Do you really know your attendees’ priorities and preferences? Do you know how to make use of the data that you do have? This may finally be the year to pull that data together.
“Leveraging technology to improve attendee engagement and drive strategy through data capture will be key for 2017,” says Cate Banfield, director of event solution design, BCD Meetings & Events. Meeting technology expert Corbin Ball agrees: “With the recent explosion of onsite data collection and analytics tools, meetings will no longer be the ‘black hole’ of marketing analytics. Events and trade shows are beginning to provide a goldmine of data detailing attendee preferences, interests, movements, and interactions.”
How does that look in the real world?
1. Polling attendees as part of the registration process in an event management system provides personalized information and helps identify preferences and interests. An event organizer can use this information to send targeted communications pre, during, and post event via social channels or the event’s mobile app.
2. Mobile apps are collecting big data from attendees and providing an opportunity to boost lead generation, facilitate in-session polling (resulting in higher engagement), and aggregate social media posts. In addition to apps, tracking tools like beacons and badges that use near-field communication (NFC), RFID, or QR codes are capturing attendee data.
3. In the most robust mobile apps, integration with customer relationship management software, like SilverPop, Eloqua, and Marketo (the latter was purchased in May 2016 by Vista Equity Parters, which now owns Cvent/Lanyon) makes the most of an attendees’ digital footprint captured during an event.
