How to Harness the Value of Event Data and Make Better Decisions

We can’t stress enough how much data is crucial when it comes to making right business decisions. However, gathering information is not the ultimate goal, it needs to be well analyzed in order to show you the right way to follow. Read on and you’ll learn how to improve and speed up your decision-making process and how to use the event data to enhance the experience of your audience.

Have you ever asked yourself what makes us, event professionals, slightly different from the rest? Is it our ability to prioritize multiple work-related assignments or the tendency to multitask like crazy?

These features aren’t far from the reality. Yet, most probably, the trait that defines us best is our propensity to master the decision-making art.

Just think about the multitude of decisions you have to make every day. From how the event webpage layout should look like to what type of venue to rent, you must choose from an overwhelming number of alternatives.

As Julia Rutherford Silvers, professional event planner and former adjunct faculty member at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, notes, “Making decisions and solving problems is a large part of event management, and a skill that any event organizer must master.”

Considering this, how can you be 100% sure that the decisions you’ll make are the right ones and you won’t sabotage your event? After all, with having to deal with so many emails, tasks, and meetings, it’s almost impossible not to overlook something and come up with a poor solution.

The answer is to understand the real potential of data you’ve previously collected from prior events, and learn how to extract valuable insights or learnings from it. By doing so, you’ll not only improve and speed up your decision-making process, you’ll also enhance your audience’s experience.

Let me show you how you can do it:

Example #1.

Decide how to communicate with your prospective attendees

Not sure how to interact with your potential guests? Let the data from your previous events guide you. How did people react to your pricing strategies? Was the CTA (Call to Action) message a high-converting one or not? How about the open and click rates of your email campaigns? Did the email headline grab people’s attention, or you should have come up with something better?

By gathering data from your last events, you can easily understand what works and what you should improve. These insights will, subsequently, help you make better decisions while designing your communication plan and increasing your chances of attracting more attendees.

Example #2.

Supercharge your marketing plan

What’s the right way to promote your event? Should you do it via social media, inbound marketing, or influencers’ networks? What’s the best way to make sure people find out about your event?

Check out the statistics from your previous planning experiences. Maybe you poured lots of money into Facebook or LinkedIn ads and you had a great outreach, but the number of guests was lower than you expected, meaning next time you should change strategies and try something else.

Example #3.

Refine the attendee engagement techniques

As a pro, you’re probably using an effective event management platform and gaining access to valuable data about your attendees’ behavior. So before deciding what engaging activities to introduce in the schedule of your next event, ask yourself how your previous decisions worked (or didn’t).

For example, if you’re using gamified systems and beacons, you can easily monitor attendees’ activity (during previous events) and understand what dynamics encouraged your audience to engage more and which activities were less successful.

Example #4.

Rethink the networking dynamic

A truly good event management platform will help you understand how people interacted during your event.

Was the networking setup a friendly one? Were guests able to identify those people who presented real interest for them? Where they were able to talk with these people, and were their interactions meaningful?

By analyzing the attendee behavior data from previous events, you’ll be able to rethink the networking dynamic and experiment with other interaction settings such as refining the networking categories (matching the demand with the offer), introducing roundtable discussions among the participants to increase the interaction level, or engaging the services of a networking facilitator.

Call to action

A good decision-maker is someone who has the data to extract valuable insights and adjust his or her actions accordingly. So before making any more decisions for your next event, check the data about your previous conferences, festivals, or trade shows.

Analyze what you did well and what you should enhance. Ask yourself how you could improve both your attendees’ experiences and your results. And don’t forget that whenever you doubt before making a decision, dig deeper into the data you already have. By doing so, you’ll certainly find your way.

Are you ready to take your event to the next level?

Let’s talk about how we can help you collect and use all necessary data to make better business decisions. Contact us!