The days when marketing managers would provide their attendees with nothing more than a wrinkled piece of paper with a map on it are over. These days, guests are looking for a more curated experience that caters to their requirements.
Fortunately, new technology and facilities are now available to marketing managers to make their jobs easier. Marketing teams are turning what we once thought were stressful days into something more seamless, providing a concierge-style service.
Here are some of the ways marketing managers are making life vastly easier for attendees at major conferences and events:
Reducing schedule and anxiety with mobile apps
One of the biggest innovations in recent years has been the rise of mobile apps for events and conferences. These provide all of the information that attendees need to make the most of their visits. Marketing event apps feel significantly more proactive than conventional options like websites. Psychologically speaking, they reduce attendees’ reliance on your existing administrative staff, allowing you to field a skeleton team while offering the same level of service.
Users are now well-versed in leveraging apps for all sorts of activities and services, so they often feel right at home when there is an event-specific app. Once you have one app up and running for an event, you can continue using that for subsequent events by only changing a few of the underlying parameters.
Think about the advantages of real-time notifications for your attendees:
- You can make last-minute changes to your schedule and even surprise them with new guest speakers or experiences.
- You can also tell speakers immediately if a room is delayed and notify guests, eliminating confusion and making the experience more seamless for everyone.
Personalised content tracks
There’s also the fact that you can offer your guests personalised content tracks. Instead of bundling everybody into the same experience, you can provide them with an agenda that caters to different tastes based on the information that you have about them. You may find that different guests want completely different things, or you can use registration data to segment audiences and deliver tailored recommendations.
This approach has become vastly more popular in the age of AI, when systems are able to evaluate information and then deploy recommendations immediately using real-time context. You can also adjust the way that you market to people. For example, some users are more responsive to pre-event emails and app sign-up requests than others. This is one of the ways that you can personalise the experience and make recommendations to them so they aren’t rifling through hundreds of seminars.
Deal with baggage and hotels
Marketing managers are also seeing the benefits of managing attendees’ baggage in hotels. Usually, there’s a problem with where to store bags during the day and where to stay at night.
However, marketing managers who are proactive in this realm can solve many of these problems. There’s no reason they can’t act more like a concierge service, especially if the event is about branding or providing customers with the best experience possible.
Most people travelling to a new city don’t know where to stay or where to keep their belongings. While some venues have lockers on site, these are often low quality and require guests to bring their own padlocks, which most won’t. Instead, it’s nice to have solutions ready and available immediately on arrival so that attendees can focus on the content of the event and nothing else.
Automated networking
Automated networking is another significant change marketing managers are making to improve the lives of people attending events and business conferences. When guests walk into a crowded room full of people they don’t know, it’s not always clear who they should speak to, and getting around everyone can feel exhausting, especially for introverts.
Marketers are now using AI-driven matchmaking so that people can be seated and arranged in ways that mean they’re most likely to meet their highest-value contacts immediately. These systems aren’t perfect, of course, because they don’t have intrinsic knowledge of everybody who’s going to be in attendance. They can make pretty good guesses about who is going to want to speak to whom and how they can benefit each other.
What’s more, marketing managers are collecting information about attendees’ professional goals. For example, they’re asking whether they’re hiring senior developers or looking for seed funding. This information can then be matched to venture capitalists looking to invest in new startups or experienced developers looking for roles in new companies.
Interactive wayfinding
Wayfinding is a significant challenge for many events and conferences, since most take place in enormous convention centres that most people haven’t been to before. Many exhibition halls waste time and sour the experience by failing to provide attendees with proper direction on where to go.
Therefore, it’s useful to use wayfinding, including interactive digital maps that function like GPS in indoor spaces. For example, you might want to include a map feature such as live booth search. This tells attendees where a vendor is and shows them the path they need to take to walk directly to them. You could also use crowd density heat maps to tell guests how busy a specific area is before they decide to walk along it. They may want to wait in one location before moving to another.
Frictionless post-event knowledge and education
Finally, marketing managers are looking for ways to extend the value of their conferences and business events by making post-event knowledge and education frictionless. The idea here is to take the effort out of following up on what was learned at the conference by providing post-event resources electronically.
Previously, the way to do this was to send a generic link to a cloud folder, but marketers are now automating this workflow and sending personalised wrap-up emails based on the information gleaned from attendees during the conference.
Attendees receive video recordings, slide decks, and digital handouts for the sessions that they scanned into. All of this helps to increase the value added to the experience and encourage guests to return in the future.
