The event technology you use to design, organize, and execute events can serve as a powerful tool to collect rich attendee data. Marketing events give you the opportunity to build deep attendee profiles, measure engagement, and gauge interests.
According to a study by Live Marketing, 83% of brands say their #1 reason for running events is to increase sales. By capturing attendee data and feeding it to your marketing automation platform efficiently, you can enrich your understanding of what is most likely to drive leads to the next step in their buying process.
And you can act on this information to effectively convert more leads to customers through timely, personalized, and relevant nurturing. So, how can you use event data to convert more event leads to customers? Read on to learn about the steps you need to take to achieve this.
1. Use What you Already Know
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Chances are you already know a lot about the people you’re inviting to your event. Pull that information directly from your marketing automation or CRM system into your event management platform. Use the data to start segmenting and understanding your prospective attendees, predict their interests, and personalize your pre-event outreach.
2. Be Smart About Registration
Use the event registration process to deepen your attendee profiles. Use smart registration forms to automatically pre-populate fields with “known” details. Utilize progressive profiling to ask the “next logical question”. Ask about areas of interest, event goals, current product usage, or dig deeper into profile characteristics such as job title, company revenue, and purchase history. The more you know, the more you can tailor your event to the needs of your attendees.
3. Get Personal
Events can be personalized just like your digital marketing channels. Your attendees want an event that is designed for their unique needs and goals. Use what you’ve learned about each attendee to recommend the sessions and activities that are most likely to appeal to them. The more personalized you get, the more your attendees will be engaged with your event and your brand. And that’s good news for your sales cycle!
4. Create Connections
Events are all about getting face-to-face with people who share similar interests and goals. Help your attendees connect, not only with your company representatives but also with each other. Use self-scheduled or automated appointment matching to help attendees make the most of their time at your event. And help yourself in the process by using these in-person meetings to propel your attendees through their buying process.
5. Tag and Score Attendee Interest Areas
Attendees can tell you a lot about their interests by the sessions they attend or the meetings they accept. Use your event management software to tag various attendee activities by interest. Did an attendee sign up to attend a session on marketing revenue attribution? You may want to adjust her score accordingly and tailor your follow-up content to expand her interest in this area.
6. Get Real-time
If you’re tracking attendee activities at your event, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using what you know to immediately target sales and marketing follow up activities at the event. A large software company recently used real-time attendee data at their flagship conference to target attendees out on the event floor via text messaging and hot leads were approached by sales reps. With this approach of using real-time event data, the company was able to drastically cut sales cycle time.
7. Continue the Conversation Post-Event
With everything we’ve talked about in the steps above, you can start to imagine the depth of information and insight you will have collected by the end of your event. Use the insights about the sessions your prospects have attended, the appointments they made, the exhibits they visited and the reactions they had to each. Then craft personalized and meaningful post-event follow up.
Ready to Start Planning your Next Event?
All of the steps we’ve presented in this blog point back to one big key to success: integrating your event data with your sales and marketing automation technology.
Certain is the leading enterprise event management and intelligence platform that helps data-driven marketers integrate rich buying signals and attendee insights to improve sales and marketing outcomes. Certain’s end-to-end event management software will enable you to seamlessly incorporate the 7 steps we discussed above into your next event and see how you can generate and convert more leads your events. Contact us for a free consultation with one of our event experts.