How Bizzabo Powered Inbound

If you’re in the event software business, how better to present your brand at an event within an event? I guess that’s why, at Inbound 2019, Tel Aviv-New York-based Bizzabo set sail in a luxury yacht around Boston harbor, with partners, prospects, and media on deck.

It gave me a chance to sit down with co-founder and CEO Eran Ben-Shushan to pick his brains on Inbound, and on the growing event tech space.

Powering Inbound

Bizzabo turned out to be the event partner for Inbound itself. “With HubSpot, a great partner, we are powering basically all the fundamental parts of the event. So, registration and collecting payments. The agenda and the speaker management at Inbound is quite robust and top tier. The speakers, and sessions, and tracks, and content in general, is managed on the digital platform. We are the mobile app for the event; social interactions between people, registration for specific sessions, managing capacity of those sessions. And because we have all the data in our platform, all platforms which are integrated to Bizzabo are using the data in order to power their own services. At check-in for example, they pull the data from the Bizzabo platform. The platform doing lead-capturing on the conference floor is integrated with Bizzabo as the single source of truth.”

Data from badge scanning, and therefore the details of an attendee’s trajectory at the event, feeds back into Bizzabo. “It’s about understanding who are the people at your event,” said Ben-Shushan, “what are their preferences? Based on that, you can personalize their experience.”

What about the prospects of smart badges, replacing lanyard-strung name plates with QR codes? “We have the option to use RFID technology as part of the badge; definitely something we know how to do.”

Differentiating Bizzabo

Some of the most interesting developments in marketing tech over the past couple of years have related to in person events. Virtual events have all kinds of advantages, but the pendulum never truly swung away from what happens live — and the possibility of collecting rich data from expos and conferences, and driving it into marketing automation systems to fuel nurture programs, has never been greater. In some ways, it’s analogous to the way in which brick and mortar retail, rather than becoming obsolete, is actually embedding itself in digital networks —
at the cutting edge, anyway.

With so many players in the space, how does Bizzabo differentiate its offerings? “It’s always difficult,” said Ben-Shushan, “but I think it’s something that we set as a goal for ourselves when we started the company —
not so much differentiation for its own sake, but innovation and disruption. But I do think the way we differentiate ourselves is Bizzabo is built as a holistic platform from the ground up. All the different features we have in the platform are inter-connected, and that enables you to deal with data in a very seamless way. Once you have data which is clean and streamlines, you can use it to surface insights for customers — marketers typically — and make them smarter about their events, and the decisions they make around their events.”

Where Bizzabo shines, Eran went on, is feeding marketers with the kind of functionality that enhances personalized experiences at events. That means end-to-end service — as for Inbound —  from website building and registration, through the custom event app, assistance with content creation, speaker and session management, email marketing, and community building, to reporting and analytics. The reporting feeds back agnostically into the marketing automation or CRM system of choice.

I asked if Ben-Shushan what he was hearing from attendees at Inbound, in terms of top-of-mind challenges. “A big theme that people are challenged by, and want to learn more about, is personalization at scale. This is my personal perspective now. As marketers, building and growing companies, who care about their customers, really understanding them and personalizing experiences for them is probably one of the biggest challenges they have today.

“From a Bizzabo perspective, we do know what people are interested in, through their digital footprints.”