Events have evolved to play a pivotal role in enterprise strategies, serving a multitude of purposes, ranging from nurturing stronger connections to enhancing brand identity and generating leads. Organizations achieving tangible business results from events do so by crafting a robust event strategy, harnessing the power of event data for maximum impact, and making strategic investments in event technology.
In this blog, we will delve into the evolving role of events as strategic tools that drive business growth, foster innovation, and enhance brand value. We examine the challenges and opportunities faced by enterprises in leveraging events effectively and provide insights into redefining the event landscape for maximum impact.
The Importance of Event Technology for Enterprise Growth
The role of events in fostering enterprise growth is multifaceted and increasingly pivotal in today’s business landscape. According to Eventbrite, 85% of marketers believe that events are essential for their company’s success.
Below, we’ve highlighted a few ways events can help enterprises:
1. Amplify Audience Engagement: Event technology empowers marketing executives to create captivating and interactive experiences that resonate with attendees, fostering stronger connections between the brand and its customers.
2. Utilize Data-Driven Insights: With event technology, enterprise marketers gain valuable data on attendee behavior and preferences, enabling them to make informed decisions, fine-tune marketing strategies, and optimize future events for maximum impact.
3. Personalized Experiences: Event technology allows enterprise marketers to tailor event experiences to individual attendees, offering personalized agendas, content recommendations, and engagement opportunities that leave a lasting impression.
4. Boost Lead Generation and Conversion: Events serve as excellent lead generation platforms, and event technology streamlines the process, making it easier to capture and qualify leads – this is necessary for segmentation, tracking, and messaging purposes. Integrated CRM systems further facilitate effective follow-up lead nurturing and conversion.
5. Enhance Brand Visibility: Leveraging event technology, enterprise marketers can showcase their brand and offerings to a targeted audience, while social media integration helps extend brand visibility beyond the event itself.
6. Stay Ahead of the Competition: By embracing event technology, enterprise marketers demonstrate their commitment to innovation, giving their brand a competitive edge through cutting-edge event experiences.
7. Adapt to Changing Market Trends: Event technology allows marketing executives to be agile and responsive to evolving consumer preferences, accommodating virtual and hybrid events to meet the changing demands of their audience.
8. Access Global Audiences: Virtual events enabled by event technology eliminate geographical barriers, granting marketing executives access to a global audience without the constraints of physical travel.
9. Measure ROI Effectively: Event technology provides robust analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling marketing executives to gauge the success of their events accurately and justify event budgets with tangible ROI data.
10. Foster Creativity and Innovation: Event technology encourages marketing executives to think creatively, pushing the boundaries of event design by incorporating gamification, augmented reality, and other innovative elements.
11. End-to-end Event Management Platform: Consolidating various solutions and capabilities (from event creation to engagement app to analytics) into a unified platform.
12. Advanced Event Data Analytics and Reporting: Essential for monitoring campaign efficiency & event ROI across all event types and the entire event portfolio, globally. Additionally, analytics customization ensures clear and consistent communication of the corporate brand, performance indicators, and reporting needs, etc.
Shifting Perceptions: From Cost Centers to Revenue Generators
Events offer your team a front-row seat to your prospects’ discussions, reactions and perspectives. Virtual events produce even more data points to understand your prospects’ points of view, pain points and outlook. Use this data to inform the development of sales strategies, attendee follow-up and future event content. You can use events to fuel new leads and contacts for a marketing team’s customer relationship management. The data you use to personalize attendee experiences also has a lot of potential to accelerate your sales pipeline. Attendee activity data—from the sessions attended to the polls responded—enables sales teams to segment participants based on engagement levels and customized post-event outreach.
During outreach, you can determine whether high engagement levels translate into a sales-qualified lead, maximizing conversion success and informing future sales strategies. The technology you use should allow your sales team to seamlessly act on data so they can focus their time and efforts on highly engaged leads.
It’s important to understand that great marketing events start with data and the right tools. They need insight into global events so that they can take action in real-time to boost revenue.
Data Security, Privacy & Compliance Implications
A survey by Eventsforce found that 87% of event professionals consider data security a top concern in event planning. The technology that an enterprise level organization depends on needs to rise to the occasion. Without a platform’s security, compliance, and availability, your event may not be a success. The event platform must take care of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the events – ones that keep your event data safe. Security, privacy, scalability, and availability must be at the heart of what an event technology provider supports. It should enable an enterprise to launch successful events with the highest levels of security and compliance.
Enterprise grade platforms support security and regulation compliance so you don’t have to worry about it. They incorporate specialists from around the globe to ensure those pragmatics are addressed within the platform. GDPR, state privacy laws, cybersecurity laws and StateRAMP are a few of U.S. security and compliance regulations impacting events. The US regulations constantly keep changing due to a number of factors.
Enterprise grade event management platforms stay on top of changes and handles all of this, reducing the regulatory risks for your organization. When choosing event management software, look for certifications that ensure an organization has a baseline security program that aligns with industry standards.
The Importance of Enterprise Scalability
Enterprise organizations, in particular, should look for an event management platform that’s feature-rich and highly configurable. The larger the events, the more likely you are to run into scalability issues. Failure to design for scale can lead to attendees not being able to join or participate. Network latency issues can make an online event unbearable. Worst-case scenario: The platform drops every time it exceeds the user threshold. An enterprise system identifies scalability problems before they occur.
Enterprises can redefine their event landscape to harness the full potential of events as powerful tools for achieving their objectives. Certain is an enterprise event management and intelligence platform that helps marketers create highly effective and engaging events that generate and convert leads with rich buying signals and attendee insights to improve sales and marketing outcomes. To learn more, contact us for a free consultation with one of our event experts.