May 27, 2016
A New Definition of Data-Driven Marketing
Data-driven marketing captures insights and data from a prospect.
It analyzes and scores the prospect’s data and behavior.
It triggers marketing actions and campaigns based upon marketing analysis.
An analogy is to think of data-driven marketing from the consumer side in the average online shopping experience.
When you purchase an item online, data-driven marketing strategies provide recommendations of complementary products.
These recommendations provide a better overall experience.
From the marketer’s side, data-driven marketing is a more complex process.
Marketers obtain and update information on the customer from secondary sources, such as social media sites and web data.
This information enables customization to fit buying behavior, interests, past purchases, web searches, social media posts, and similar information.
In other words, this approach allows you to optimize your funnel by customizing the buyer journey to a particular prospect’s needs.
Surveying prospects to obtain primary sources of data is possible, but there is often bias between what individuals or groups claim and their actual behavior.
If an event attendee was ranting about poor service at the luncheon one day, they may be praising the closing keynote and fail to mention the luncheon in the exit survey.
Once you have obtained the data you need to create groups, you can divide prospects into personas.
This division allows you to customize and personalize your approach, timing, channel, and subject matter for each persona group.
The closest option at in-person events are scans that provide contact information and basic registration information.
Scans do not provide data needed to track a prospect’s engagement before, during, and after the event to prove the event ROI for a given group of prospects.
The exhibitor could have collected further data from me, but doing so would have been at the cost of other prospects who could not be helped while gathering my information.
After the event, I had several recommendations for items that didn’t meet our needs because the minimum quantity was too high, the quality wasn’t good enough, and the prices were too expensive.
The company had my contact information but did not know enough about me or my organization to make appropriate recommendations.
A data-driven marketing approach to this in-person event would have drastically improved my experience while increasing the marketer’s Event ROI.
How does data-driven marketing improve your ROI?
Data-driven marketing improves ROI by enabling tailored campaigns through data analysis.
There was a 14% increase in confidence in using big data to work in marketing departments from 2013 to 2014, with expectations for additional growth.
Many marketers still do not know how the additional data provides a solid improvement in ROI or how to use the data for their company’s best advantage.
Companies that have implemented data-driven marketing into their marketing toolbox and recorded the results have often seen a 10-20% improvement on their ROI.
Like any tool, data-driven marketing must be used correctly and implemented with other tools in a marketer’s kit, such as social media data, analytics, SEO, content targeting, and developing better buyer personas.
What steps are needed to get the most out of data-driven marketing for events?
1. Create Targeted Email Campaigns
- You can use the information you’re gathering to segment and target your invitation list.
- Who is your audience?
- Can you tell the difference between a manager who is attending to check off a box on their continuing education list versus one who is a real decision maker at the company you are currently targeting?
- If you want to develop your event as a thought leader, you need to determine who are the most important attendees and who will enhance your event by attending and participating.
2. Personalize Prospect Emails
- Beyond targeting who you are inviting, do not assume that a one-size-fits-all approach to your marketing will work.
- When you collect rich data on your prospects, you can take a different approach instead of producing a campaign that focuses on a single persona.
- Using the above conference example, there were a wide range of prospects who attended, including independent marketing consultants, members of marketing teams from small to enterprise companies, exhibitors with a wide range of tools, services and products.
- Without leveraging these rich attendee insights, you will be unable to properly segment your email follow-up campaign to deliver highly personalized content that will increase your buyer’s engagement.
- This also applies to creating landing pages for each persona, focused on the interests and needs of that particular group.
3. Pre-schedule Appointments
- When possible, pre-schedule appointments for the event.
- This allows participants to check-in, ask questions, watch a demo, and give prospects the opportunity to provide great world-of-mouth to people in their network who may be interested in purchasing your product in the future.
- Include an area on the event app where attendees can provide their contact information quickly and easily, along with an area for notes or voice recordings so they can include details of the individuals they’ve met, ways to post directly to their social media profiles from your app, instant updates and notifications to schedule changes and similar concerns.
- By including tools like this, you can ensure that attendees will default to using your app instead of using multiple other channels and apps where you won’t be able to access each attendee’s data as easily.
4. Track Your Social Media Presence
- If you’re not able to add a branded event app to your event, at least make sure you have a solid presence on social media to connect attendees and share experiences.
- A solid social media plan should monitor your different channels, develop talking points to keep attendees involved in the conversation while the event is upcoming and ongoing, and create official hash tags and similar tracking tools early to monitor progress and whether goals have been reached.
- Don’t forget the possibility of offering upgrades to an attendance package for qualified referrals, as this will also help increase your event’s overall reach.
5. Capture Attendee Behavior
- The data you’re gathering can have a big impact on planning future events to get the best ROI.
- If you implement data tracking during your event, you can make session recommendations based on attendee behavior and interests.
- You’ll have a better idea of how many people are showing up for morning networking sessions versus evening events, and this will help you decide how to schedule activities.
- Some information can be gathered through surveys and questionnaires, but you can also gather it during the event itself, leaving attendees to focus on what made them decide to come to your event.
6. Monitor Social Media Mentions
- The data you’re gathering can help expand your reach and ROI for an event.
- Start with a comprehensive social media plan to monitor your different channels.
- Develop talking points to keep attendees involved in the conversation while the event is upcoming and ongoing.
- Create official hash tags and similar tracking tools early to monitor progress and whether you’ve reached your goals.
- Don’t forget the possibility of offering upgrades to an attendance package for qualified referrals, as this will also help increase your event’s overall reach.
7. Review Data for Timely Follow-up
- Don’t forget to follow up after the event.
- Look at the data available on your most active attendees.
- Determine what information is available from attendees who responded but didn’t show, those who had to sign up or cancel, and similar groups of interest.
- Group attendees by persona to maximize data-driven marketing approaches.
- By analyzing your data, you can nurture prospects for cross-channel marketing campaigns.
8. Plan Post-Event Lead Nurturing
- Plan your post-event engagement with attendees.
- Include links to presentations or teasers for the next big event.
- Stay in contact and keep potential exhibitors, speakers, or attendees informed to build engagement and ROI for the next event.
- Include your analysis of confirmed registrants, including those who replied but didn’t show, those who had to sign up or cancel, and similar groups of interest.
- Once you have grouped attendees by persona, try approaching them differently for the next event.
9. Analyze Event ROI
- Measure ROI.
- Event analysis occurs after the event is over.
- Map attendee behavior to ROI by considering interactions at exhibitor booths, sessions, and high-traffic locations during the event.
- If you are hosting an event, you can begin to match up leads to exhibitors based on the presentations each attendee is going to and what activities they are participating in during your event.
- By studying the actions of the prospects as a whole, you can create a more dynamic event that delivers personalized content to each prospect based on schedule, interests, and past actions.
Finally, data collection and tracking are vital to improving Event ROI. An effective event automation platform helps capture information before, during, and after the event so cross-channel campaigns can start as soon as possible, reaching prospects during crucial time periods around the event and increasing conversions.