Goldcast

Since 2020, MarDreamin’, one of the largest virtual Salesforce-focused education events for marketers, put on by Sercante, has brought incredibly exciting content to the Salesforce ecosystem. The goal of this event is to bring relevant thought leadership content to all marketers on the Salesforce platform around the globe for free to help the marketing community grow their skills and sprout connections between users.

When the time came to look for a new platform to produce and scale this event, the MarDreamin’ planning team chose Goldcast. Thankfully, Goldcast’s customer service, ease of use, and customization quickly won the hearts of the planning team, who were first onboarded to Goldcast in 2022 and have continued to use the platform through 2023 and beyond for their flagship MarDreamin’ virtual conference. In 2023, they hosted more than 65 virtual sessions throughout the week, with 100 speakers, and over 2,000 registrants worldwide.

The MarDreamin’ team was ready for a change!

“The #1 issue we had was getting the event set up on time due to the logistics involved with having to plan a multi-day and multi-session event.,” explained Marcos. Overall, the team was trying to solve how to be able to streamline the setup process, have more control over the event, and have the ability to collect more data to guide their future events.

When it came time to look for a new virtual event platform, the team had very specific goals in mind. “Our key goals included: faster setup time, better ease of use for our partners and attendees, and more analytics to be able to customize future messaging,” said Marcos. Luckily, Goldcast delivered on all three fronts and a lot more!

After challenging past experiences, the MarDreamin’ team was ready to find a platform that could minimize the time spent building their event, and provide the service and support they needed.

Hosting a multi-day, multi-track event with more than 65 sessions and 100 speakers is no easy feat. Getting access to stable, timely, and consistent support was a huge win for the MarDreamin’ team. Better together - the MarDreaming team alongside Goldcast produced a winning combination!

The MarDreamin’ team has been beyond impressed with the level of support they’ve received from Goldcast over the past two years. From their Customer Success Manager to various support team members, they’ve been wowed with every interaction they’ve had with the Goldcast team. So much so that Marcos even gave his Customer Success Manager, Kaitlyn Herzog, a public shoutout:

“When it comes to Goldcast, I think you're the Chick-fil-A of events in terms of the service,” stated Marcos.

In the past, the planning team had to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours on event setup. With a small team and one huge event, they needed to find an event platform that could make event setup and management easier and less time-intensive.

One way the platform made event management easy was through the email builder. Marcos explained:

Another feature the MarDreamin’ team loves is the automatic calendar invites. “The ability to add the event to the registrant's calendar is huge to ensure that people don't forget to attend” stated Marcos. “Goldcast is one of the only platforms that offers this, and the team has seen an increase in attendance because of this. It’s also helped us increase the time our attendees spend engaging with us across the time of our event by over one hour.”

Overall, the team found Goldcast’s UI much more intuitive than other platforms across all segments of users: speakers, backend users, and audience members alike. Marcos said, “The platform is super easy to set up and customize, we are so lucky to be using it now!”

Because MarDreamin’ targets marketers using Salesforce, the event look, feel, and experience are incredibly important to all those involved.

“One of the features that we were hoping to benefit from a customer experience was the sleek Netflix-like redirections and tracks. And it has worked out great! Goldcast has one of the easiest ways to bundle sessions into tracks that we have experienced,” explained Marcos.

He goes on to explain how the Netflix-like event experience makes an impact:

“We were hopeful we could not only elevate our production value for this event but also bring the content to a wider audience and be truly global,” shared Marcos. And the platform delivered! MarDreamin’ has hosted event attendees from more than 65 countries.

“This feature has helped us increase the time our attendees spend engaging with us across the time of our event by over one hour.”

The transition to Goldcast was like night and day when it came to event setup. A huge issue in the past for the team was how much time and effort they had to put into setting up MarDreamin’ across all their digital properties. Complicated backend functionality put a dent in their ability to move quickly and scale. Goldcast eliminated all these issues.

MarDreamin’ Event Success Metrics Using Goldcast

• 600+ hours saved on event creation and execution by switching to Goldcast (in year one)
• 89% reduction in event and technical troubleshooting requests from event attendees by switching to Goldcast
• 43% increase in sessions attended per attendee from 2021 to 2023

A large event like MarDreamin’ takes time to develop and execute, but the MarDreamin’ planning team was blown away by how much time they were truly wasting after they saw the Goldcast difference.

“In 2021, executing this event called for roughly 2,500 resource hours to run from start to finish In 2022, the first year we switched to Goldcast, the same event took us 1,900 hours to run as a whole. In 2023, we continued to use Goldcast and it took us roughly 300 fewer hours to execute” shared Marcos. That’s a savings of 600+ hours when switching to Goldcast! Not to mention how knowing the platform and new product improvements have allowed the team to save another approximately 300 hours the following year.

“Although these numbers encompass everything needed to plan, setup, and execute a successful event, Goldcast has allowed us to focus less on setup and more on building a dynamic user experience for our audience.”

Goldcast has helped reduce the time invested across multiple categories:

• Event platform setup
• Reporting
• Day-of troubleshooting
• Answering questions via email/cases

Thanks to these time savings, the team can focus more time and effort on providing their speakers, sponsors, and attendees with the white-glove service that sets this incredible event apart.

“Year after year we hear things like you bring the white glove service to every event, or awesome speaker experience, etc.” Many sponsors have called the MarDreamin’ sponsor experience one of the best in the market, at a fraction of the price.“The Goldcast platform is a clean canvas and we've been able to use it for this event quite well,” shared Marcos.

Goldcast has made event setup, registration, speaker access, and entry to the event from an attendee perspective so much easier across the board. This has led the MarDreamin’ team to have a more robust and streamlined attendee experience with fewer technical issues.

This one is important because most of the issues the team had in the past had to do with technical problems that the team had no control over. Goldcast has pretty much made these disappear so we can focus on executing a successful event.

Marcos explained the impact this has had:

Marcos believes the time savings and limited technical issues can be attributed to Goldcast’s ease of use, making it simple for anyone at MarDreamin’ to learn. “Goldcast is just so streamlined and so simple to use. Anyone on our team feels confident enough to log in and make an edit at a moment’s notice.”

Previously, Marcos had such a limited view of audience engagement, interactions, and feedback that he couldn’t report on many stats at all. Goldcast changed all of this.

“With data from year over year, we were able to plan better and produce more content each year that is tailored to our audience. This has led to a more engaged audience and longer watch times, across our event,” shared Marcos.

With so many sessions, tracks, and speakers, the MarDreamin’ team sits on a mountain of amazing content for marketers looking to advance their skills and get the most out of their martech stack. Yet with a small team, they haven’t been able to reuse, repurpose, and reshare the event content as much as they’d like.

That’s where Goldcast’s Content Lab comes in, an AI-powered editing suite to turn your events into a multi-channel content strategy. It uses AI to automatically clip video snippets, produce robust blog content, and more.

“Content Lab is the feature I am the most excited to start experimenting with in 2024. I saw a demo a few weeks back and it looks awesome. I do think this is going to be a game-changer for Goldcast and many of its customers. I think where a lot of marketers struggle with events is the follow-up, and I think this has an amazing promise for demand generation folks and marketers to keep the conversation going online after an event.”

Hosting a large-scale, multi-day virtual event can be a heavy lift, but with Goldcast as their virtual event platform of choice, the team at MarDreamin’ is confident they can deliver year after year.

Thanks to its superb customer service, ease of use, engaging features, robust analytics, and Netflix-like streaming experience, the MarDreamin’ team knows they have finally found a virtual event platform they can trust and rely on. “MarDreamin’ is a staple event for the Salesforce marketing community specifically and we hope to continue to grow it out on Goldcast,” said Marcos.The MarDreamin’ team's insights into the Salesforce community coupled with Goldcast's leading event platform will continue to yield a strong event for years to come.