Events are no longer seen as a cost component, but rather an opportunity to generate revenue, build brand awareness and long lasting relationships. This is a huge change in perspective, from a ‘white elephant’ to a ‘cash cow’, opening up doors for event marketing and management to bring in data sciences and prove their mettle.

Event Marketing: What are the primary objectives?

Bringing footfalls to any event was the only agenda for event marketing efforts in the yesterdays. Today, during the event too there are innumerable opportunities to generate revenue, build awareness and interact with attendees which all fall under the purview of event marketing.

1. Expanding reach – Potential targets can be reached through digital marketing, but zeroing in on the right customer persona is still a challenge. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help sift through vast data employing advanced matching algorithms to target potential customers.
2. Building engagement – Real time tweets and posts from Twitter, LinkedIn etc. can be utilized by text mining algorithms to build on awareness and understand sentiments and cash on it.
3. Social selling – Data sciences can analyze spending patterns of attendees and with no historic data available, every data point is crucial and valuable as gold! Here, predictive analytics can play an important role in developing an effective targeting strategy.
4. Content focus – Social media has helped real time propagation of event content and reviews. But, along with it comes significant ‘data noise’ which necessitates content analysis and adherence to brand focus. Algorithms are necessary to deal with the vast nature of social data, and to meet the audience requirements quick.

Advance Analytics in Event Management

It has become important to bring efficiency to event management so that waiting times are minimized and disruptions to planning are controlled. Since then, advanced analytics driven features have been included in various event management solutions to address speed and efficiency concerns.

Common use cases for advance analytics in event management –

• Efficient volunteer assignment
• Venue selection
• Hourly footfall forecasting

The biggest pain point in the supply chain of event management is the ‘check-in’ process. This is also a common concern that our clients share during our discussions. An efficient check-in process has always been the Holy Grail of this industry, and frankly, it is just a matter of accurate face recognition techniques. Going forward, it is only natural that the industry will see significant investment in face recognition technology in coming months and years.

Future of Event Management

The time is now, to invest in advanced analytics in event marketing and event management. We see that data is available (unlike other industries), the industry is exploring, and the willingness to solve these pain points is highly evident. Solutions are being built for specific business needs, driving meaningful insights using data science.

A change is certainly underway!