EVENT MARKETING

 

How Event Marketing Can Turn Your Event into a Goldmine

Imagine if you had a crystal ball, and with it, the ability to predict which of your first time website visitors is mostly likely to generate megabucks for your event and exhibitors… What if you were able to seriously increase the number of these highly profitable customers attending your show?

...You would turn your event into a goldmine for each stakeholder.

There is a way to make this happen… you could identify the profiles of desirable clients, and use this information to prepare your Event Marketing mix to attract and identify them as soon as they tap into your website or call center.  Unfortunately this method is not very efficient, since each record in the database could have hundreds or even thousands of fields. A situation like this can easily become a million-data issue, too difficult to analyze.

This is when Business Intelligence proves invaluable. Business Intelligence (Data Mining applied exclusively to business matters) is a collection of mathematical tools for examining large amounts of data in search of useful patterns. The goal is to build rules.

This process is what we have termed “Science Marketing for Events”, the development and implementation of Event Marketing strategies and activities based on business intelligence discoveries.

In this way, Event Marketing will be able to turn knowledge into a number of selected actions designed to:

    • Engage potential buyers with event content
    • Attract more attendees
    • Increase e-mail opening rates
    • Create conferences and events based on preferences
    • Improve database management

Event Marketing

The final goal is to turn these actions into value for the event, exhibitors, attendees and the industry itself. Such value should be recognizable as:

    • Incresing knowledge about the market
    • Becoming a recognized reference in the industry
    • Establishing higher barriers to competence
    • Enhancing offer and demand encounter
    • Increasing ROI and value

Trade shows are recognized as powerful direct marketing tools, which enable companies of all sizes to meet their goals of exposure, product presentation, lead generation, sales and ROI. It’s no surprise that Event Marketing has been shown to be the most significant task for any successful show organizer, since he is directly responsible for the number and quality of potential attendees, a key performance indicator (KPI) used to measure the effectiveness of events.

However, attendance growth rates have stalled since the last recession. Attendee behavior has clearly changed due to the economy, but also because of new trends in the use of technology and information.

In 2009, Kara Horner from expoweb.com discussed the challenges faced by events:

  • Motivate potential buyers to take time away from their jobs to attend the event
  • Increase the number of new attendees and retention year after year
  • Keep an event fresh through messages
  • Persuade attendees to open e-mails
  • Effectively manage databases

Even though these challenges were described during the worst part of the recession, they still remain valid today.

To overcome these challenges permanently, science should be embraced by show organizers in order to better understand their attendees, focus their strategies and increase ROI. Due to the amount of data generated, we propose the use of Business Intelligence to provide guidelines for Event Marketing to reach their goals.

After our 20 years of experience in trade show registration, we are well aware of the huge amount of data generated by attendee behavior. The implication is that thousands or even millions of small bits of collected data can be turned into useful information or knowledge using today's mathematical and computer power.