Today, marketers have more access to data than before. With this, not only do marketers have increased visibility into every marketing campaign but can also use this crucial data to identify key opportunities and sharpen efforts to drive better output.
How is this adopted to meetings at events? And what are the advantages of using an analytics-centered approach to events? Let’s simplify it. Meetings are an important part of trade show campaigns. They are enormous opportunities to create new business, develop current relationships and drive up the top line. But simply sitting through them and not analyzing efficiency is not going to be of much use. Marketers constantly feel the need to optimize customer meeting experiences to be mutually beneficial and to drive better results each time.
In this blog, we look at the top four reasons why meeting analytics is on the rise and how you can leverage the true potential of meeting analytics at events and trade shows.
Beyond surface level
Marketing professionals are no longer impressed with surface-level vanity metrics. This is because they form an incomplete picture and do not really offer much in terms of deriving actionable, result-oriented insights.
Meeting managers are now on the lookout for qualitative data that can help them identify crucial KPIs, sharpen their meeting process, and align their actions with their goals to drive better results. This holds strong especially in the case of live sessions. Better orientation not only increases the productivity of marketing and sales teams that face customers but can also help them be more accountable within the process.
Transparency
Meetings are a data-driven art. In our previous blog, we mentioned that the things that happen in a meeting room often dictate the outcome of the event campaign. This means that marketers often face the need to prove their worth and bring in tangible results and boost their performance metrics.
Metrics and analytics are great tools to increase organizational transparency. This aspect of business is crucial and can help marketers and sales teams address the concept of the value they bring to the table with meetings. Recording and analyzing crucial event metrics paint a clear picture of the outcome of marketing efforts. This also helps increase the quality of meetings in terms of the mutual benefit they deliver to customers indirectly leading to a top-line growth.
Integrations
Integrations are becoming an important trend in the event industry landscape. Marketers have identified the potential of convergence and find the need to create synapses between various platforms to increase efficiency and save time. Not only does this greatly ease the flow of information from multiple systems into a single interface, but it can help marketers associate isolated pieces of data to form a clearer picture of real-time and historic performance. With more and more companies opting to converge their event marketing processes through various integrations, it has become increasingly important to piece data points together to create a well-rounded analysis of how events campaigns are shaping up and tweak strategy to maximize the impact of meetings at events.
Related: 5 integrations your meeting management software needs today
Event ROI
Events are a great way for marketers to get closer to their core audience and target them with specific marketing campaigns at events. But marketing at events is an expensive ordeal involving a tremendous investment and effort. This makes measuring results a pressing matter because at the end of the day high returns are all a CMO cares about. A closer look at performance metrics like cost-per-lead and meetings per customer closed, for example, can create an accurate projection of the returns from these investments. And further, while presenting to higher management, these metrics can help them understand ROI better and can come handy while requesting budgets for subsequent events.
Related: 4 event ROI metrics that need to be used more often
Metrics and analytics play an integral role in marketing at events and trade shows. One of the biggest challenges marketers face is deriving insightful data to improve the effectiveness of event marketing strategies. And more often, marketers overlook the impact of these metrics. The insights derived from defining and analyzing key metrics from trade shows are valuable resources that can help marketers formulate valuable insights that can greatly improve marketing strategies.
These are just the top four reasons why you should adapt to the analytics-centered process. For more on meeting metrics, check out our free ebook on event metrics by clicking on the button below:
