Your event management platform should come with various features for promoting your event on social and measuring its success. When it comes to scheduling posts to be published, your marketing automation software is your best friend.
During the Event
In this section we’ll explore how technologies can help manage a variety of event-day processes, from checking in attendees to showcasing event sponsors.
Facilitating a Smooth Event Check-in
Recommended Tech: Event Management Software, On-Site Management Software
Leading up to your event, attendees will have many touchpoints with your event brand. They will have visited your website, received emails from your team and potentially have seen retargeting or paid ads.
If someone has a lousy event check-in experience all of this can go out the window.
Fortunately, most event management solutions now come with intuitive tools for checking in attendees. Dedicated on-site management software like Bizzabo's onsite solutions can provide an even more customizable check-in experience, in addition to other services like badge printing.
Event management software and on-site management software can be integrated with one another for an even more powerful event check-in experience.
Tracking Session Registration
Recommended Tech: Event Management Software, On-Site Management Software
Who signs up for each session and which sessions are most popular with attendees is helpful to know. On the one hand, data on the amount of session registrations can tell you which sessions are most popular. On the other hand, knowing what sessions your attendees are interested in can help you craft future event content or post-event content for following up with attendees.
Both event management software and on-site management software can help here.
Attendee Networking and Engagement
Recommended Tech: Event App
As mentioned above, attendees have grown accustomed to using event apps to navigate through events. Below are several use cases for an event app.
- Viewing an event agenda and create their personal agenda
- Researching who will be at the event and networking with other attendees
- Participating in polls and surveys
- Learning about event speakers
- Receiving real-time event updates via push notifications
Giving Partners and Sponsors Exposure
Recommended Tech: Event App, Event Management Software
Event sponsors are absolutely essential for making B2B events possible. For securing event sponsors and keeping them happy, event marketers need to demonstrate that their event is worth the investment. The same goes for other event partners.
Event marketers have multiple ways of making an event worthwhile through sponsorship packages. They can give a sponsor a booth at an event, showcase their logo on printed materials and give them shout-outs in media and emails.
Event management software can make spreading the word on sponsors a cinch. Imagine being able to seamlessly feature sponsor logos across event emails, the event website and the event app—all from one page.
Some event apps, like Bizzabo, offer dedicated features just for sponsors. These include:
- Dedicated sponsorship pages
- Special offers that drive attendees to specific web pages
- And the ability to track and measure attendee interaction with all of the above.
A glimpse of how an event app can track event sponsorship engagement.
By now it's clear that your event management platform is the most important technology in the event lifecycle. Read the Event Software Buyer's Guide to see how Cvent, Etouches and other top platforms compare.
After the Event
The stage after your event is the time for driving action and optimizing your strategy.
Passing Leads on to Sales
Recommended Tech: Event Management Software, CRM
Thanks to your event management software, you should have a list of everyone who is registered for your event. You may even have other information such as what sessions they attended, which sponsors they visited and more.
Once this info is synced with your CRM, your sales team will have a good idea of who they should reach out to next.
Naturally, you’ll want to make sure that these contacts are tagged with the event campaign. This will factor into marketing attribution and measuring ROI, which we’ll discuss below.
Following Up with Attendees
Recommended Tech: Event Management Software, CRM, Marketing Automation Software
When it comes to following up with attendees, you have options. You can use your event management software or you can use your marketing automation platform. With event management software, it may be easier to make lists based on an attendee’s event activity. Conversely, the information passed to CRMs and marketing automation platforms may not have the same level of granularity, but will let you expand the scope of your email campaign beyond those who are in your event database.
Measuring Event Performance and ROI
Recommended Tech: Event Management Software, Data Warehousing Software, Data Visualization Software
Modern event management software comes with a variety of measurement tools built into it. You can measure revenue, registrations, the popularity of sessions, the exposure of sponsors and more—all through easy to read reports and visualizations.
Some platforms, like Bizzabo, allow you to compare cross-event analytics so that you can easily see how one event performed in comparison with another.
Using data warehousing software, you can aggregate data from across your event technology stack. From there, you can use data visualization software to compile reports based off the resulting data. For example, an event marketer could create a report that pulls event revenue and attendee information from event management software and each attendee’s lifecycle stage from a CRM.
Building Your Event Technology Stack
The sky's the limit when it comes to the technologies that you can use to help you with your event lifecycle. Below you’ll find an overview of the types of technologies that we covered. The combination of these tools working with one another is called the event technology stack.
Event Management Software
Event management software (EMS) is the foundation on which the rest of your event stack will be built. Not only will it help you create your event, it will also serve you in growing and optimizing your event far into the future.
Given that your event management software forms the base of your tech stack, it is essential that it integrates seamlessly with other platforms that comprise it. That is, your EMS should be able to automatically send data to and receive data from other platforms in your event tech stack.
Note: This is the only platform that is essential to every step of your event lifecycle.
Example: Bizzabo
Event App
Mobile event or conference apps for attendees have become a fixture at B2B events. They offer attendees a means of conveniently networking with one another, planning their event itineraries and engaging with event app content (via polls and surveys) among other features.
For organizers, event apps can be a great way of driving event ROI, showcasing event sponsors and mining valuable insights about attendee preferences.
Example: Bizzabo
On-site Event management Software
While your event management software should cover the majority of the functions for marketing, managing and growing your event—you will likely wish to utilize on-site management software to make event check-in smoother for attendees and easier for organizers.
There is a lot more that on-site event management software can manage like badge printing, session registration and other tasks that we’ll examine below.
Example: Bizzabo's onsite solutions
CRM
Customer relationships managements systems (CRMs) have become a mainstay for most marketing and sales teams. Statistics show, there’s a good chance that you (or someone at your organization) is already using one. But just in case you’re unfamiliar, here’s a quick breakdown.
At its simplest, a CRM serves as an interactive database of information for customers and leads.
Before an event campaign is even planned, an event marketer can pore through a CRM to surface data that may influence that campaign. Mining a system for data related to contact location, seniority, or other information can make it easier to plan a more successful event from the outset.
Example: Salesforce
Marketing Automation Software
Outside of your event management platform, your marketing automation software will be your primary platform for engaging with your event contacts. Marketing automation software automates repetitive tasks that marketers would otherwise need to handle manually.
When it comes to your event stack, your marketing automation software can perform a number of critical functions like sending out segmented emails and passing attendees through specific workflows.
Example: HubSpot
Data Warehousing Software
Data warehouse software serves as the central hub for all of the integrated event data across your event technology stack and even your organization. It is a database that constantly updates based on the platforms integrated with it.
As an event marketer there will be times when you want to analyze and manipulate data from your event management platform, marketing automation platform, sales CRM, attribution software and online ads (tracking pixels). Data warehousing provides the foundation for making that analysis happen.
Example: Amazon Redshift
Business Intelligence & Data Visualization Software
Once your data warehouse is in place, it’s time to extract insights from it. Business intelligence and data visualization software covers a wide variety of tools that are used to translate event data and metrics into charts, graphs and insights.
Example: Looker
Wrapping Up: Your Event Tech Life Cycle
At every stage of the event lifecycle there is the opportunity to harness technology to make you and your team more productive than ever before. In this post we covered the core technologies that can take your event strategy to the next level. As you continue to build out your event technology stack you may find other technologies that serve your event strategy.
- Leverage event management software, CRMs and the rest of your event stack to maximize productivity .
- Before your event, you can leverage technology to build the foundation of your event campaign and promote.
- During your event, you can leverage technology to showcase sponsors and partners, engage attendees and harvest valuable attendee data.
- After the event, technology can help you coordinate between different teams, follow-up with your attendees, create reports, visualize data and prove ROI.
- At every stage of the life cycle, ensure that your technology is seamlessly integrated so that no data is lost.
The perfect event technology stack starts with the perfect event software. Compare today's leading platforms in the Event Software Buyer's Guide.