Events are chock-full of data collection opportunities for your business. Information from registration, poll and survey responses, and even virtual chats or breakout groups can all provide useful data to inform your next event. But did you know this information can also help your marketing and sales teams? That’s right. The data you’re already collecting as part of your event strategy can be an invaluable source of insights to make your colleagues’ jobs that much easier.
So here are a few ways you can be the hero for your sales and marketing teams.
Event data is gold
Think about the reasons you gather data as an event marketer. You want to know what attendees did, which sessions were most (and least) popular, demographic information, and how they engaged with the content, just to name a few things. That same information can be just as valuable for sales and marketing strategies, too. Information such as age and location can be helpful for the marketing team to tailor ads and social media content, and which sessions an attendee went to can help the sales team understand where they are on the buyer journey, and how best to tailor their pitch.
Your sales colleagues can also use identifying information to find key similarities and help them better delineate between qualified and unqualified contacts. Information collected through surveys after the event can be funneled to marketing to provide useful information about why attendees engaged, what they achieved by attending the event, and what they plan to do next, all of which can inform effective and personalized marketing messages.
The total package
It’s one thing to collect data points and information that could help your colleagues do their job better, and it’s quite another to package it in a way that makes it actionable. Handing over reams of information, a stack of feedback cards, or a link to poll responses will not make you the office favorite. Sales and marketing teams need specific types of information as well as an understanding of how to take action on it. That doesn’t mean you have to spoon feed them the information. After all, sales and marketing teams have their own methods for gleaning valuable information. But you can give them the information with a lower barrier to taking action.
One method for packaging event data is to score or weight event activities or interactions to help you prioritize information. For example, you can assign scores to every type of interaction along the attendee journey, which then add up to an attendee’s overall qualification score (typically ranging between 0 and 100). How you determine the weight of a score for an interaction would be determined by your business goals and priorities.
You can also leverage interactions among attendees, along with speakers and sponsors to prioritize leads. At InGo, our platform makes it easy for speakers or sponsors to share your event with their network and we make it easy to see and track these interactions. If a C-suite level exec shares their favorite event session with your VIP speaker, that’s a pretty solid lead that you can elevate to sales or marketing.
Don’t start from scratch
Collecting, analyzing, and presenting gobs of event data may seem like an insurmountable challenge, but it isn’t. Provided you use the right tools. There are scores of platforms out there to help collect and manage event data so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. And with adds on, plug-ins, and interfaces, you can probably make that tool talk to your existing platforms to ensure all of your bases are covered.
The InGo platform makes referral marketing a snap and lets your attendees seamlessly register, and connect with colleagues before, during, and after your event. Measurable touchpoints and interactions are organically and easily captured making it easy for you to qualify important leads and share the treasure with your colleagues.
Maintain a comprehensive view
Event data doesn’t have to be hard, and if you incorporate your business’s sales and marketing objectives into your data collection efforts, you can achieve your business goals across multiple channels.
And if you’re looking for help with your event marketing strategy, look no further! We can help you solve your biggest challenges, and drive attendance and engagement. Find out how.
