We are in the third decade of a modern gold rush to mine corporate data. As multidimensional data analysis (MDA) continues to accelerate, the hunt has intensified to find new “veins” to explore.
Until recently, one treasure trove has remained relatively untapped: the data generated by live events and conferences. Information on attendance, engagement, sales and other metrics has received far less attention than other silos across the enterprise. But as the activities and behavior from events are digitized and optimized online, live event data can now be tied quite easily to almost any business outcome.
Our challenge was to show event planners the significant opportunities that result from live event data: either as highly actionable business intelligence input for discrete applications or new insight that can be added to the marketing stack.
By staying on top of what the industry wants and by listening closely to our client’s needs, G2Planet was able to deliver a next-generation solution by leveraging on our extensive experience with ERP platforms, database driven application solutions, modern software development and application personalization practices.
Harnessing the Business Value of Events
When event planning software debuted two decades ago, the solutions were focused solely on the production management tasks with implementing a hosted conference or event – e.g. gathering registrant profiles, processing payments, reserving a hotel room, checking people in, issuing badges, and so on.
As more sophisticated marketing analytics practices emerged, we saw a technological opportunity to take our clients into a new paradigm of event planning, which was focused on helping a company improve the intelligence gained and resulting advantages harnessed through the use of their events.
But with many clients, we continued to be challenged by the nature of the event industry. Great event planners seek to “up their game” every year by doing something bigger, better and different than their previous year’s preeminent event. But successful enterprise applications are built on the model of reaching scale through standardization. This works well with certain corporate functions, including accounting, HR, and even sales. However it was challenging to “standardize” event marketing in an effective way.
This inability to standardize put strain on the professional services element of the event software vendor-event planner relationship. We began to have many new clients approach G2Planet requesting the latest capabilities – a tall order made taller by the longstanding internal challenges surrounding event marketing.
Better Inputs. Better Outputs.
Our team worked hard to develop a next-generation solution using clever architecture, modern development techniques, and the philosophy that at our base, G2Planet is a services company who provides enterprise software to meet its client’s business needs.
Modern business analytics require quality inputs to optimize outputs. Live event data is as pure as information gets. With the right tools, any enterprise can collect and manage every data point in the event process. Because live event data is quintessentially organic, it is of higher caliber than online data generated by content farms, click bait and other intermediaries that can skew outputs.
A popular new approach termed Data-Driven Enterprise Event Planning, or DEEP, provides companies with the tools to excavate and leverage the highest quality data first. DEEP tools were designed in response to help clients realize the business value of event data by more easily integrating it into other business systems. While the original event management systems were useful for transforming paper and pencil data into digital depositories, they were built like bank vaults: Although the data was relational and object based, it remained optimized for legacy use and was not all that extensible.
Most of all, the data that existed in legacy management systems did not lend itself to massive aggregation, and as a result, could not be meaningfully mined for “big data” opportunities. When working with big data, the more heterogeneous, the better.
The data generated by live events and DEEP tools can now be tied to lead scores, participation rates, user experience, product adaption, conversion goals, and the myriad of other business outcomes that exist within a Marketing Resource stack. Just like online data, live event data can now thrive within the same ecosystems that drive CRM, marketing automation, digital marketing and more. Unlike online data, however, live event data captures person-to-person interactivity in a dedicated commercial setting.
With the use of DEEP tools and other advances in event technology, we have enabled our clients to mine their event data with the same rigor and sophistication as other sources of online marketing data. And while the insights yielded by online data have long been documented, the value offered by live event data is only now being discovered.
Mark Granovsky is CEO of G2Planet. Click here to download a new whitepaper on the role of event management in the enterprise ecosystem.