Know your audience. This old-school marketing adage is at the heart every planning decision made at the 50 fastest growing events and conferences. From venue location to dinner menus, top meeting planners rely on a deep understanding of their attendee’s tastes when making big ticket decisions. But did you know that a deep understanding of your attendee’s behavior could translate into revenue dollars for your event?
Here is how it works. Consumer behavior is a key driver behind trends. Trends are a key influencer in economic markets. Anticipating trends, predicting trends and leveraging trends can be worth billions of dollars. More to point, the information required to manage trends, otherwise known as Big Data, is estimated to be $125 billion dollars.
“So what does this have to do with my conference?” you might be asking. The answer is this: you have your own mini-Big Data set waiting to be collected at every event you produce. Through a process called analytics, you can spot and, more importantly, quantify trends in attendee behavior, which can unlock sponsorship opportunities that are new and go beyond what we generally see on the sponsorship menu.
For example, let’s say your conference rotates between three or four venues, such that every third year you are in Anaheim, the next year you are in Texas. If your mobile app is configured with WayFinder and geofencing, you can, within a couple of cycles, vet out the extracurricular activities of your attendees by venue. If you are in Anaheim, you can guess without analytics that a portion of your attendees will arrive to the conference early or stay afterward to visit Disneyland. Analytics, however, might tell you that they prefer to live their Disney life from a less expensive hotel. This creates a new opportunity for sponsorship in a category perhaps previously undefined, Pre-Show/Post-Show. As luck would have it, Disney is surrounded by small-chain and boutique hotels suited for just this purpose. With the analytics in your pocket, you can sell these businesses a captive and relevant audience, to which they can sell their services. Genius, I know… Just because it has not been done before does not mean it cannot be done now. In fact, analytics can prove that it can work, without it actually having been done before.
There are a dozen other ways analytics derived from mobile apps can generate revenue, especially in a year-over-year analysis, but this post has to be fewer than 400 words and there is still a video to watch.