Event marketers constantly need to justify their event marketing spend. At a recent Haute Dokimazo unconference, a VP Marketing commented that 50% of their marketing spend went into events. Given this level of investment, understanding the ROI of an event is a must. While badge scans and booth traffic are interesting, they are still far removed from the holy grail of pipeline. What is going to impact pipeline more? The scan from someone stopping by to get the latest promotional item for their kid or a meeting between your company’s CEO and a prospect? Meetings drive pipeline that drives revenue.
We have all seen the gamut of companies that are on this meeting engagement-focused journey. They start with a 10×10 booth with brochures and over time grow into building an executive briefing center with 18 meeting rooms on the showroom floor like the one at HIMMS 2019. And those are just the engagements we can all see on the expo floor. They don’t stop there. There are offsite meetings, dinners, and sessions, with prospects, executives, press & analysts and, of course, customers. Companies are starting to shift their focus from booth lighting and promotional items to driving these key engagements at events.
At Jifflenow, we have tried to codify this meeting engagement-focused journey. Like the Capability Maturity Model for software development that defines the degree of formality and optimization of the software development process, the Event Meeting Maturity Model defines several stages that companies go through when focusing on meetings at events, starting from ad-hoc, un-managed meetings to a very formal meeting engagement process, strategy, and management tied into backend systems to understand key business metrics like pipeline and revenue.
As our customers have become more focused on scheduling, managing, and analyzing their meetings at events, we have seen some impressive metrics. Not only do meetings drive revenue, but a well-executed meeting engagement strategy can bring productivity and efficiency gains as well. For example, a study of over 50 customers who attended MWC 2019 found that the top 10 companies had more than 100 meetings per meeting manager while the next ten had almost 25. This is but a small glimpse into the efficiencies that can be gained when using a Meeting Automation Platform like Jifflenow.
When developing an event meeting engagement strategy, companies should consider the level of automation in scheduling and managing meetings, the types of engagements, the various backend integrations, the security and analytics capabilities of their strategy.
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