack. As Geoff Oblak, general partner at Ascent Venture Partners, explained:
“Splash’s sophisticated event management platform equips marketing professionals with a solution to ensure maximum ROI from every event. Ascent has been highly active investing in companies that enhance the omni-channel customer experience, including the convergence of digital and physical interactions. I look forward to supporting the Splash team and the exciting innovation within this rapidly emerging market.”
This is something that large companies are beginning to recognize as more than half of companies of the Fortune 500 are Splash clients. The company noted that over 80 percent of their new customers this year are using their enterprise product, a sign that the secret is out: events turn into to sales. Newscred’s VP Marketing Adrienne Wright, put it like this:
“40% of our first-touch marketing leads were driven by events. We make those touch points count with Splash.”
Splash’s news does not end there: the company made two key hires from two of New York City’s most recognizable startups. David Greenberger, former Foursquare’s head of sales, joins the team as vice president of Sales, and Conrad Rushing, who was a director of engineering at Tumblr, is now Splash’s vice president of Engineering. Attracting a crowd is something Hindman is accustomed to, having previously been employed as the events director at Thrillist.
Having worked in the space for some time, Hindman sees nothing but growth for both Splash and the marketers that use their event platform:
“There is an exciting evolution happening in the event space right now. Finally high-touch, in-person marketing is as trackable as digital. Marketers now have the ability to capture a treasure trove of data about their ideal customer profile and pump it through their marketing mix.”
How the events space hasn’t adopted this kind of technology yet is behind us. But at least Splash is getting the ball rolling.