By creating a 360-degree event experience around engagement and personalization, you can transform events and conferences into in revenue and insight engines.
When’s the last time a conference or event had a profound impact on your professional life? When’s the last time you found yourself thinking about something you learned or experienced at an event weeks or months after attending?
Unfortunately, most industry confabs are one-dimensional, annual fire hoses of information and activities that leave very little impact after your Uber to the airport.
With the relentless competition for mindshare and attention, your events need to be immersive, memorable, relevant, and connective. Impactful events imbue a sense of community and create meaningful, relevant connections that last well beyond the final session.
How do you facilitate impactful events? Start by thinking outside of the time box. Think of events as ongoing experiences that happen to have a live, in-person, or virtual component at some point during the year.
Engagement and interaction should be happening before, during, and after the live event. We’ve created a helpful 360-degree framework for events to foster greater engagement, greater sponsor participation, lasting value for attendees, actionable data and insights, and subsequently more revenue.
Our work with some of the largest producers of conferences, events, expos, and trade shows has informed this revenue-driven approach to maximizing the return on investment in events and event marketing.
This approach focuses on creating discrete interactive content experiences throughout the event lifecycle to gather useful market intelligence, provide value to sponsors and exhibitors, and surface actionable intent and interest data from attendees.
Leverage compelling interactions and journeys that help prospective registrants uncover their reason for attending. Build in share features to amplify your reach, help prospects seek supervisory/budget approval for attending, and even facilitate meetings in person at the event.
Create interactive experiences that build communities around shared interests, major event topics, or types of attendees. It’s a great way to bring people together and make your event an important catalyst for creating professional relationships that matter.
Use pre-event interactions with prospective attendees to uncover the topics, issues, vendors, and concerns that are important to them. Then, use that data to develop can’t-miss sessions, speakers, and networking opportunities. These interactions can surface actionable data on attendee interests, goals, and needs that can fuel connections among attendees as well as with sponsors, speakers, and exhibitors.
People love to learn. Make educational experiences central aspects of your event. Use quizzes and assessments to uncover attendee knowledge gaps, show how they stack up against their peers on key topics, and point them to relevant services, exhibitors, and sponsors. Leverage live, real-time response and gaming features during sessions to solicit instant feedback, facilitate audience participation, and even spark a little competitive fun.
Develop data-driven sponsorships that drive new revenue by matching sponsors and exhibitors with highly qualified attendees. Sponsors and exhibitors will pay a premium for excellent sales intelligence. Don’t rely on attendees stumbling their way through the exhibition hall; give them precision guidance through personalization-focused interactive experiences—all based on their specific interests, needs, and goals.
Don’t stop engaging the minute people head to the airport. Create post-event interactions that collect feedback, solicit ideas, and keep your event and services top of mind all year long. Create experiences that continue the conversation, extend sponsor revenue opportunities, and capture zero-party data to better inform business decision-making.
Leverage the framework to create small, strategic “moments of interaction” to drive engagement and capture data. They’ll roll up into a cohesive, interactive event experience that creates new revenue streams and provides memorable value for attendees.
