Comment
Getting personal
Personalised user experiences are a ‘must-have’ for exhibitions, says Tanya Pinchuk,
Managing Director at event platform provider ExpoPlatform
he customer journey
becomes increasingly
complicated as
tradeshows grow. And,
with the recent acquisitions in the
global exhibitions landscape, talk in
our office has switched to the issue
of keeping the visitor experience
personal throughout the formation of
increasingly large businesses.
Perhaps technology can offer a
solution. In much the same way as
a company such as Amazon aims to
provide every one of its millions of
customers with a unique experience,
event technology can help focus
the communication process for
visitors and return that personalised
experience to an event.
For example, when a user is not
registered for an event, the widgets
on the show website display may
show generic information. Once they
register for the show or log in the
information on the website (exhibitors,
sessions, speakers, etc) becomes
unique to that user. A carefully applied
AI-powered matching algorithm
can enable visitors to see a preview
of exhibitors they should meet, the
sessions they should be part of and the
speakers they’d like.
This means a personalised
experience regardless of the size of the
event and number of sectors it covers;
your version of the website will have
the information you are interested
in. Big events become just as large
as the visitor – or exhibitor – want
them to be. Technology can reduce
the problems that accompany these
supersized shows.
Visitors who don’t look at their
conference schedule, browse
exhibitors or interact, instead just
attending the event blind, will spend a
lot of time going pointlessly from hall
to hall. A good matchmaking engine
decides what entities (exhibitors,
w w w.exhibitionworld.co.uk
people, products, content) are
interesting for a person, and is able to
adapt based on how they then interact
with those entities. The results of the
matching engine can then be used to
create personal recommendations.
Interactivity
It is equally important to allow visitors
to actively take advantage of relevant
matches by driving them to interact
with the results in a meaningful way.
These interactions can take the form of
meeting requests, messages, addition
of sessions to personal agenda,
product likes and so on.
The value of such a system lies in
the ability to meet with new leads or
business partners, with whom you
may never have had contact in the
past, in a convenient and data-safe
way that doesn’t expose contact
details directly. This enables visitors
to interact with exhibitors without
fear of being forever pestered by their
marketing campaigns.
The organiser, of course, exists to
facilitate the needs of both exhibitors
Above:
Technology
can create
customised
templates
Above:
Tanya Pinchuk,
Managing
Director at
ExpoPlatform
and visitors, and is uniquely placed to
do so in this instance. It need not be
a complicated process. With efficient
technology the organiser can create
customised templates for pre-defined
cases that use information about how
far along the engagement pipeline
a user has progressed. Based on the
stage the user is at, the system will
send out a tailored message to get
them to explore the features they have
not yet come in contact with.
Additionally, for users that have
become inactive, an email with
content and entities (exhibitor,
visitor, content previews etc), selected
for them personally, is sent out
automatically, urging them to have a
look at what they are missing out on.
A technology provider can perform
this laborious task for organisers
with the result that both parties will
get improved value from the event.
And in doing so we can ensure
that as organisers grow, or as their
shows expand, the visitor experience
remains as personal - if not more so -
as ever.
Issue 6 2019
55