Marketing within the B2B sector has always embraced a personal approach to customer relations. Face-to-face marketing is increasingly taking centre stage for many B2B companies as they realise that events marketing can enable them to reach more potential new customers than other forms of contact. As Gordon Owen, sales director at Carlson Marketing, succinctly points out, “People do business with people. Whilst other channels have their place in most customer journeys, face-to-face remains crucial for the higher value, longer term buying decisions that are typical in B2B.”
The events sector is vast. The latest figures from the Events Industry Alliance indicates that 17 million people visit trade shows each year that translates into an industry turnover of £9.3 billion. With 76 per cent of visitors to trade events having buying responsibility for their respective companies, and with 29 per cent of delegates never seeing a sales representative other than at an exhibition, ensuring your business has a presence and proper exposure at relevant trade events each year is of paramount importance.
Face-to-face
In the rush to automate the large-scale events and exhibitions your business is involved with, it’s easy to forget that an event can be a simple meeting at your premises, a small scale conference as well as a larger event that your business attends or organises itself. Technology now exists that can help you manage any of these events to ensure that your ROI is always at its optimum level, which is becoming vital when allocating marketing resources.
In the past, events have often been viewed as little more than loss leaders, but with better management and detailed insight into delegate activity – as well as integration with CRM systems – structured calendars of events are now finding favour at board level and attracting the funding they deserve.
Increasingly, event management systems enable you to not only make an effective sales pitch whether you are in a one-to-one meeting or fielding hundreds of enquiries at a large trade show, but to also reinforce your business’s brand. “The best delegate management packages enable events marketers to offer a branded, customised experience at each point of the customer journey,” continues Owen. “Information captured during the lead-up to the event ensures that everything runs smoothly and a first class brand experience is delivered on the day.”
Within the larger event environment, technology can also help your business better manage these large-scale conferences. David Preston, MD at DMS, says, “Digital solutions have two fundamental areas where they are improving the customer experience: personalisation and speed of execution. We have technology now to provide a personalised experience for a delegate from the initial touch inviting them to a conference or event, through their experience on the web when they register their needs and wants, to how we interface with them onsite and post event. All this can be done because we have data in a digital form that is tailored to the delegate.”
Attending an exhibition or mounting your own bespoke trade event must always be underpinned with the ability to analyse the delegates that you invite to your own event or that visit your stand. LiveInteractive provides an innovative audience engagement system and is an ideal tool for marketers to capture data, share ideas and deliver efficient events.
The system combines purpose built software with touch screen technology in a single lightweight tablet. It can accommodate up to 250 people in individual or group formation. Views and opinions can be analysed instantly from the system and displayed on presentation screens at the front of the forum and collated into post-event reports. “Maintaining audience attention spans and encouraging participation are key issues at any external and internal meeting or conference,” says Toby Lewis, MD at LiveInteractive. “Capturing spontaneous opinions and ideas is also critical in maximising event value.”
Contact intelligence
Event management systems costs vary depending on the type of package that is bought, from hosted systems to desktop software. Smaller meetings or conferences can be handled with systems that can be bought off-the-shelf for a few hundred pounds. Larger events can require much more complex systems with bespoke platforms costing tens of thousands of pounds. The key is to plan your event carefully and look for a management package that enables your business to launch the event successfully, but also capture as much attendee data as possible. This information is essential to your marketing activity after the event. If you’re looking for simple meeting and conference management, desktop systems are available such as MeetingMatrix, EMS Enterprise and if you need to manage catering as well, Caterease offers an excellent suite of applications.
Specialised systems aimed at more complex events include DMS, which has advanced delegate registration systems; Event Advantage Solutions that has built systems for organisations within the B2B events market; Connect 2 that has a number of tailored solutions; Delegate Select; Ubiqus event management software; the Expo Studio and event suite of application; and Backnetwork that embraces the Web 2.0 paradigm of online social networking within an events context. You’ll also find that marketing agencies also offer their own systems. Good examples of these include Carlson Marketing, VIPexperience from Kempster and Concep Online Event Management.
Off-the-shelf solutions vary in complexity and the feature set they offer. Systems include Symphony and Eventsforce. One of the most comprehensive is Amlink’s EventsPro suite of products. Trevor Gardiner, CEO of Amlink Technologies, says, “Clients are able to use the software to manage an unlimited number of events. The system is modular so that functionality can be added as and when required in line with a customer’s requirements. The only ongoing charges are for additional software licenses, training and an annual support and maintenance fee. There are no per registration fees or per transaction charges. Configurations vary greatly from client to client, so investment for a typical installation can range from £10,000 to £50,000 depending upon the client’s specific needs.”
Hosted systems that use a web-based portal to handle your events management can have much lower upfront costs, as you are not buying a software application outright. However, look carefully at the fee structure of the hosted system you’re interested in. Ensure you understand how you will be charged and if there are any set-up costs that are extra to what is often a per delegate fee.
Event success
The future of events management is clearly about more integration with online social networking sites. One good example is the social networking and events management tool from Backnetwork. The system enables delegates to interact with each other as well as the events hosts in what has been dubbed a ‘relationship cloud’. Measurement of the event is also central to the system to ensure that ROI meets projected targets.
Steve Evans at Backnetwork says, “The benefits of using a tool like this for the organisers include the ability to capture the immediate feedback of the delegates via interactive posts, blogs and reviews as well as extending the footprint after the event as people use these tools to continue interacting.”
Missed opportunities
Mounting your own bespoke events may be beyond the resources of your business at the moment, but you must still clearly understand how technology can impact on your attendance at an exhibition or conference. In this environment it’s important that you capture detailed information about every delegate that visits your stand. The footfall of large events can be very high, but it’s easy to let this opportunity to gain valuable client data slip through your fingers. When planning your attendance, assess not only how you will gather customer data but also how your existing in-house systems will interpret the information. Talk to the exhibition’s organiser to ensure that your existing back office systems can accept the raw data that their delegate registration system will generate.
Abigail Codd, business development executive at Concep Global, which has recently launched its own events solution, says, “No matter how advanced we become in technology, when it comes to exchanging large sums of money and taking risks, managers are going to insist on meeting their suppliers.”
She concludes, “Trust is an important element in any exchange as people need to be assured they are investing their money in reliable services, solutions and most importantly people. Developing strong client relationships is essential in today’s competitive world, these relationships may start with phone calls and emails – however, people will need to meet a person face-to-face to build that rapport and affirm the relationship.”
Events from simple one-on-one meetings to large-scale corporate conferences are an established component of the B2B marketing landscape. The bottom line for all businesses is sales. Event management systems can be as simple as meeting room allocation software to sophisticated delegate analysis packages that enable you to drill down into the data you have collected to better profile prospective leads. Choosing the right technology to help you manage your activity is important as moving into the future the events that you attend or organise yourself will become an increasingly important component of your business’s marketing mix.
