Ungerboeck Software International, the American event management software company, claims more than 600 shows worldwide use its purpose-built event organiser customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Of this number, around half its clients use it across all their shows. In mid-February the company launches its new Event Showcase solution to help clients justify to their exhibitors how their attendance at these events compares with other marketing channels.
Speak to any software provider formulating solutions for exhibition organisers today and they’ll tell you mobile solutions are top of their list of priorities. Event attendees, be they exhibitor or visitor, don’t bring their desks to events, they need to access to their contacts, event programmes and an increasing list of resources on the hoof. For exhibitors and organisers alike, a convergence tool can do much to empower and enrich their experience of an event.
Data that is comparable across all devices is data organisers can communicate to exhibitors more effectively. Explaining how many impressions (instances of a user visiting a page) your exhibitor’s section on your event website is getting, can make it easier to explain to them why they are – or are not – getting the results they want.
“It’s not useful to go to an exhibitor and say ‘Well you had 100 views on your mobile app’, if you know only 20 per cent of attendees use mobile apps,” says Ungerboeck chief executive Krister Ungerboeck. “You have to take all the different click-thrus and consolidate them, then add other factors so that you can tell them ‘We know only a certain percentage of our visitors are even using these tools, they’re still using the printed guide’ or whatever it may be.
“When you go to the exhibitor and say: ‘Hey, you’re spending US$10,000 to come to this show and we’ve got 20,000 views on the show website, they will want convert that to a cost-per-view. Which is what Google offers them, as does all the other pay-per-click advertising that they’re trying to compare it against,” says Ungerboeck. “Taking a mobile phone-only metric and trying to divide that by the total exhibitor spend is a very dangerous thing for an organiser to provide an exhibitor, because when that information gets filtered to the chief marketing officer, it’s going to look really bad in comparison with the other metrics of their other marketing channels.
Judged by their peers
Ranking exhibitors’ performance to other similar exhibitors is another way of helping them see where they are succeeding or failing in their approach to taking part in your event. Ungerboeck’s new software enables an exhibition salesperson to have a meaningful, data-driven conversation with an exhibitor, telling them, for example: “I can see you’re not getting nearly as many people viewing your page from our online tools. Let’s send out an email blast to all our visitors announcing a giveaway to drive traffic to your booth.” Depending on whether or not that’s an important exhibitor to them, they may or may not charge for that service; but it can further help the exhibitor to see when the problem they are having is actually a result of their own lacklustre pre-show marketing.
“If I went to an event and a show salesperson said to me that they could see our three main competitors were getting three times as much traffic to their web app as we are, then that’s likely a problem with my marketing and nothing to do with my location on the floor,” says Ungerboeck. “We’re aggregating the data to give show salesmen the tools to help exhibitors be more successful and also to separate this from the thought that ‘I’ve got bad traffic because you gave me a bad location’.
Of course if they can see their competitors were getting more traffic because of a superior exhibitor web page, or did a greater job with pre-marketing, then you can open up new revenue opportunities. Or as Ungerboeck points out, “At the very minimum you get to have a fact-based conversation with an exhibitor on why they can control their performance at the show, during the show, a great deal more than they think they can.”
This all takes place in real time, and could enable the organiser to use the data for upsell opportunities, preventative measures in advance of the show so the exhibitor doesn’t have a bad experience, or even doing it face-to-face during the show.
Ungerboeck’s new software may offer organisers to turn an age-old complaint into more revenue.
This was first published in issue 1/2014 of EW. Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
