Cathy Song Novelli is the Chief Marketing Officer at Hubilo.
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The data that will be central to your business intelligence and strategy in the near future may just be self-generated during your next event. Real-time audience data (RTAD) is the modern equivalent of striking a gold vein for marketers and business leaders alike, especially if it’s coming from your own audience. As privacy concerns muddle behavioral data collected from tech giants like Apple and Facebook, event professionals can generate more specific and valuable data on the audiences that matter most: their own.
Adding Up The Benefits
Traditionally, collecting RTAD can be difficult and therefore expensive. RTAD can be generated from website visits or during an interactive element of a live video stream. It’s found in web paths, heat maps and the time consumers spend viewing different elements of a brand’s marketing. These streams all offer great insight. Virtual event data takes us to the next level.
Events bring together people who are predisposed to hearing your message. Virtual events can expand that audience to larger global proportions than ever before at a potentially lower cost than in-person events or other RTAD methods. The data you collect during your events can tell you who, exactly, your audience is—where they’re from, how they identify, and their segment or ideal customer profile. Further, it can show you who engaged with your content, how they engaged and how often they engaged. RTAD from your event can reveal what format, speakers, messaging and product information resonates with attendees. Who is driving your pipeline, and what best connects your community and creates brand buzz? This does not need to be a mystery.
Data collected from your own event is comprehensive and specific to your stakeholders and customers, which makes it immediately actionable. As the CMO of a company that offers an event analytics platform, I believe the epicenter of your future marketing strategy should be RTAD from events.
Centering Your Audience
Virtual events are a cost-effective way to bring together the people who are most interested in and relevant to your brand, perspective or offerings. Virtual events are also owned and controlled environments that allow you to answer the questions you’ve always wondered about your customers. Whether they’re small or larger-scale, virtual and hybrid events give you the ability to find out exactly what resonates with your stakeholders—and what doesn’t.
Taking this data to create an audience-led go-to-market strategy gives you an advantage over brands that don’t utilize this awesome tool. There have only been a few other times when I have been so excited for a fundamental shift in our industry. Much like how social media, streaming content and growth hacking presented huge opportunities, I believe event data and the activation of real-time insights through digital streams are revolutionary new points in branding and marketing.
With RTAD, event professionals and marketers can suss out exactly who they need to talk to and exactly what message will be most effective. This data can also create reverberations into the future for outreach and expansion long after the event is over.
Managing The Resource
The right virtual and hybrid event platform for you should seamlessly plug into your existing tech stack to make the data accessible and actionable. As the fight for increasingly sparse consumer attention continues to escalate, having the data necessary to guide your marketing strategy could eventually become a driver of core business strategy. Starting now to integrate virtual and hybrid events into a strategic audience data generator could put you light years ahead.
You don’t need an extensive marketing stack to make use of the data, though. Whatever platform you use, strategize before an event and determine what you hope to learn about your audience. Because RTAD is immediately actionable, you should keep an eye not only on session attendance but also on how engaged the audience is. If you know ahead of time that it’s valuable for your event to keep the conversation flowing in the chat, measure messaging rates and prompt your audience accordingly.
Choosing your KPIs ahead of time can also help you host the event on the right platform. Some webinar-focused platforms can only give you a high-level overview of the event, like attendance or run time. Others are meant for diverse conversations with your various segments. If you need to measure engagement by audience or region in breakout rooms, lead generation or attendee networking data, use those needs as filters in your platform selection. Just like a physical venue for your event, a virtual platform should meet all your business needs on both the front and back end.
You may need to experiment with which metrics provide the most valuable information for your events, especially if the data you’ve been collecting has been high level. It’s tempting to use RTAD to compare your events to others’, but I’ve found that it’s better to focus on leveraging the data to provide a better, more personalized experience for your attendees by adjusting to their needs during the event—or learning for the next one.
Before and during the pandemic, virtual events existed as a tentpole marketing activation or a piece of a broader marketing strategy. The seismic post-pandemic digital shift turns this tactic into a key differentiator of marketers’ ability to reach their audiences. Now, virtual and hybrid events are becoming a tentpole business and intelligence campaign. Incorporating economical, replicable events into your marketing strategy now could set you apart from your competitors in the future.
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