As Devin Cleary—who led event programs at HubSpot and served as vice president of experiential marketing at the enterprise software firm PTC before joining Bizzabo as vice president of global events in March 2021—puts it, “Each event is a moment in time where you've got the largest pool of people together, and you're able to engage your audience and test out new ideas. As a result, events are able to surface data on attendees that other teams within organizations would otherwise not have access to.”
The Attendee Experience
Whether they're conscious of it or not, attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and other stakeholders put up with a lot of inconveniences when they attended events in the past, inconveniences they were trained not to accept elsewhere. After all, if your local café allows you to order ahead on an app to avoid waiting in a short line to pay for your coffee, why should you spend hours in line to get a good seat at the conference keynote?
“There is an expectation for a consumer-grade experience, and events have been anything but in the past,” explains Nicola Kastner, vice president and global head of event strategy at SAP. “We are sophisticated digital consumers in our personal lives, but we check those expectations at the door when we go to an event; we're okay with a less than seamless experience. Standing in line to register, standing in line to check into the hotel, trying to figure out how to build your calendar, and then making sure your mobile app is working—it's overwhelming.”
Nicola suggests that enhanced customer experiences tied to countless everyday products and services have raised the bar on consumer expectations. Previously, when it came to events, these inconveniences were excused as part of the trade-off. Attendees generally believed that events were worth the time, money, and headaches that came with them.
According to Nicola, after more than a year of attending events virtually—thus avoiding those inconveniences—many attendees will begin to question that tradeoff and demand a more personalized, efficient, and convenient experience in the future.
“What we're realizing is that the stagnation, the consistency, and the staleness that was ongoing prior to the pandemic, that can't reemerge,” adds Devin Cleary. “If companies choose that route in terms of the safety play, they are not going to be around much longer; their consumers are going to choose competitors to invest their time in, because they are trying to meet them halfway, where their customers are, in the format, style, and duration they prefer.”
As we discussed in Part 1, the industry has long been immune to the forces of disruption that have upended countless other businesses in the past 10 or 20 years because the model works naturally; if you put buyers and sellers in a room together, business outcomes will flow.
According to entrepreneur and events industry veteran Marco Giberti, “Even if you don't do a fantastic data job pre- and post-event, if you facilitate those connections face-to-face, most likely your community will say it was a great investment of [their] time and money; they'll come back next year because the human connection face-to-face is such a powerful thing that it adds tremendous speed into the deal nurturing and closing in comparison to other tools. That's why the industry was, in some way, reasonably isolated from digital transformation and digital disruption—because the model works.”
Business-to-business (B2B) events have always been about relationship building—and that won't change any time soon. But with the rise of virtual and hybrid events, and the data they yield, we are seeing new ways to expedite that process and increase the value each attendee extracts from their participation.
Just as attendees stand to benefit from this evolution of data spurred by hybrid event strategies, so do event experience leaders and the organizations they are a part of.
As Marco puts it, “If in the past your strategy was 10,000 people in Vegas once a year, in the future it's going to be 2,000 people in Vegas once a year, 500 people in three cities, and 10 virtual events. And because of that combination of data knowledge and activation, your job and your budget and your return on investment will be significantly better than in the past. That's the potential big change that we're going to see in the future because of the crash course we just had during COVID, moving everything virtual.”
In fact, many event organizers are already seeing the benefits of increased data accessibility and utilization. Take, for example, the events team at the AI technology and enablement firm DataRobot, which used real-time analytics to streamline its virtual attendee experience and leveraged its event platform's Salesforce integration to make decisions about future events. The company was able to use insights like who stayed for the shortest or longest amount of time to determine which attendees would be best primed for event follow-up as potential customers and which sessions were most relevant to their audience.
Through the process of digital transformation, events are becoming more cost-effective, more effective in achieving stated outcomes, more integrated with digital marketing efforts, more demonstrably valuable to organizations that host events, and better positioned to offer a better, more personalized experience for attendees. Moving forward, CMOs and marketers will expect to be able to measure the return on events (ROE) at an even more granular level. Attendees will expect a personalized experience that maximizes the time and resources they dedicate to events. Sponsors will demand better insights into their audiences to target their messaging more effectively.
Fortunately, as we saw with the events team at DataRobot, we as an industry already have a head start. Unlike Warby Parker or Harry's or even Netflix, we are approaching the starting line of this digital transformation journey with a trove of data, a network of engaged users, and buy-in from decision-makers. All we need now are event organizers who understand the fundamentals of how to collect, store, and utilize that data effectively.
CHAPTER 5 The Event Data Maturity Curve
From our perspective, the biggest gift the pandemic offered was furthering the events industry along the event data maturity curve, a framework for understanding how the industry has progressed toward maximizing the value of data.
Identifying the Four Steps of Event Data Maturity
Events have long stagnated behind most other industries in the use of data, but they are finally starting to catch up. The first step in the event data maturity curve is improving the availability of data, which is more robust today thanks to holistic tools, event applications, and the digitization of events in general. We call this step data capture. Event organizers can see which sessions an attendee signs up for and which company an attendee represents. Email marketers can see which contacts open their emails and which links they click in those emails (if any). In short, because of the availability of more technologies and their growing sophistication, we now have a lot more data to work with.
The second step in the event data maturity curve for event organizers is to connect that data to business systems—such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, the sales technology stack, digital marketing platforms, and association management systems—in order to enrich those systems. We call this step data integration. Insights into attendees and their actions—such as the type of people they interact with, the types of sessions they attend, and how engaged they are in those sessions—will help paint a picture of customer intent.
Intent