The dizzying array of potential opportunities to collect and utilize data can be intimidating to the uninitiated, but understanding data's potential is vital for event experience managers in the age of disruption.

The transformation that the events industry is about to undertake is not unlike the one that advertising went through in the mid-1990s, as it made the jump from television, radio, billboards, and fliers to digital advertising channels like banner ads and social media content.

As with most jumps from the physical to the virtual world, digital advertising began by taking traditional ad content and simply moving it online. Instead of posting a billboard on the side of a highway, early digital advertising sought to place a version of that same billboard at the top of a popular web page. The key difference was that users could interact with the ad. Specifically, they could click on it in order to be taken to the advertisers' website or landing page.

The first banner ad was launched on October 27, 1994, on a website called HotWired, Wired magazine's online offshoot at the time. The website charged advertisers an upfront fee to place a banner ad on the site for three months, similar to a traditional magazine or billboard ad.

Soon after, advertisers realized that they didn't need to serve the same ad to every single visitor on the website; they could actually increase the effectiveness of each advertisement they served by targeting specific consumer demographics. In 1995, Boca Raton, Florida–based digital ad agency WebConnect began helping clients identify their ideal customers' online activity, and only served ads to users who met certain criteria. The company also allowed its clients to set a limit on how many times a particular user was shown the same ad. After all, if the user didn't click on the ad the first 10 times they saw it, why should they pay for the 11th?

Then in 1996, New York City–based digital advertising agency DoubleClick launched a new and revolutionary service that would allow advertisers to track not only how many people viewed a specific ad on a specific website, but how many times the same ad was seen and clicked on across multiple websites. This allowed advertisers to track the effectiveness of their ad across the Internet in real time and make changes to their campaigns to optimize their returns. If an ad was performing well with a certain demographic, or on a certain type of website, the advertiser could change its visibility accordingly, and thus improve their return on investment. This process gave way to a new and more dynamic pricing model and introduced the concept of cost per mille (CPM, a thousand impressions).

Through the mid-2000s, with the rise of social media and online search platforms, advertisers had new ways of reaching the right audiences with the right messaging at the right time. The trove of data that became available about each individual user through increased online activity made it easier to target ads accordingly. Now advertisers had the tools to serve ads only to those who were most likely to convert into a sale, on the platform that was most likely to reach them, using the most effective messaging for that user type. Today, digital advertising has come to be seen as more valuable than traditional advertising for its ability to effectively target the users, to be flexible and adaptable in real time, and (ultimately) to improve ROI.

What took the advertising industry a quarter of a century to achieve is now being pursued by the events industry in a much more condensed time frame, as the desire to leverage data effectively is likewise unfolding.

According to a study we conducted in 2019, 60 percent of enterprise leaders believe events are the most critical marketing channel for achieving business goals, but 54 percent struggle to prove their return on investment. The event success strategy of the past involved gathering a large audience and exposing them all to the same messaging, not unlike traditional advertisements.

Like the switch from billboards to banner ads, the transition from entirely in-person events to hybrid and virtual events will generate valuable data and insights about user behaviors that will serve to improve their performance. Using data, events themselves will become as targeted as online ads.

The days of simply accepting that events work without any means of measuring and optimizing their performance—accepting the “black box” as fact—are over. In its wake will be a new era of events, one that similarly targets the right users with the right messaging at the right time to optimize and improve ROE.

Informing Event Strategy

Let's take a basic example that will be familiar to organizers in every category. Let's say you're running a flagship event in three weeks and only 40 percent of your attendees from the previous year have registered. At this point, you just might be on the verge of panicking—until you go back into the data from previous years and find that 60 percent of your registrations typically occur in the two weeks before the event. Knowing that information can give you some peace of mind and prevent you from making any rash decisions before the anticipated spike.

Now let's say you want to break that pattern next year, so you start looking at the data from previous years and find that only 10 percent of registrants take advantage of early bird ticket sales. With this insight in mind, you can begin to investigate why.

With just a small amount of data about registration patterns, coupled with some insights into your target market, you could solve a major challenge for your event. Perhaps your early bird pricing isn't enticing enough to attendees, and so you decide to lower the price. Perhaps your early bird sale isn't being advertised effectively, and in post-event surveys you discover that a majority of your attendees weren't aware such a sale existed, so you decide to run a marketing campaign to advertise the sale next year. Perhaps the data suggests that your audience members typically don't pay for their own registrations and don't really care about the price. One outcome from this analysis may be that you decide to offer exclusive perks to your first 100 registrants, like a backstage pass with the keynote speaker, in order to drive up that early bird registration.

While this data was available to event organizers in the pre-COVID era, the type of data and insights that became available during the pandemic—through the emergence of the virtual and hybrid events coupled with new tools for capturing and analyzing data—will take data-driven decision-making to another level.

Take, for instance, the events team at DJI, the world's largest consumer and enterprise drone company. In 2020, the team pivoted their annual AirWorks conference to virtual for the first time ever. The team was naturally cautious about how the virtual experience would support their goals of driving attendee experience, promoting community building, and creating an effortless speaker and sponsor experience. However, the experience turned out to be a boon not only for driving their main goals but gathering data in the process. Using Bizzabo's reporting tools, the DJI team was able to learn who purchased tickets, where they were purchasing them from, who showed up, and other details about their attendees. Using this information, the DJI team was able to surpass their registration goal of 850 by almost 39 percent and saw that between live attendees and on-demand viewers, nearly 73 percent of registrants converted to virtual attendees.

In the words of one team member, “[This] was the first time we've ever had this kind of information for this event. To then go virtual and be able to really home in on who is attending, at what time, and who tuned in live or on-demand—that data was more robust than anything that we've had before.”

Targeting Key Accounts

Sophisticated data insights and analytics tools can today help corporate marketers learn where a particular prospect is in their buyer's journey (their path toward purchase) and organize event experiences specifically based on those stages. Taking this concept a step further, many companies today choose to put additional resources behind a number of key accounts. Especially in the enterprise B2B space, we believe events will become more integrated with sales and marketing teams tasked with pursuing these key accounts.

Consider the reemerging importance of account-based marketing (ABM) strategies that require an intimate understanding of the target account's needs, their key decision-makers, and how to reach them effectively. In ABM, marketers assign scores to various accounts that represent where they are in their buyer's journey and then serve content based on those scores. ABM can be done in a one-to-many approach where similar accounts receive similar content based on their collective qualities, or ABM can be done in a more focused one-to-one approach where unique accounts receive content that is tailor-made to them. The common analogy is that, rather than casting a wide net, ABM is like fishing with a spear. According to one study (Demandbase, 2022), the average annual contract value (ACV) for account-based marketing deals is 33 percent higher on average than non-ABM deals.

Armed with an ABM approach and the right data to support it, event organizers can be even more targeted and intentional with their events strategy and create personalized content for that specific client or prospect. While this has applications for creating curated experiences at large conferences where those who attend may be across the spectrum of the buyer's journey, it also has applications for smaller bespoke experiences that are focused on nurturing prospects toward closing business—this is called field marketing.

As Nani Shaffer (former vice president of account-based marketing at Demandbase) shared with us on an episode of the IN-PERSON podcast published in March 2020, “Field marketing is often looking through the same lens as sales, so they make a natural combo there that lends itself well to an ABM strategy.”

Corporate events—whether field marketing events or large conferences—can be vital in gathering the necessary data to better understand clients, as well as being one of the channels used to reach them. With some basic information about decision-makers' actions and behaviors at an event, marketers can better determine how to reach them based on what content they engage with, who they are meeting with, and how they prefer to be reached.

Improving Attendee Engagement and Communication

Post-event communications is an important touchpoint for turning attendees into prospects and prospects into sales, but that communication is only as valuable as the data informing it. Previously, in the best-case scenario, organizers could tailor their post-event messaging to attendees based on registration data and post-event surveys, but the data wasn't always accurate.

For example, let's say an attendee at a technology conference is asked three months prior to the event what their main area of interest is and clicks on “mixed reality.” When the event rolls around, however, the data shows that the person attended 14 total sessions with only one session specific to mixed reality and the remaining 13 focused on artificial intelligence. At the end of that event, organizers would be much better served following up with a webinar on artificial intelligence delivered by one of the speakers at the event rather than with an e-book on mixed reality.

With the right tools, events can become powerful data generators for sales and marketing teams, critical channels for reaching targeted audiences, and effective pathways to community growth.