Why Event Data is the Best Information Your Company Isn’t Using

In our blog, we’ve discussed how, even though business practices have grown increasingly digital, there is still a lot of value in live events and getting people together. Good things happen when people are face-to-face, but so often companies don’t know how to capitalize on what happens during the event for greater value after the event. According to a recent study by the Event Marketing Institute, 76% of marketers say event and experiential marketing initiatives are integrated with all of their marketing campaigns. Yet, all of that budget backing events largely goes to waste when companies don’t know how to leverage the insights from them afterwards.

However, with the right technology in place, companies can start maximizing that return. They can track who is attending what sessions and breakouts, which attendees connect with one another - on what subject and for what duration, how long they stay at the event and what they’re most interested in. Put more simply, companies would be at an enormous advantage if they capture data along the lifecycle of the attendee’s event experience to analyze and optimize it on the back end. And this goes for a variety of events, whether you are pulling employees together for a leadership retreat or holding an annual sales summit with partners and prospects - data gathered from the event can map what’s working and what isn’t to identify ways to shape future events, office culture and policy, how to approach sales leads and more. 

Let’s look at it in the context of a sales prospect that has been on-the-fence to-date. They’ve been lukewarm in previous conversation, but they’ve decided to attend your annual meeting to see if it will tip the scales. You can track the prospect’s activity and identify the people they engage with and why to better tailor your approach after the meeting. This could mean customizing sales and marketing collateral that will elicit the best response or simply knowing the type of conversational cues this person reacts to. Perhaps there are use cases of your solution they were more drawn too, so you can follow up with pointed stats from client case studies that appeal to that interest. Simply understanding someone’s interests and preferences for conducting business could be the difference maker from turning a questionable lead into a promising one. 

All in all, uncovering insights and trends from events where people are interacting live create a better springboard to build new relationships, and the information necessary to strengthen the relationships that already exist. 

Now imagine combining this with a CRM system and being able to holistically look at the entirety of the client relationship. Being able to analyze and capture this data in real-time via dashboards will help employees adjust their approach in the moment to deliver better results.

In fact, according to a recent study, 26% of event planners note that tying event data to sales and marketing campaigns is a top challenge. That’s because companies need to not only see their event successful as it’s happening, but how it translates to true business value thereafter.

At Proxfinity, we want to help clients achieve this type of clarity and get the most out of the gatherings they host. That’s why we coalesce and breakdown important information like which attendees connected, for how long, what attracted the conversation initially, what activities or sessions did they engage with during the event and more. Using our dashboards, clients can easily see how to turn those marketing dollars into profit from new sales, money saved from decreased employee turnover and more.

We understand events aren’t cheap, and people want to get the value of what they paid and more - and at Proxfinity, we’re helping clients do that better than ever before. 

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