Ask 10 Account Executives what their biggest challenge at work is, and at least half of them are going to tell you that it is being able to reach out to the right people, with messaging that resonates, through a channel that is appropriate, and to do so in a way that is scalable. It’s the eternal struggle, an iterative process that’s forever under refinement. Live Events Professionals, in that way, aren’t too different from AEs!
While it’s true for events of any scale, it’s even more so for large-scale enterprise events. How do you walk the fine line between generalization and personalization, especially from a content and session perspective? Engaging different types of attendees requires some degree of being able to cater to their unique needs, but how do you do so in a way that it’s scalable, cost-effective and not mind-numbingly labor intensive?
SMYKM
If you’re not in Sales, that nifty little acronym stands for Show Me You Know Me. It’s at the core of this strategy. While we naturally don’t need to personally analyze every single attendee, thinking about general cross-sectional buckets we can place them into is a great first step. While there’s practically no limit to the number of different ways audience data can be sliced and diced to create different categories, we’ll look at 3 key personas purely from the perspective of why attendees are at your events: Learners, Networkers, Researchers.
Learners - These are your content consumers. Your first-in-line-for-the-keynote attendees. The ones who obsess over the agenda and register for sessions well in advance to extract the maximum amount of enrichment and enlightenment possible. They’ll always have their push notifications turned on. For Learners, the key thing to understand is what kind of sessions they’re focusing on and how they can be enabled to make the most of their time. Recommend sessions to them that they would not want to miss. Make it easy for them to know what’s next on their agenda. As much as a generalized event schedule helps them, personalization is really key here as these attendees look for, nay HUNT for, ROI.
Networkers - Connection is the name of the game for these attendees. They judge their success by the number of hands shaken at the event, metaphorically or otherwise. For an intimate event (<500 attendees), there’s probably not a lot of need for personalization. It wouldn’t be too difficult to get to know most if not all people over the course of the event. 10x that number and things become challenging. That’s where knowing who a specific attendee is most likely going to want to connect with is critical. Matchmaking takes precedence over just being able to browse an attendee list.
Researchers - The last kind of attendee is at your event to see the latest and greatest. They’re going to all exhibitor booths, looking through most product demos, collecting most of the pamphlets (and consequently branded merch) they get their hands on and are really aiming to get caught up on what’s new in the industry. Nothing beats some old-school tactile exploration of the latest technology, but talk about an event with 1000+ exhibitors and it’s suddenly a daunting task.
Once again, knowing the type of exhibitors a specific attendee might want to book a meeting with, or the specific sponsored session that might most appeal to them, goes a really long way in ensuring they’re making great use of their time and energy. It’s the difference between that attendee walking 10k and 25k steps to get what they want on the expo hall!
Measure and tailor
With these 3 key attendee types in front of us, we measure our audience to get a sense of the composition. With that data available, and an eye on the kind of attendees that form a bigger portion of your audience, you start picking pieces that can realistically be tailored to these attendees’ preferences. Can you leverage technology to surface recommendations? Can you use a mobile app that effectively guides attendees to the next session they should be going to? Can meaningful indoor navigation, quite literally, help your Researchers navigate their way around the maze of booths and product installations instead of simply giving them a printed map? Is there a way to consolidate key event information that can be available for all in an easy-to-access manner without needing painstaking personalization? Knowing the budget and what kind of attendees are more important to cater to will go a long way in making this process a lot easier.
Of course if all that sounds like a lot, we at Eventbase had a similar realization which is why we launched Discover, which lets event organizers create the perfect first screen for an event app, tailored to your different attendee types and continuously changing throughout the event with personalized recommendations and more. And we intend to continue to innovate and evolve our feature set, whether that’s enabling indoor GPS with our partners at Pointr Maps or helping you reach your global audience with AI-enabled translation of the session audio feed into 40+ languages working with our partners at Mixhalo.
You can reach out to us at hello@eventbase.com to explore how we can help you achieve personalization at scale and meet your specific event objectives.
