Regardless of your industry or service, data is the lifeblood of many organizations. When it comes to strategic decisions at scale, the most successful teams don’t make any decisions without the right data in their corner. Introducing, data-driven event marketing.
Data-driven marketing helps marketers analyze and optimize their promotional campaigns to better understand what works and doesn’t- This allows for better and faster decision-making and a better understanding of customer needs. However, collecting data is just the beginning; you’ll also need to organize your data to better segment your audience on an individual level.
Data-driven marketing strategy has gained more and more attention in recent years, allowing marketers to run better advertising campaigns and significantly increase their ROI.
The idea of data-driven marketing may seem daunting at first. But remove any jargon, and many of its strategies will instantly sound familiar. But what are data-driven marketing efforts?
Today we’re going to take you through the most important things you need to know about data-driven event marketing and why it’s important for event organizers and the event industry at large to dramatically increase your sales and boost return on investment. They will help you understand different aspects of this new marketing approach.
Data-Driven Marketing: An Overview
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While marketing instincts are helpful, at best, it’s just a smart guess if not backed up by relevant data.
Why?
Well, data and information are not the same. However, both are essential pieces of effective marketing. Data needs to be collected, and it needs to be analyzed, and then once interpreted, it becomes information. Efficient and accurate data collection is critical as it ensures that we have a strong foundation upon which to gain insights and insights. Every business, regardless of industry, needs to collect relevant customer data and turn it into useful information, leading to successful marketing activities. With relevant data, companies can create an effective strategy on what to do with insights from the data – this is what we call data-driven marketing. The term emerged due to today’s digitally connected world, where social media and mobile devices are rising, and data has become the key to success.
Data-driven marketing is considered the next generation of marketing because it provides customer insights that were previously difficult to find. Data-driven marketing is defined as a marketing method that uses data from customer and third-party interactions to better understand customer motivations, preferences, and behaviors. Through internal data collection and third-party purchased data, today’s business strategists have many tools to craft marketing messages, observe customer behavior, and promote their digital marketing campaigns.
As a result, it helps companies optimize their performance, improve customer experience, and generate more revenue and profits. A data-driven marketing strategy also involves collecting and processing large data sets to help predict customer behavior concerning market positioning, brand awareness, and product launches or new features.
Data-Driven Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing
Let us compare these two marketing strategies closely to understand the difference between traditional and data-driven marketing. As digitization continues, the debate between conventional marketing and data-driven marketing continues, with no definite end.
The goal of traditional marketing has always been to define the needs and wants of the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). The main feature of this tool is to understand your audience, discover their needs, and develop strategies to deliver a product or solution that meets their needs and solves their problems. However, traditional marketing has fundamental challenges. First, you have very little information about your audience, which means you make decisions based on your assumptions and emotions. You resort to trial and error with extensive marketing campaigns in hopes of getting more people’s attention. And finally, sales are the sole parameter for the success of your campaigns and doesn’t take into account the crucial factors that influence it.
No one can say for sure whether a marketing or advertising campaign will be successful or has been. Even the data sources – mainly market research are unreliable. And with a limited measure of effectiveness, traditional campaigns fail to generate new market and target audience insights that companies can use to better strategize.
On the other hand, data-driven marketers can connect with the right customer at the right time with the right offer. Using customer insights or investing in conducting some small-scale and versatile research projects like descriptive surveys, modern marketers can target a specific audience, personalize the customer experience accordingly, attract new customers, and improve their marketing strategies. Company’s market in real-time. Data-driven marketing eliminates the need to run multiple campaigns just to identify a problem a potential customer is having.
Data-Driven Marketing in the Event Industry
As an online event ticketing platform, If you’re wondering how exactly data-driven marketing can make a difference to your event and multiply event ROI, you’re not alone. Many marketers still don’t know how additional data incorporated into the marketing tactics can dramatically improve ROI.
So we have listed some of the impeccable ways data-driven event marketing can make a whole 360-degree turn to your event success and amplify ROI.
Capture Authentic Attendee Behavior
The data you collect can significantly impact planning future events for the best return on investment. If you implement data tracking in your event, you can make session recommendations based on attendees’ behavior and interests. You’ll then have a better idea of how many people come in for food than listening to the guest speakers for example, which will help you decide how to plan your event activities. With data-driven event marketing tactics, you can also track which events attract the biggest audiences, which sessions attract the most audience participation, what times are best for specific speakers, and which seminars need more promotion or another focus. While you can gather some of this information through surveys and questionnaires, you can also collect it within the event, allowing your attendees to focus on what worked. Make them decide to come to your event. Also read, how to increase attendee engagement at events with social media.
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Optimize Marketing Attribution
All the analytical tools and metrics used in data-driven marketing allow marketers to determine which portion of an event’s advertising budget has the most relevant and meaningful impact on brand awareness or conversions. Finally, marketers can see which ads or campaigns aren’t attracting potential customers using an ad tracking tool like Voluum, helping them minimize their spending and increase online ticket sales. Event managers and organizers can allocate budgets properly by seeing what moves potential and existing customers through the funnel.
Determine the Best marketing channels
In addition to determining who you should communicate with and interact with, data also reveals the best way to communicate with them. By revealing the interests of your target participants, the data also dictates the channels you should use to interact with them now and soon. Using the right channels helps with positioning and messaging by placing your audience within the marketing funnel.
Better-Targeted Advertising with Reduced Costs
The concept of targeted advertising has thrived in the world of digital marketing. In the case of data-driven event marketing, you can choose demographic attributes like gender, age, geographic location, and more so you can target only the right people. This allows you to significantly reduce your marketing costs and thus enables you to achieve the best possible ROI.
Analyze Previous Event ROI
While event analysis happens after the event is over, it’s probably one of the essential parts of your pre-event planning – a failed event with a poor ROI will have little chance of success. By incorporating the previous event ROI analysis into your planning through data-driven event marketing, you can essentially start mapping your attendees’ behavior, from the exhibit booths where they stop to the locations with high traffic during the event. If you are hosting an event, you can start linking potential customers with exhibitors based on the presentations each attendee will attend and their activities during the event. By observing and analyzing your lead’s actions as a whole, you can create a more dynamic event that delivers personalized content to each piece of information based on schedules, interests, and activities. This allows you to cut off popular sessions and exhibitors from the event while expanding the focus areas that generate high circulation.
Are you curious to know which type of event is best? Then read Physical Events, Virtual Events, Hybrid Events, Which is best?
Final Words
In today’s fierce marketing landscape, a data-driven approach is the only way to go if you want your business to succeed. Gathering as much information as possible about your target market will help you stay ahead of the competition by doing your best to remain in the minds of your customers. Consumers’ expectations demand data-driven marketing, especially when coupled with the growing number of channels, apps, and devices to reach them. Once you successfully implement the right set of data-driven event marketing tactics, you can truly harness the power of your event data by creating personalized attendee experiences, optimizing your event budget-spending, increasing sales, and increasing ROI.
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