Introduction
More attendees will reevaluate the worthwhile experiences of traveling away from home for two to four days as they become acclimated to the ease of online events. In this environment, more than gathering and analyzing data alone for a post-event report is required. It serves as the impetus for making an occasion a must-attend experience. Data has value and advantages beyond assessing a conference's success and may give event organizers a competitive edge. Data tells you what is happening worldwide or at a particular event. When you learn how to organize and interpret it, it becomes useful. It might be the key to consistently outperforming your rivals if you become proficient in this ability.
Instead of organizing on-demand material based on the order in which it occurred at an event, utilize statistics to manage it based on popularity. Or discover unexpected subject trends and interests. Based on the knowledge gained from virtual events, data may assist event planners in elevating the in-person event experience and allow for experimenting with new formats and distribution methods. It's important to detect trends and patterns throughout the event journey rather than just reporting on the number of people who registered or watched a particular session. However, before diving into reports and spreadsheets, you must specify precisely what event data you want to gather and analyze. Avoid the pitfall of collecting an excessive amount of metrics. Make sure everything you track offers insight that can be used. To achieve your overall event goals, align your data strategy with them. And keep checking the accuracy of your data.
The Significance of Data When Organizing Online Events
When organizing a virtual event, there are many things to think about, and statistics may help you prioritize your efforts. Let's think about the following applications for data insights.
Event Marketing and Promotion
To get the correct crowd, you must advertise your event. You may gain valuable insights from the already available data rather than searching the entire internet for sporadic suggestions about where to focus your efforts. In addition, you may assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategy using the data gathered during current events, which can help you decide what to do next. You will hit the mark and reduce losses if you adopt a data-driven marketing strategy.
Selection of Subject and Speakers
Your planned event's content may be influenced by information from recent and ongoing occurrences. Your events or other industry events might serve as the data source. You may tailor the content of your event in a way that will satisfy attendees after you know the type of content that appeals to your target market. Similarly, event data may show what kind of speakers are most well-liked by event participants.
Exhibitors & Sponsors
The types of goods or services your target customers are interested in can also be revealed by event data, which can help you choose the best sponsors and exhibitors to approach. Your viewers will be eager to uncover pertinent answers when you pair interests with fantastic items and services. Additionally, your sponsors will see an increase in sales, motivating them to keep supporting your cause.
How To Find the Information You Need?
You can use data service providers to assist in locating the necessary data or evaluate your current data, depending on the scope of your event and your financial constraints. The recommendations listed below can also be used to create your data.
Utilize Services For Data Scraping
On the internet, data is dispersed everywhere. They can be discovered in various places, including forum conversations, emails, tweets, and postings. You can locate the information you need about potential attendees, rivals, and sponsors publish online. As a result, you may utilize data scraping services to gather information from several websites, social media profiles, and discussion boards.
Register A Webinar
When planning a more significant event, you should first organize a webinar to generate interest in the subject and get sample comments through live polling and Q&A. In reality, the Q&A portion is a data center. Therefore, please pay attention to the questions that people are asking since they might help you choose your more significant event's central theme.
Acquire As Much Data As Possible From Registration Systems
At the time of event registration, you can gather further information from attendees. Obtain additional individualized information, such as addresses and locations, phone numbers, the nature of your industry, your position title, etc. In addition, you may learn more about their event priorities by asking them further questions.
Mobile Apps And Online Platforms For Events
Event analytics may be tracked and reported in real-time using a flexible virtual event platform. This includes choosing sessions, participating in sessions, interacting, viewing and downloading content, participating in Q&A, and making payments. The media occasionally also provide specialized mobile event applications that may be used to keep tabs on a range of in-app activities.
Use Platforms For Data Sharing
You may access pooled data from the industry's event management software suppliers through third-party organizations. Consider this if it's your first event and you still need to get clients.
Ideas To Enhance Your Conference With Event Data Analytics
Analytics And Data
The abundance of relevant data at your fingertips is one of the significant benefits event technology offers planners. This data provides crucial insight into attendees' tastes and habits, which helps improve the event experience and raise your ROI.
- With the right event technology, you can quickly gather your data and learn more about:
- The elements that engaged your audiences the most
- How do you rank your speakers
- Which sponsored events were the most effective?
- Results of sponsored advertisements
- How audience members accessed your material
- How involved were they with your event?
Event technology partners provide organizers access to user data to understand better what was successful and what wasn't and where they can make improvements, whether they are conducting an onsite, virtual, or hybrid event. Using this information intelligently, organizers may create memorable events that bring in larger crowds year after year.
Interactions Optimization
When anything goes wrong on your digital channels, the majority of members don't complain. Most often, people give up on the website out of frustration. Because of this, more associations emphasize leveraging analytics to enhance the online experience. For example, one organization had a complicated event registration website that customers had to go through several stages to complete. Although they could see the registrations pouring in, they needed more information to determine where members were facing problems. With the use of analytics, they were able to find methods to reduce friction throughout the registration process, increasing site conversion rates and event income. The easier you can make it for members to communicate online, the more probable they will do so again.
Decide which Content is Best for On-Demand Access
Even though the event lasts only three days, the content may be enjoyed all year. But you can do more with data than make content last longer. After the event is complete, you can utilize it to build an on-demand instructional library that will help you draw in new viewers.
Robust event data enables you to pick the most exciting sessions more instead of just posting all your recorded breakout sessions online for anybody to register and view. In addition, you can improve your post-event content strategy if you know what was necessary at the event.
Examine your live audience numbers to see when a session may have experienced a lull. Some themes may take some time to reach the tipping point towards buzz-worthy status if your program strives to be cutting-edge with next-generation material. Your audience will realize that your presentation was well ahead of the curve by the time the issue or trend is on everyone's radar.
Research Your Conference Attendance Patterns
Attendance at events is a typical event measure. Although this knowledge is significant, success isn't necessarily correlated with a large attendance. Data may indicate that it's time to liven up your event at an early stage. Lower numbers of sponsors or exhibitors or a drop in the presence of regular guests are signs of a problem with your event. If this is the case, you might need creative event ideas to pique your delegates' attention. And if the number of new registrants is minimal, it can indicate that your marketing and outreach efforts need to be getting through. You'll need to monitor attendee data closely depending on your event aims.
You may want to draw more scholars from Asia to your international conference, but only some people are signing up there and putting plans in place to recruit them more effectively. Accessibility problems may keep a wide range of participants away from your conference. If the event data shows a lack of diversity, you may need to make your conference more accessible.
Customer Journey Insights
Precisely determining how to maximize each touchpoint of your customer's journey is one of the most challenging aspects of event preparation. Event technology can help in this situation. A live data dashboard lets organizers see what their audience is doing online. This is true for viewers at home watching the event online and for participants and exhibitors participating in person and using the mobile app. Every click and every action leaves a digital trace. Favorite exhibitors, sessions with the highest attendance, and presenters with the most significant levels of engagement can all be recorded by the organizer. By enhancing the experience they provide viewers, access to such information dramatically increases their ROI.
Data-Based Behavior Prediction
The transition to predictive analytics for associations is the following stage. A particular association had hosted an event for several years, but enrollment steadily declined. At that point, they began scoring members based on their propensity to attend using predictive modeling. They discovered that some members attend the event nearly seldom and others almost always. As a result, they could put less effort into these two categories and more work into the people who had the best chances of becoming converts. In addition, they can now distribute resources more effectively rather than wasting money on people who only sometimes attend. As a result, they've noticed a rise in attendance and a drop in expenses.
Personalized Event Experiences
Because they are specifically created to satisfy every attendee, exhibitor, and sponsor, personalized events are successful. With the correct data at your disposal, you can identify and incorporate those more minor elements into your event, making it more memorable and effective for all attendees and sponsors. In addition, personalization boosts engagement since participants are witnessing an event that is completely tuned to help them accomplish their goals. Event technology enhances the experience through personalization, whether it's a customized agenda loaded with AI-powered networking or session ideas or personalized notifications that guarantee the experience is matched to their needs.
To learn more about what members are discussing, what they like and hate, and what drives their involvement, they decided to invest in analytics. They may now examine patterns to gain insightful knowledge about their membership. Now companies can be much more focused on communications whether they conduct an event, post material, or send out marketing messages. They may tailor the news rather than broadcasting the same message to everyone. When they organize an event, they look at popular topics online and modify the sessions to enhance the attendees' experience there.
Keep Track Of Mobile App Activities
During and after the conference, if you're using a mobile conference app, you may incorporate polls to get feedback directly from your attendees. You may immediately export the analytics data from your dashboard using several programs. You could seek the most in-demand features to improve your app for the upcoming years. You may determine the amount of engagement by looking at adoption rates, download dates, and usage duration to see whether you need to advertise your app more actively in the upcoming year. Finally, looking into your app's most popular sessions will assist you in figuring out what was the most well-liked.
Conclusion
.A conference management system may have an export feature for data on submissions, reviews, the program, registration, and your mobile app. Integration of these aspects helps you have a deeper understanding of your attendees and your whole planning process. This is beneficial when searching for methods to improve your conference for everyone involved. Inflation is an essential factor for event planners. Everything is expensive, including venue rentals, food, lodging, and transportation. Event technology may assist in reducing the excessive expenditures associated with event preparation by providing a complete digital solution that merges different services into one location. Refrain from squandering money on maps, brochures, guides, paper tickets, etc. Instead, use the technologies in your event app to streamline event components, such as registration and session access management. This increases the convenience factor for guests because everything they need is contained inside the palm of their hand, but it also enables you to save money that may be used for other aspects of your event. This could involve attracting high-level speakers, improving the venue's Wi-Fi, and providing better catering choices.
References
- https://meetings.skift.com/5-ways-event-data-can-give-competitive-advantage/
- https://associationanalytics.com/blog/4-ways-to-improve-events-with-data-analytics/