Marketing
Paul Dominguez runs
tamedMedia, a digital
consultancy providing
publishers and event
organisers with strategic and
hands-on support to better
understand and engage with
their communities. With over
20 years’ experience working
with leading B2B media
and events brands he is
passionate about using data
and analytics to interpret
audience motivations to
consume and buy.
Mark Parsons runs Events
Intelligence, a big data
business which uses machine
learning to understand
the similarity between
companies and find new
exhibitors at scale. For the
last four years he has helped
the strategy and deal teams
at major organisers using
data-led origination tactics.
He is a chartered accountant,
holds an Executive MBA from
London Business School,
and a MSc in Data Science
and Business Analytics from
NYU Stern.
of thousands (and sometimes millions)
integrating systems into complex
CRMs such as Salesforce, the reality
is that binding data together (even
probabilistically) and querying it is not
overly difficult or expensive to build or
to outsource. One can use many online
databases and analytical tools provided
by cloud compute platforms offered by
Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.
There is little value in data per se, the
value for event organisers comes from
being able to query data from multiple
sources to discover areas of interests.
You should seek to build a “data lab” that
enables you to quickly explore different
data sources to identify clusters of
similar interests, which we like to call
“communities of interest”.
Using interests to tailor and delight
Tradeshows bring together large
audiences of engaged buyers and
sellers. Pre Covid-19, most organisers
didn’t really know that much about the
interests of their attendees or those of
their exhibitors. Post Covid-19 those
organisers that can build a data-led
content and digital events strategy, will
be able to segment users effectively and
to generate tangible value. For a typical
show of 10,000 attendees and 500
exhibitors, being able to split them into
small groups of 100 or 200 individuals
who have specific and similar interests
has significant value for the organiser, for
its exhibitors and its attendees.
Sales reps can use insight into
communities of interest to sell the value
proposition of a show more closely to
specific exhibitors and to upsell pre-show
access to those potential attendees who
are highly engaged on a specific issue.
Attendance can be improved by
tailoring marketing messages to focus on
the expressed interest of the user. More
creatively, those ‘influencers’ within your
audience can be identified and leveraged
to gain extra marketing reach for the
event.
Matchmaking can be significantly
improved by combining exhibitors’
targeting lists with information on
attendees’ interests. A further layer
to this is by adding new data covering
company similarity from data providers
such as Events Intelligence.
So where does that leave the marketing
funnel?
Just as remote working will continue
in the future, attending a mix of digital
and live events is likely to become the
norm now that the fire has been lit. From
a marketing perspective, this creates
a richer and continuous relationship
with our communities of attendees and
exhibitors. Data from these interactions
transform the traditional marketing
funnel into a complex machine to
segment users into interest groups. Data
is commonly described as the new oil -
for organisers to create real value they
need to build refineries!
August — 13