If you could wave a magic wand what vital information would you want to know about the visitors to your event?
Perhaps what social media they use or how they use social media in their buying decisions or more in-depth information such as which visitors are most influential on social media.
As part of our ‘Culture of Curiosity’ series, we have explored the ‘7 Tips to Audience Insight Success for Event Organisers’ and the “Urge to Merge Your Data,” and the value of your data from a variety of important sources especially for an event organiser looking to understand their attendee audience. Connecting the dots between what content your audience consumes and how it translates into value has been the holy grail for a long time. The holy grail is upon us.
Historically gaining access to this data was a difficult task. Multiple programmes would be working concurrently pulling key strands of data and storing them in different places. This resulted in companies and certainly event professionals having to jump from platform to platform to gather what they need, losing time and have a segmented picture of events rather than an accurate picture of events.
Emerging technology and changing times mean that gaining access to your event data today is a much less complicated process. There is a myriad of tools available to provide you with the information and insights you are looking for all managed in one place and providing you with analytics and insights to help your commercial and marketing teams to meet their objectives now.
There has been ‘data, data everywhere and not a drop of insight.’ These systems can bring together insights to tell a story about your event, understand your data and audience on a deeper level and ask questions that deliver the information you need at the drop of a hat.
Journey of Modernisation
Leading companies, brands and household names, not just in the events sector, are on a journey of modernisation when it comes to how they store, access and engage with their customer data.
The end goal along this journey is to have a future-proof, agile, cost-effective solution that allows them to also incorporate new technologies such as artificial intelligence, conversational BI and other cognitive solutions into the mix. This journey can only begin when creating a culture of curiosity within your organisation. This culture ensures that it is within the DNA of an organisation to find the most relevant information, allowing you to pinpoint and act upon key trends.
Imagine giving your project and sales management team the ability to make advanced decisions based on trusted information and how this would benefit the overall event performance. For example: being able to profile an event attendee and categorise them based on their activity online and how they have engaged with you digitally, a real benefit when you are tailoring your speaker sessions to appeal to your audience.
Within any organisation, there is a management structure which requires stakeholders and decision makers to seek information from other members of the team that perhaps on a day-to-day basis they don’t work with.
Tools such as conversational BI would allow you to simply ask the question of your data within a platform that would quickly result in giving a un-emotive factual answer instead of a delayed response because team members are busy trying to pull the information from spreadsheets or multiple systems.
New technologies mean that you can let your people do the things that people are good at, such as creative campaigns, yet be armed with the data to sell more services and to be able to tailor the experience for your event attendees so it feels bespoke and real to them and truly what they are interested in.
The information can also be used to come up with new revenue streams that will be appealing to new exhibitors and sponsors and offer a greater return on investment while providing the attendee with a better experience.
We often fall into the pattern of simply building reports based on the information we think we need to know and then delivering those reports upwards instead of being able to find and ask questions when there is a requirement in the moment.
Reactive requests for quick information to make important decisions that could have a big impact on your event can be made in minutes as opposed to days with modern technology.
Given this new speed of transaction, your team can get on with the job at hand and not waste precious man-hours and resources trying to find information to make better decisions and be more effective using the insights you have quickly gathered to meet your objectives for the event.
From artificial intelligence to machines that learn, cognitive intelligence, conversational BI and chatbots technology are all set to change the way we construct our events in the future.