Event Professionals: Tips on Scaling Your Enterprise Event Program
Marketers and Event Professionals: are you working for your corporate events or are your events working for you? Phrased differently, are you leveraging events and event technology to their full potential? According to Engaging Events, 91% of event professionals stated that increasing engagement at their events was a top priority for their organization, which means that in the world of B2B events, there is a lot of room for improvement. In our infographic below, Events: From Rock Bottom to Rocking ROI, we cover how events have evolved and what best practices you should have in place to rock your next event.
Event management has come a long way since the 90’s, from paper check-in and manual exporting of excel sheets and registrant lists, to leveraging fully-integrated, cross-channel event and marketing automation systems that capture rich attendee data and launch personalized follow-up campaigns that convert prospects into customers. Below are ways that you can you make sure that your events aren’t just keeping up with the times, but ahead of them.
Let’s Get Digital
Offline events are no longer offline. Stay with me here. While developing in-person relationships with your prospects is definitely a strength of face-to-face events, that’s only one step in the buyer’s journey. Rather, events are part of a rich digital ecosystem. Events can fuel your entire marketing strategy, from capturing leads, to rich attendee insights like: how many prospects visited your booth, what product demos were most popular, and which sessions were well-attended.
Beyond the capturing of attendee data, event and marketing automation systems can send triggered email campaigns or notifications to your CRM to alert sales teams to follow-up with prospects based on attendee behavior and interest level. Triggered email messages get 119% higher click-through rates than batch and blast emails. Batch and blast emails are now an outdated form of event marketing, as marketing and event automation enable highly targeted and personalized emails to be delivered based on attendee actions and engagement. So make sure you stay ahead of event marketing trends, and leverage the data captured in your event and marketing automation systems to fuel all aspects of your digital marketing efforts.
Increase Engagement with Easy-to-Use Event Apps
Have you ever been at an event and been unable to find your registration information or a digital schedule of sessions and keynotes? According to Marketing Charts, 88% of event attendees believe that easy-access to meeting or event schedules in an event app is essential. Event Automation and event apps focus on the attendee and user experience. Both make it easy to create scheduling changes, access your event and appointment information, and provide a seamless user experience.
By leveraging event technology, you place the customer experience front and center. You also make it easy for your attendees to engage with your events. Live polling features on your event app also enable marketers to capture even more information about audience participation, booth visits, and event attendance. First, identify the questions you want to ask event participants ahead of time, and later, use the captured data to inform future event planning decisions.
Not only have events evolved, but so has the way we market our events. With marketing and event automation in the event marketing mix, events have gone fully digital. When events are fully integrated with your marketing technology stack, marketers and event professionals can grow their event program and scale their events in size, attendance, and number of locations. To find out how you can rock the world of event ROI, read our Events: From Rock Bottom to Rocking ROI below!
