Meetings serve not only to generate ideas, but sometimes revenue. Increasingly, live events are being used to market brands and sell products. A 2014 Forrester Research report concluded that, on average, 20 percent of marketers' budgets now is committed to live events. However, although live events seem like fertile ground for sales leads, according to a 2012 MarketingSherpa study, 79 percent of all marketing leads, virtual or in-person, never convert into sales.
In order to help marketers better nurture leads gained at in-person meetings, event management platform provider Certain Inc. this year announced its integration of "interest intelligence" and attendee engagement tools with its marketing automation systems, thereby providing marketers with more in-depth views of attendees' interests, and resulting in more tailored followups.
"For marketing people, events can be a black hole," said Certain global vice president of marketing Betsy Zikakis. "They invite people to come to events, then people come, and it's hard for marketers to drive what people are doing," Zikakis said. "At the end of the event, they don't know what happened. There's a lot of behavioral data that, if transferred and put in a format salespeople would understand, provides a lot of insights."
Certain's interest intelligence tools allow companies to tag each event activity with specific, customized areas of interest, in order to determine how engaged an attendee is in a particular area. "There's too much data, so we say, ‘Let marketers define interest,'" Zikakis said. Delegates also can rate sessions and answer polls, augmenting their attendee profiles and allowing organizations better to gauge their interests. Attendee registration information is imported into Certain's meetings management system, and event organizers can "use that data throughout the event," Zikakis said. "It's more likely that attendees will be truthful in their profile data, so it's helpful to use that data to recommend what sessions they should go to," she said.
After each event, Certain sends the host company any new data concerning delegates' demographic or firmographic information. "We also send back some basic engagement statistics," Zikakis said, "such as how many sessions attendees registered for and how many they actually attended, what their average rating was, if the sessions met their needs, and how many appointments they had." This information is intended to improve lead intelligence and help companies tailor communications to each specific attendee. Companies also can integrate Google Analytics into Certain's event sites or mobile apps to track how many times attendees visited various pages, and in the future, Certain hopes to add social media engagement tracking tools as well.
"The most interesting piece [of interest intelligence technology] is to be able to track the sessions attendees registered for and attended, and transfer that into different interest scores," Zikakis said. If an engagement score is high enough, the delegate's profile is sent to Salesforce, so marketers can reach out with information specifically geared toward that attendee, "without being overwhelming," Zikakis said.
Certain recently worked with a company hosting a 4,000-person event with 80 education sessions, resulting in about 32,000 data items for marketers. "It's overwhelming for a marketer to deal with," Zikakis said. "By transforming all that detailed data into actionable intelligence, they can now take action on these scores."
Currently, the interest intelligence technology is included with use of Certain's event application programming interface for $2,500, but "it may not always stay that way," Zikakis said.