You’re a marketer. You live for leads – every kind of lead. To succeed in your role, you have to believe everyone is a potential business contact. No matter how new-school your techniques become, you still know not to discount the old-school personal touch. This is why you believe in events, because in-person leads have a power all their own.
Event marketers competing against the best online lead generation techniques face the following challenges:
Speed. This is what we’ve come to expect when we’re online. If we register for something, we don’t want to wait. If we have to wait, we abandon ship. To succeed at an event, you need to offer rapidity to your attendees.Thanks to developments in the cloud, there are now a few key companies (The Limelight Platform is an excellent example) offering Saas solutions to this problem. Limelight Platforms offers full suites of custom event marketing apps, from guest list managers, surveys, and opt-in sign-ups to branded social content and integrated social sharing.
Ease. Easy isn’t always fast, and fast isn’t always easy. When you’re talking in-person ease of use, you’re essentially dealing with perception, as opposed to process. For the attendee, the process has to feel smooth. It has to be low-maintenance, and it has to be pleasant. This is where organization and pre-planning come in. Build and design your on-site event apps ahead of time, and strategize their use. Decide whether they’ll be in the hands of staff walking the floor, at static kiosks, or deployed during specific events, seminars, or demonstrations. Pre-planning of this kind – combined with the right suite of tools – will ensure smooth, easy, pleasant experiences for all users.
Accuracy. Gone are the days when you can afford to write off 20 percent of lost leads to lost sheets of paper, poor handwriting, sloppy data entry, or other sins of data translation. You need every piece of information you can get, and to be actionable, it must be accurate.
The secret to this comes down to synchronization and integration. As an event marketer, you see the long view. You’re looking at website and email stats, RSVPs, attendance counts, and yes, you’re looking at your in-person on-site data. You need this all to be synced and integrated, because your job – once the event is over – is to put it all together and build a post-event strategy that will ensure maximum long-term ROI.
At the end of the day, it’s going to come down to digital outreach, and it’s going to play out in two spaces: social and email. As anyone worth their marketing salt knows, these aren’t places you can afford to make mistakes. You need the ability to cross-check and verify every name, every address, and every account, vet it all for accuracy and validity, and strategize the best approach for each.
Only when every spoke has found its way safely home to the hub can you really process your analytics and determine your true ROI. Data from every direction comes into your analytic homebase, where it gets synchronized and integrated with all your other data streams. From there, you build your strategy, identify your action items, and deploy your outreach. As results get returned, they are in turn integrated, and steadily and accurately, you build a picture of your demonstrable and verifiable ROI. Sound complicated? It is.
You need a sophisticated system to succeed, and while Limelight is only one of a number of options, its system is recommended because of its seamless architecture and the breadth of its all-in-one platform. It is important for platforms to feature the following:
Whatever platform you choose has to be so good that it’s virtually invisible, because this is an in-person event, and there is no substitute for the human touch.