As events continue to grow in popularity, they’re earning a larger slice of marketing budgets. Forrester Research reports that roughly 25 percent of the average B2B marketing budget goes to events, underscoring their value and impact. As the modern marketing mix evolves to a blend of digital strategy, technology, and systems, many still view events as outside the integrated marketing sphere. This is where event technology can help.
Incorporate Technology into Events
The best route to making events part of the integrated marketing mix is to incorporate technology into your live events so that they become part of your overall digital arsenal.
Conferences, sales meetings, and other events create multiple in-person touchpoints to help speed sales. And, the right event technology can help capture attendee data and insights across the full lifecycle of an event, from registration to onsite activity, survey responses, and the sales process. Unfortunately, many organisations are not set up to use this data. That means that they’re missing out on rich insights and customer relationships.
Power of Live Events
Live events help improve prospect profiling and lead scoring by supplying missing information to round out buyer profiles. To start, blend live event data with known information about attendees from online interactions and social engagements. You will create richer experiences for attendees while providing data for event managers and marketers to help build tighter customer bonds.
Bridging the Divide
Define the Right Data to Collect
Some events offer opportunities to collect more information than others. Know your events and the event lifecycle to collect the right information at the right time.
Align Internally
Marketing and sales need to align with events to maximise leads. This ensures collecting the right information at registration on through to onsite engagement tracking at events.
Break Down Barriers
Events should be thought of as a touchpoint within an integrated set of marketing tactics and programmes that map to the buyer’s journey.
Harness Technology
Integrating the data captured from your event into Marketing Automation Tools and CRM systems opens a new world for event planners and marketers. Strategic integrations provide a 360-degree view of attendees so that you can refine and personalise event experiences to accelerate buying. Build rich event data into your existing systems to determine how events drive key behaviours. This insight ties event investments to revenues, providing a clearer read of data’s impact on marketing.
For more information, see The Power of Live Event Data.
