Felicia Asiedu, senior marketing manager for Europe at Cvent, shares some key takeaways from her talk at this year’s International Confex.
The past few years has seen the industry undergo an accelerated digital transformation.
Even as live events make a welcome return, the additional reach and engagement potential offered by digital tools and virtual platforms makes the online event environment a firm fixture of the planner and marketer toolkit.
However, short-lived engagements that begin and end along with your event can often leave both the planner and attendee feeling empty and wondering if there was any depth to the relationship to begin with. How do you remedy this? By mastering always on/year-round engagement.
This engagement strategy enables you to extend your reach before, during, and after, as well as between events to build deeper, long-lasting relationships.
At International Confex, I unpacked how planners can create year-round engagement (by leveraging both their content and events), so attendees don’t end up feeling like they’ve been ‘ghosted’.
During the session, delegates was taken through three different relationship meeting scenarios to demonstrate how technology can help planners develop more personal, lasting relationships with their audience through data, community and ongoing content.
The scenarios were:
1) Tinder fails: when a lack of data leads to a mismatch.
2) Met on a night out: a good match on the surface, but not much substance as in-between communication is poor.
3) We’ve been friends for a while: aka the keeper – cue the wedding bells – always on engagement.
Key insights and takeaways
The always on engagement opportunity
The key is to keep attendees engaged between events, not create one continuous event. Remember everything that made virtual events possible is still accessible and can be leveraged to drive engagement before the event (through content) and after the event via on-demand.
The benefits of early connection
With always on engagement, attendees can do more than interact with your content in advance – they can interact with one another. By creating opportunities for early connection, attendees will be even more prepared to have impactful conversations onsite as well as build a network of connections that can go from event to event.
Building a community
To keep attendees engaged, you need to constantly create new and exciting content and experiences. By offering attendees varied opportunities to connect, you’re building a more engaged and connected community. Now, all your events can be truly interconnected rather than siloed experiences.
The power of event data
You can gain deep insights into attendee behaviours and patterns from event data, and from these insights you can create targeted marketing campaigns, enhance the event experience and improve future events as well as measure ROE (Return on Experience).
The right technology
Determining the right platform for your events programme is key, as successful event programmes will connect multiple events year-round, across in-person, virtual and hybrid. So, your chosen platform needs to provide digital engagement tools, a fully integrated solution to support planning and marketing communications as well as event and attendee data capture.
