Common Challenges of Event Pros

DENNIS O’BRIEN
Vice President, US Client Services

 The EventsEvents 2019 is one of those professional conferences that you mark your calendar well in advance and return to year after year. The active participation and open dialogue for the attendees, combined with the intimate setting and multiple networking opportunities results in enlightening conversations and a plethora of good ideas.

Here are a few of my takeaways from the event that are applicable to the majority of the attending organizations. No surprise that each involves the need for high-quality actionable data.
 

  • Acquiring timely and quality incremental data to fill gaps and enrich audience information would improve targeting, allow for pre-qualification of attendees, and greatly reduce the effort to convert and register customers. Look for a partner that integrates into your workflow and adds to your team’s effectiveness rather than taxes it.
  • Due to the relatively high costs of marketing automation, it can be difficult to get a positive ROI. How can the event industry move to more sophisticated platforms without investing large amounts of time and money? Consider working with a marketing operations partner. Share the costs of the platform, expand resources to operate at a low cost, and reap the benefits of improved engagement and higher conversion rates.
  • There’s a great opportunity to improve your understanding of customers and better leverage that knowledge with these platforms. Consider a CDP or Customer Data Platform technology. Benefits include saving on the costs of storing data in SFDC, identifying known versus unknown visitors, applying 3rd party data to enrich and fill data gaps, and expand marketing channels with built in APIs and connections to the most popular tools such as Google DFP, Google AdWords, Facebook, AdRoll, and LiveRamp.
  • Event organizations as niche audience owners have a unique opportunity to develop data products to better serve and engage and retain qualified attendees, and generate incremental revenue. What type of vertical industry or market information and trends might you be able to gather? Speaking with an expert in data product development may be a great way to create continuous customer and prospect engagement and incremental revenue for your organization.

I look forward to returning next year and learning of the progress made by these innovative professionals and their organizations in further leveraging quality data and marketing technology to fuel the continued growth of events and launch of new ancillary products and services. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in discussing any of these challenges in more depth. Please email dennis.obrien@meritgroup.us or call (001) 919 358-2984.
Merit Group