In today’s digitally driven, ROI-focused world, capturing and leveraging event data is critical for success. With the evolution of events beyond simple in-person or virtual into hybrid, metaverse, and “phygital” experiences, traditional KPIs like attendance and satisfaction alone are insufficient. Digital tools can help devise and correlate advanced metrics, including sales-qualified leads, product demo views, and content resonance to business goals.
Maximizing event data unlocks significant benefits:
Know what success looks like: Event teams can successfully capture—and then move beyond—generic metrics to define nuanced KPIs such as lead quality, content performance, and product interest.
Listen to event data: Cutting-edge platforms detect behavioral signals and engagement metrics throughout events: session choices and length of attendance, event engagement, product demonstration interactions, and meeting feedback. This data can provide powerful insights into content resonance, buyer preferences, and areas for improvement. But collecting it is just an early step in the process.
Close the loop with CRM and Marketing: Integrating event data into business systems realizes its full potential. Leads flow into sales, analytics into marketing, and poll results into nurture streams.
With the right event technology, capturing event data delivers powerful insights and business impacts far beyond satisfaction scores.
When Having Enough Data isn’t the Problem: Optimizing Information
As events, even fully in-person ones, lean into the use of digital tools, organizations risk being overwhelmed by data quantity, causing confounding “noise” that takes time to categorize and interpret. Advanced event platforms can offer a lifeline in navigating this data deluge, transforming raw data into compelling success narratives and quantifiable ROI. With the right technology in place, organizations can turn data noise into a symphony of actionable insights and success stories.
Success stories and ROI are critical for today’s event teams. Events have always been about visibility, but in today’s ROI-fixated world, that imperative stretches beyond customers to numerous stakeholders:
- Executive Management requires updated and accurate reporting on event performance and ROI
- Marketing needs to ensure events support demand generation, branding, and other priorities
- Sales want prospect engagement opportunities identified and qualified before, during, and after events
- HR has an increasing interest in aligning internal events with culture, values, and learning objectives
- Customer Service needs feedback to improve retention and interactions
- Product Teams use events to launch new products and features and gather feedback from current users
- Local Communities have an interest in public perception and minimizing disruptions
- The General Public may pay attention to how events promote a brand’s reputation and initiatives (e.g., DEI and sustainability)
- Investors want to see sound financial management and returns without irresponsible spending
Most major multinational organizations already have data, analytics, and insights well entrenched across operations and customer experience processes. Expanding these benefits to event teams requires solutions that can play the dual role of being event-specific and yet flexible enough to integrate with other existing solutions. Some examples of how major organizations can leverage event data solutions include the following:
Recruitment drives: Finding optimal talent is increasingly difficult, and event data can help companies identify and engage the right candidates. Shipping giant UPS regularly holds in-person recruitment events, for example, and CPG leader Unilever has a large, virtual Unilever’s Annual Careers and Competition Live Event every year. Whether in-person, online, or hybrid, an advanced digital platform could help a business analyze participant engagement before, during, and after events and provide insights on how to target the right new hires.
Partner events: Enterprise and financial transaction software company NCR has a broad partner network and conducts Global Channel Partner Meetings, providing the opportunity to network and learn more about NCR’s solutions. The right event technology can help a company such as NCR decipher partner interests and behavior, enabling them to personalize the approach to individual partners, such as tailoring communication or offering specific products or services based on identified preferences.
Customer attraction and brand building: While Tesla’s ability to create a large cult-like following is rapidly growing to Apple-esque levels, the groundbreaking EV manufacturer cannot rest on its laurels. Tesla regularly creates innovative customer experience events such as the Tesla Takeover for consumers and the Tesla Semi Delivery Event for business customers. Advanced event data could provide a company such as Tesla valuable insights on attendee demographics, the events’ most engaging aspects, how far they are in the buyer’s journey, and how to improve future events.
User events: As with customer events, user events help educate current users and attract new ones. Adobe’s Adobe MAX event, a large user conference spanning several days and, in 2023, included over 100 new features for its flagship Creative Cloud, is one such example. When dealing with a large and complex event, event data can provide insights such as most attended sessions and attendance duration. Post-event, this information can help tie together characteristics about the attendee—are they an independent graphic designer or the head of content for a major conglomerate, for example—to the sessions they attended, their level of engagement, and what solutions they purchased, shaping marketing strategies and tailoring solutions for diverse audiences.
According to Cvent’s Senior Director of Solutions and Customer Marketing, Julie Haddix: “The proliferation of event technology has presented us with an incredible opportunity to harness a wealth of data that was previously untapped.” Haddix notes that event managers must pivot from data accumulation to data activation, mastering the art of transforming this information into compelling narratives of event success.
Haddix says advanced technology “empowers event managers to craft captivating stories and also effortlessly integrate the data across the organization,” leading to “tangible business impacts.” This is particularly important in an era of increased ROI scrutiny and a need to collaborate across multiple business divisions.
The right tools and platform enable integration that allows businesses to leverage the valuable insights gained from event data and drive meaningful business outcomes. As Haddix summarizes: “To truly make an impact, event managers need to go beyond anecdotal success stories and weave the data into the very fabric of their organization.”
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