Louisa Daley explores how audience profiling can positively impact events – from gathering insightful data to creating more inclusive experiences.
When it comes to events, the most important aspect to consider is the audience. After all, almost all decisions made by event organisers are for the attendee’s benefit. Eventprofs are constantly exploring what makes a great event experience.
But how is this achieved if you don’t truly know your audience, more specifically, who they are, or what they’re looking for? Luckily – audience profiling can take out the guess work and be an event planners secret weapon.
I chatted to Bruce Rose, head of audience, Live Group; Emma Grant, global events strategist, Moodys; Lauralee Whyte, founder, Spectrum Speakers and Entertainers; and Priya Narain, co-founder, Diverse Speaker Bureau – to find out how audience profiling can be utilised for events in 2023 and beyond.
Power to the people
“Audience profiling is a really powerful tool,” says Whyte. “By collecting data via questioning, you can understand and segment the different types of ‘characters’ in your audience and then tailor your content based on their shared behaviours, needs or interests,” she explains.
“Audience profiling demonstrates that event organisers actually care about the attendees and their event experience. It helps individuals feel valued, heard and respected,” says Narain. “It’s almost like, why haven’t we been doing this already?,” adds Whyte.
This is especially important when looking at audience profiling from a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) perspective. “By not making assumptions about your audience, you can make your event fully inclusive and accessible,” says Narain.
“For example, one in five people are neurodiverse, that’s a large proportion of attendees who potentially cannot engage with your event. What about those with hidden disabilities, will these attendees need additional visual or audio support? Make sure those kinds of questions have been asked pre-event, and that this information been gathered,” she says.
Whyte echoes Narain’s sentiment and adds: “We all want the same from an event, but there are different nuances and perspectives as to what that might look like. You can tap into those and ensure that everyone has something that they can experience and/or takeaway.”
Data is king
Tapping into our audiences has never been more important, especially in a post-pandemic world. “People’s behaviours have changed”, says Rose. Therefore, event organisers can no longer predict what audiences are looking for – but they can use audience profiling data to help them fill in the missing gaps.
“Covid-19 showed us how important data is because we were able to capture it much easier. For example, virtual events allowed us to not only see who registered and attended, but who participated in polls and/or breakout rooms as well as who dropped off after five minutes. We were able to work out how engaged audiences actually were,” explains Grant.
The teams at Live Group and Moodys wanted to explore this data further and apply what they learned at virtual events to live events. This ultimately encouraged them to develop their own audience profiling tools.
“We created our own bespoke website, Moodys Live. Once an account is created, every event you sign up for is linked to your account, which saves time having to fill out multiple registration forms. It allows us to see ‘okay, so this person created an account on this date and since then, they have registered/attended X amount of events’. Our website also has a built-in preference centre, which provides us with a targeted distribution list and ensures quality over quantity in terms of attendees,” explains Grant.
Over at Live Group, the agency’s audience profiling tool works a bit like a personality test. Rose explains: “AudienceDNA is a quick mechanism to discover the attributes of a given person (perspectives, interests, preferences) and therefore an audience in an events context. AudienceDNA places each audience member into one of 16 categories, which detail their content and communication preferences. It’s based off 98% accuracy.”
Bruce tells me AudienceDNA has changed how the agency delivers events. “As part of registration, attendees would be given the option of ‘would you like us to help build the event around you? If you would, please take a minute to answer these questions.’ All that then goes into a background database, where we see the entire cohort of people attending the event.
“The more people who take AudienceDNA and the more events we do with it, the information only gets more critical and valuable. We are trying to share these insights with the wider industry, because ultimately, that helps make the industry better and that benefits everyone,” he adds.
Troubleshooting
But what about those industry professionals who are unable to invest in similar technology? Is audience profiling still possible, if so, how? “Anyone can do audience profiling if they want to. I think there’s a misunderstanding on a client level, that profiling your audience is more complicated and more work – therefore, it’s not something to engage with.
“But once you have the planning/methodology set, it’s easy. Your methodology starts with questioning the audience in a meaningful way at the start of the project, then tuning your delivery,” says Rose.
So, what’s the most budget friendly way to do this? “You can ask questions by conducting research and/or surveys. You can create Google forms for nothing, which can build into your registration routes,” says Rose. “You just need to ask the right questions and take what you’re asking seriously,” says Narain. Alternatively, eventprofs can monitor social media conversations to identify key trends.
“Audience profiling doesn’t have to be expensive,” Rose reminds us, “the expensive part is the time.” This is especially true when it comes to analysing and storing the data. Across the board, the eventprofs recognise that raw data can be overwhelming.
“Integration is key to making sense of the data,” according to Grant. “At Moodys, our website data integrates with our email marketing platform, our CRM and Survey Monkey – then at the end, it all goes to Power BI and comes out as a neat report.
“We used to spend quite a long time trawling through data or survey results, but now we have a dashboard for every single event that has the survey results, companies who attended and the registration list. We can pull that as a PDF or share as a live link with our stakeholders.”
Similarly, for AudienceDNA, Rose says the agency has an analytic engine that helps break down the information into “easily digestible insights”, like key patterns and trends within each category. This then allows event organisers to make “informed decisions” about the event’s format, content, speakers and communications strategies. “Working with raw data is a core part of our work. If Live Group hadn’t started as a company with its own DMS, that would have been a real speed bump for us,” he adds.
In terms of storing the data, Bruce says it needs to be treated as sacred, and anonymised after the event is delivered. “You must be left with almost a fingerprint of a personality that helps identify trends and look at what content really interests people.”
Audience profiling is clearly a must for 2023. “If event organisers aren’t already looking at audience profiling, they should implement it into their strategy as soon as possible,” advises Narain. “Anyone who doesn’t, will probably find themselves at a disadvantage and find themselves at the bottom of the pack when it comes to winning new clients and new business.”
The time is now to remove the guess work and really get to know your audience, all you need to do is start by asking the right questions.
