The Experiential Marketing Summit might be a wrap, but, along with conference swag, we packed away a suitcase’s worth of takeaways for event marketers of all kinds.
The conference, which took place May 3–5 in Chicago’s McCormick Place, gathered hundreds of the top minds in experiential events and marketing, representing companies such as Twitter, Adobe and IBM, among others.
If you missed out—don’t worry! We took notes. Here are seven useful lessons we took away from the Event Marketer Experiential Marketing Summit.
1. Harness the Totality of Your Event Data
Across the board, the hottest topic that every keynote speaker touched on was capturing data and utilizing it to improve events. Understanding the data you receive and how to apply it is a game-changer for the events industry, and it’s growing more and more indispensable. No longer will events be designed with guessing—data will back up our decisions.
You can create real value by taking data and turning it into insights, then converting those insights into action. Also, with finance and procurement seeking quantitative budget justifications, data can provide a variety of measures from the impact of the experience to consumer consideration to sales performance.
Colleen Bisconti, Vice President of Global Conferences and Events at IBM, takes the idea of data gathering to another level, beyond the data gathered exclusively from your event.
“To be truly effective, we have to harness the totality of data we have on each and every person,” she said. “What products do they use? What other events have they gone to? How else have they engaged with us, even going so far as to look at their social media footprint?”
Read the full blog with all seven takeaways on itagroup.com!