Rodney Hart: Hello, and welcome back to Event Perspectives. My name is Rodney Hart, VP of Events at RainFocus, and I think of all the different hats that I get to wear here, host of this series is definitely one of my favorites. Each time I’m joined by some of the brightest minds behind some of the world’s top event programs, and in each episode, we dive into the backgrounds, the journeys that led them to where they are today. And then what we also focus on is just what’s the most interesting challenge that they’re focused on. And then we try and have some fun along the way.
In this episode, I’m thrilled to be joined by Ghazwan Almoazen, and he’s the director of global experiential marketing demand and communications at Docusign. Ghazwan, welcome. How are you doing?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Hi, Rodney. Thank you for having me. I’m doing well. Thanks for having me today.
Rodney Hart: Great, great. First and foremost, I got through the title. That was the part I think I was most nervous of stumbling on. And to kick things off, before we get into anything too serious, I’d love to start with an icebreaker question if you’re ready.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Absolutely, let’s do it.
Rodney Hart: All right, cool. Let’s go with: what is the worst item you’ve ever forgotten before a work event?
Ghazwan Almoazen: That would be my iPhone charger.
Rodney Hart: I want to know how did you deal with that? Did you have someone that bailed you out in that situation or what happened there?
Ghazwan Almoazen: You can imagine I was in panic mode in airports, on planes, at the event venue asking people to help charge my iPhone, sticking up to the plug below that chair in that airport gate or in the venue. So that was a lesson that I will never forget. Always double check that you have your iPhone charger with you before you leave the house.
Rodney Hart: I couldn’t agree more. I had a similar situation where I was doing a virtual recording with my phone and it was going to be like 15 minutes, and the second we started going live, my phone gave me the low battery alert. So I’ve never, you know, that feeling of just watching that battery bar and trying to figure out how much more time you might actually have. I want to know how many chargers do you bring with you now? Because I’m guessing as an events person, you now over-prepare.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Exactly. I have the one meter, the half meter, I have disposable batteries. I go fully prepared now.
Rodney Hart: That’s great. So one of the elements that I like to cover on this series before we dive into the challenge is just in general, I feel like people always have an interesting story as to how they got into events. I think some people do it on purpose and I think a lot of people find themselves here. So I’d love to know, Ghazwan, how you got started working in the event industry.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Yeah, I think like the majority of people, I found myself here in events. It’s really rare to find someone who says, “I’m going to launch my career in event marketing right after college.” So I kind of worked my way through doing digital marketing as a start right after graduation, managing web marketing, email marketing, social marketing. I got a taste of multiple areas of digital marketing before I really started diving into the events world, where at Oracle, at my previous employer, I transitioned from doing international web marketing and then moved to the events team to manage the global demand generation of Oracle OpenWorld. Now it’s called CloudWorld, for North America and globally. And that was it for me to launch my career into events demand generation and communication.
Rodney Hart: That’s awesome. Oracle OpenWorld was also my first exposure. I think my first exposure to an event of that size just blew me away by how it took over the entire city. And no matter where you went, it was packed out. I’d love to know, was there any moment in that process of discovering events where you kind of fell in love with it? And if so, what is it about events that keeps you there?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Yeah, I think my favorite moment is when check-in officially happens and you see people walking in to grab their badges. That feeling that, yes, you are here today because you received the communication, you received the invitation that enticed you to sign up for this event and come join us in person, leaving everything behind, all the meetings, all the work, taking two or three days out of your week to be with us in the city during this event experience. And then people smiling, having a great time, learning, networking, building connections and so on.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, I think that’s so well said. That moment of seeing that spreadsheet translate to actual real people, or just that database of names and seeing what that looks like in person, can be an incredible experience. Over the course of your career, what’s been your primary focus areas and what led you ultimately to Docusign in your current role?
Ghazwan Almoazen: In general, I just love communication. I love seeing the conversions. People take an action after an invitation or after a social post they see on social media that clicks with them, motivates them to click, learn more, and take an action. Yes, I want to be part of this experience. Yes, I’m going to sign up for this event. And that’s how I kind of started. Then I joined Docusign a few years back to lead all the global demand gen for the digital and in-person marquee events for Docusign. One of them is Momentum, our flagship customer event held every spring in April.
Rodney Hart: And I know we’re going to talk a little bit more about a new event that you’re working on launching, and I’m really excited to address that. So you kind of came over to Docusign with a lot of different event experience and really demand gen experience. In your role now, I know the most interesting challenge that you’ve identified is launching a new digital customer event. I feel like digital events are such an interesting topic because we’re well past some of those pandemic-era timeframes where that was the only option. Tell me a little bit more about the event that you’re working on launching.
Ghazwan Almoazen: The event is happening next week. So you can imagine all the work is happening now, this week, in the last stretch.
Rodney Hart: Wow, that’s bold and you’re on this now. Okay, I love it.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Exactly. Back in April, we launched a new solution category, IAM, intelligent agreement management, that helps cloud software powered by AI manage agreements. Since that launch, customers, developers, and partners were leaning in to learn more about the progress we’ve been making since April. And that’s what led us to say, okay, let’s do a digital event where we update everyone about those launches, enhancements, and availability in the product. So we’re doing the Discover event. It’s a new muscle that we’re building at the company, open to all customers, partners, and developers across horizontal audiences. We’re trying to reach those audiences and show them how they can build more with Docusign and the IAM category that we launched.
Rodney Hart: And I know in the conversation we had, you said this is the creation of something new. What was like the need that you saw that this is addressing? And why a digital event versus another in-person event?
Ghazwan Almoazen: So the in-person event will always be there annually, but between that event and the next one, we need to reach our customers, partners, and developers with something easy-access and quick, where we give them a rundown about what’s available for them and what’s coming next after six months. I figured a digital event would solve for that. So that’s why we came up with, let’s do something digital until we meet again in person next April in New York City.
Rodney Hart: So it’s really meeting the audience somewhere in the middle between an annual flagship event, filling that gap of communication and updates. Do I have that right?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Exactly. And then Discover will also be an annual event happening in the fall. So Momentum in the spring and then Discover in the fall, and then the story continues 12 months around.
Rodney Hart: And so you said you’re a week away. Is this the official launch of this digital series? I’d love to know from an overall audience perspective. Is it a similar audience? Are you looking to target pretty much the same audience who would come in person?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Yes, exactly, North America and globally as well.
Rodney Hart: I’d be curious to know from a targeting perspective, how does that differ across audiences?
Ghazwan Almoazen: For digital audiences, you can try to reach everyone since they’ll be attending from their homes. They don’t have to worry about travel, booking airplanes, or hotels. So we try to reach the broader audience that we have, versus in-person where we start focusing on local audiences and the surrounding areas where we’re having that event. We also factor in engagement with us in the past, how many in-person events they’ve attended versus how many digital events. Online events obviously don’t have the full experience that in-person offers from learning, networking, and just being there with peers and coworkers.
Rodney Hart: And in terms of event marketing strategy, from the channels that you’re using, are they the same or different? How are you thinking about strategies around driving attendance and outreach?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Overall, the strategy was kind of the same, except for in-person events, you have more leeway in promotion and more room to play with content, because we’re announcing more sessions, more speakers, more networking, more activities. For the digital event, we typically have between three to four months to promote and market. You don’t need more than a few sends to the audience to get them engaged and to sign up, and then some reminders that the event is happening, to join us live or join us on demand after the event if it doesn’t fit their schedule.
Rodney Hart: And that was going to be my other question, which was cost. I’d love to get your thoughts in general around costs for virtual events. I know around the pandemic timeframe I was responsible for a number of different big events and trying to figure out the balance. I’m curious, is there a cost to attend this event, and what’s your strategy around that?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Great question. There is no cost to attend digital events, but there are always costs associated, and people tend to forget that digital events are almost as expensive as in-person events now. Recording events, editing, having your production agency, staffing, flying speakers in for the recording, doing rehearsals, getting ready for the big moment when they all come together and speak at the event. And there’s also the cost associated with paid marketing. For in-person events it tends to be a little higher than digital events, but nothing comes for free.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, it’s so true. I remember my first exposure to virtual events and digital events. I thought, “This will be easy compared to in-person.” No. From cost to execution to stress level, you have all of it the same.
Ghazwan Almoazen: It’s the same.
Rodney Hart: But I am curious, talking a little bit about event execution, I’ve seen different experiences. What’s the plan for the event experience and how do you plan to keep attendees engaged throughout?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Yeah, there’s always this rule of thumb that you should design your events around your audiences, not your audiences around your events. When you’re planning this content, make sure you have engaging content that attendees will want to listen to, learn from, share with their coworkers and networks, and that helps them do their jobs better every day. That’s really the number one key.
There’s also more communication needed, especially post-pandemic. We feel that we need to share more communication to get people more engaged and excited about attending. It’s a competitive industry. Everyone’s having their events. People used to say summer is a slow time for events, and we’re seeing more events happening during summer than before. So always cover all the bases with your communication, with your reminders, and market the event internally the same way you market it externally. Not everyone in the company would know the value of the event if the marketing person didn’t share that value with them and make it easy for them to drive registrations, do the follow-ups, and share with customers in their outreach.
Rodney Hart: And I’m curious about the format. What’s the length of time for this event?
Ghazwan Almoazen: About an hour or less.
Rodney Hart: And do you have recommendations for length of time in general? What’s too long? What should your expectation be for a virtual audience?
Ghazwan Almoazen: It all depends on the content. Typically, if you don’t have lots of breakout sessions to offer, between 40 and 60 minutes max would be ideal, leaving some time for Q&A and sharing perspectives with attendees online. If you have digital breakouts as well, shorten the keynote to 30 minutes, and make sure the breakouts aren’t longer than 20 minutes, with some break in between if you have more than four breakouts. Give the audience some time to relax and recharge for the next session. In the meantime, you can share additional resources, invite them to a digital lobby where they can network with other attendees. If there are sponsorships, make sure there’s a booth where they can check out the sponsors. It all depends on how big or small the digital event is.
Rodney Hart: Right. And here at RainFocus, I’m often thinking about registration strategies and how to go about that. How do you think of the digital registration process? Is it as short as possible? What data are you collecting?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Less is always more when it comes to registration for digital events. If you can just get away with email and first name, I would say go for that. In person is a different case because we have to get a little more information since they’re attending on site. We need emergency contact information, sometimes mailing addresses if we’re sending incentives or swag pre-event. But for digital, yes, shorter is better.
Rodney Hart: And I’d just be curious to get your reflection on pre-pandemic, pandemic, then post-pandemic. How have digital event execution strategies evolved? Are there any key learnings you’ve taken away from living in the post-pandemic era?
Ghazwan Almoazen: We’ve seen huge growth in digital events from 2020 forward. It’s not an option anymore. It’s a necessity. People are expecting to see something digital. If they cannot attend your in-person event, they will want to see something online, whether it’s a keynote, a digital breakout, a news announcement, whatever you can offer that fits the need and makes the experience better for those who cannot attend in person. There’s definitely still a strong place for digital events.
There are lots of digital events out there, so it’s key that you differentiate yourself with the content you’re offering and the communication you’re sharing. Engage with them, personalize your emails, make sure they’re scannable and fun. Just personalizing by first name, the way you would have seven years ago, doesn’t work anymore. You’ll see more emojis, more fun ways to present content from the sender line or the subject line and so on.
Rodney Hart: It’s funny because I love hearing that. I’m curious, working now at Docusign as director of communications and demand, have you sent emails with emojis?
Ghazwan Almoazen: I almost don’t send emails without emojis now.
Rodney Hart: That’s awesome. Do you remember the first email you sent that went out with an emoji?
Ghazwan Almoazen: I think that was two years ago when I added the first emoji to the subject line, the smiling face celebrating that we’re opening registration for Momentum. Then it goes into adding them to the body without overusing it, of course. Being tasteful about where it goes. It adds to the message, doesn’t take away from it.
Rodney Hart: I love it. So you’ve heard it here first. If Docusign can do it, I’m thinking for my own events we might have to put some more emojis in the subject line.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Give it personality. And also remember that we’re talking to humans. Yes, it’s B2B, but it’s human to human behind this B2B. That’s how you build the connection and how you resonate with your audiences.
Rodney Hart: That’s such a powerful reminder. At the end of the day, you are talking to other humans. The other thing I love is event measurement. I love event measurement so much that brand-new events always make me a little bit nervous because there’s no baseline. So I’d love to know, for this brand-new event, how are you looking to measure success?
Ghazwan Almoazen: I measure everything. I love data. I measure and track everything: registration, attendance, clicks, reach, conversions, traffic from the website, email, social, paid media, in-product communication, everything. And in the registration report, I know exactly every registrant, where they came from and when they registered. This helps me see the overall picture about which channel is working and what is not. Is email doing better or less? And how can I optimize for the next round of sends? That way I’m optimizing my campaigns in real time, not waiting until after the event.
Rodney Hart: And in that set of metrics, are there key ones you focus on? If you had to pick your favorite metric, what would it be?
Ghazwan Almoazen: That would definitely be conversion. Since I’m doing the marketing for the event, it’s the first step. How many people converted after getting the first email or the second email? How many more emails should I send? Should I send the third email to those who only opened emails one or two, or should I continue to hit the broader audience in my database? Depending on how many conversions I’m seeing, that defines the next steps in the campaign.
Rodney Hart: Anything surprising you’ve ever discovered looking at those measurements?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Don’t take anything for granted. What performed well three months ago shouldn’t necessarily perform the same way for this event or the next one. Always treat this campaign as if it’s your first campaign, your first event. Things are always changing. We’ve seen it across all channels. It fluctuates depending on what’s happening in the industry, what’s happening in the world at the time you’re running these campaigns. For example, we’re coming into the holidays now, people are getting more emails, and we’re seeing fewer conversions versus last month. Always treat it as your first campaign and your first event.
Rodney Hart: I feel like recently we did a survey and saw some diminishing show-up rates at digital events. Are you seeing that? And if not, is there something strategically you’re doing to address it?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Great question. I’ve seen that, and I’ve also seen that attendance rates go up when you have a celebrity speaker at your digital event. They won’t necessarily boost registration, but they will definitely boost attendance.
Rodney Hart: Oh, that’s fascinating. So everyone should carve out a little bit of budget for that celebrity speaker.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Exactly.
Rodney Hart: Awesome. All right. So it’s a week away. I’m going to set a reminder on my calendar to check in with you on how it all went. But I don’t want to let you go quite yet because I’ve got some other fun questions for you. We’re going to call this the lightning round segment. I’m going to throw some random questions at you and you just respond with the first thing that comes to mind. All right, who is your dream guest keynote speaker?
Ghazwan Almoazen: I want to say Michelle Obama. She’s been on our list for a long time. It hasn’t worked out quite yet, but I feel like everyone agrees that Michelle Obama is a great keynote speaker. I’d love to have her at one of our events.
Rodney Hart: True or false, you prefer small intimate events over large-scale ones.
Ghazwan Almoazen: I’m going to say true, surprisingly. Coming from Oracle where we had large events, 20,000 or 30,000 attending, I’m kind of liking smaller, intimate events more now. You can connect better one-on-one, you actually get to know people.
Rodney Hart: What is a book everyone should read?
Ghazwan Almoazen: “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” by Richard Carlson. In the event industry, you cannot control everything and everyone. You can only control your reaction to things. So that’s definitely a good book to keep handy.
Rodney Hart: Air travel, window seat or aisle seat?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Aisle seat, because all of my trips lately have been long hours.
Rodney Hart: I couldn’t agree more. If you could host an event anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. One of my favorite places. I’ve been there before and I can’t wait to go back.
Rodney Hart: Amazing. What is your favorite RainFocus feature?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Everything. I mean, RainFocus is an all-in-one platform. I’ll take the whole package.
Rodney Hart: Love it. True or false, you’ve hosted an event in more than three different countries.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Yeah, exactly. Add a zero next to it maybe.
Rodney Hart: What’s your current favorite mobile app?
Ghazwan Almoazen: TikTok, because recently I started using it to promote our events internally, create some excitement with our internal teams and the sales team. And the Calm app, of course.
Rodney Hart: Yeah, those are on the opposite side of the spectrum. You need the Calm to offset the TikTok. And finally, closing event party: live music or DJ?
Ghazwan Almoazen: Live music. The DJ does a good job throughout the day, but at the end of the day you just want to unwind and have some live music.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Do I get to ask you a question? If you were to go back in time, which decade would you choose and why?
Rodney Hart: Oh boy. I think I’d go back to the 70s because I think it’s an era, especially when I watch movies, that I’d really enjoy. And then I’d probably make a couple of investments based on what I know now.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Love that.
Rodney Hart: All right, before I let you go, I do have one final question. It’s the way we’ve ended all of our episodes so far. The event industry isn’t for the faint of heart. It can be stressful. The heart rate can go like crazy. But we both choose careers in this line of work. So I’d love to know, what’s your favorite piece of advice for fellow or aspiring event professionals?
Ghazwan Almoazen: I would say embrace it all. You’re not in it alone. Everyone is in it together. If we win, we win together. And if we win less, we also do that together. I don’t like to use the word “fail” because we will always learn from our experiences. And don’t forget to take care of yourself, especially the two weeks before the event. Remember that you come first and everything else can wait until you feel better, especially when you’re carrying that stress with an event happening in just a few days.
Rodney Hart: And I was just going to say, take care of yourself one week out from an event. Ghazwan, thank you so much for joining and participating. This was amazing and full of great insights. Thank you.
Ghazwan Almoazen: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure and I definitely enjoyed my time with you today, Rodney.
Rodney Hart: Awesome. And for those that are listening, thank you for joining another episode of Event Perspectives. If you’re curious about how you can participate, look at the link in the description and there is a place for you to let me know that you’d like to be on one. All you need to know is what’s the most interesting challenge that you’re working on. Thank you very much and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
