Today’s event marketers are tech savvy and
Defining goals and understanding how to measure success is the key to maximizing your event ROI. These four tech tips will help you use data to engage your audience and keep your event/tradeshow
- Marketing Automation
- Proximity Mapping
- Personalization
- Analytics and Insights
Marketing Automation
Whether you have a background in technology or not, all marketers can agree that communicating your message is so important. Reaching the right person in the right place at the right time is the best way to increase your engagement KPIs. This is the same when you’re promoting an event. Engagement marketing tools like Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua
Marketing automation can help you define and segment your audience to deliver the right message. It can measure content consumption and website behavior to measure intent—and thus
Proximity Marketing
Location technology is changing the way we think about indoor spaces. Using the technology built into our smartphones, radio frequency technology (RFID) and beacons, marketers can have insight into the behavior of event attendees.
For example, beacons (stationed throughout an event space) can send a Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) signal to nearby smartphones. By strategically placing small beacons around the event floor, the marketer can monitor the foot traffic flow throughout the event space. This can be very helpful when designing the
Personalization
Location technology is powerful, and with the right incentives, visitors are willing to go from anonymous to known. Consider offering a raffle for event attendees who opt into your app or SMS notifications, and consent to
Companies like Estimote make it easy to deploy beacon technology and combine it with display monitors around your event space, creating a truly personalized experience. For example, at a silent auction, imagine a bidder walks near a table auctioning a luxury vacation. When the person is close, the display could change from general information about the vacation to a personalized video incorporating segmentation data collected through online and offline marketing interactions.
Analytics and Insights
By incorporating technology into your event experience, new data can be collected and new metrics can be measured. Here are some of the KPIs to measure and the insights that can be derived.
Event KPIs
Total visitors
- Do you have enough prospects to reach your sales goals?
Passersby
- How much foot traffic is that area getting over a certain period of time?
Time of day
- When do you need to properly staff your booth to accommodate demand?
Engagement Performance
- Which exhibits or content are keeping people engaged
at the event? - Social media sharing and engagement (number of likes, shares
and comments)
Number of return visitors
- This is an indicator of intent
Dwell time within engagement zones
- How engaging is that space?
- Here’s an example of median average dwell time—each row represents a different zone
Business KPIs
Sales
- Total revenue
of a specified sales period can be correlated to and, in some cases, tied directly to event behavior
Brand awareness
- The effect an event had on a company/product brand
Marketing metrics, like website visits, downloads, program response rate
- Measures the correlation between event attendees and online behavior
Combining Online and Offline Data
Combining online marketing data (website visits, email clicks, content downloads) gives us a holistic view of the buyer journey.
|
Awareness | Online Research | Events | Online Leads | Purchase |
Unknown & Anonymous | Engagement marketing website tracking; Google Analytics/Marketo | Content marketing | Beacon data | Salesforce leads | POS data |
Event registration | In-booth engagement (unknown) | Content marketing | |||
Digital marketing | |||||
Known | In-booth engagement (known) | Salesforce contacts | POS data | ||
Social media targeting | Show attendee data | Email engagement | |||
Website behavior | RFID data |
Event marketers are in a unique position to deliver more data to the client or organization than ever before, proving the ROI of the live experience. Now that you have the ability to collect and analyze this information, what action can you take to put these insights to work?
Read Part 2 of this two-part blog post: From Insight to Activation, where we provide tactical ways to make the most of the data collected via events.

Mike Reed
Analytics and Automated Marketing Manager, Dixon Schwabl
Mike Reed is analytics and automated marketing manager at Dixon Schwabl, where he works in multichannel marketing and web/digital analytics. He earned his MBA in marketing and competitive strategy from the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.