CEO and co-founder of Jublia, Kuan Yan Tan, shares four insightful tips after a decade of trying out various recipes for event engagement
Engagement is the cornerstone of a prosperous event and continues to be a vital factor at every stage of an event.
However, some organisers endeavour to create captivating events without knowing the proper recipe, resulting in uncertainty and hit-or-miss outcomes. So, how can organisers ensure their events remain engaging and captivating throughout, ensuring their success?
1. Personalisation is the spice that gets you going
According to research conducted by Interaction Studio – Salesforce Marketing Cloud, prioritising personalisation leads to a more improved customer experience, with 88 per cent of marketers agreeing to this claim. Understandably, attendees seek to feel understood, seen, and heard.
Therefore, the engagement process should not be viewed as a utility. It is a performance-driven strategy that intelligently suggests relevant content to the audience, encouraging further participation, and yielding better results for them.
As a result, it is crucial to ensure that your event can personalise recommendations that connect attendees with relevant content, companies, and products that cater to their interests, resulting in a more authentic event experience.
2. Data-driven matchmaking, the main ingredient
A powerful event matchmaking – to the right people and content – does not happen if you leave it solely up to chance. It needs the right formula. A well-crafted formula is necessary, but overly controlling the process can also hinder its success.
Instead, event organisers should provide planning tools that empower attendees to discover and connect on their own terms, while also facilitating relevant meetings and interactions.
Always seek to empower your audiences’ discovery journey with the best planning tools, while not forgetting that facilitating the right meetings between relevant attendees only serves to delight them.
Create a more accurate journey with AI-matchmaking which can help track and analyse all event data in real-time to make accurate predictions, and come up with unique recommendations for each attendee according to their needs and interests.
3. The right measurements and right ingredients
Now that you have your main ingredients, we also need the right measurements. Each audience member has their own preferences too. Some won’t like spicy food, some have a sweet tooth, and some love the taste of something different.
Engagement is a single word but actually a multi-faceted process, hence it wouldn’t be wise to limit your metrics to a single outcome. Your audience may have different focuses at different stages of marketing and sales funnels. That is why solely measuring meetings would not accurately measure the actual success of engagement at your events.
There will be audiences that are very happy simply because they discovered new content with valuable insights. There might also be ones that are happy to gather leads or get the chance to talk to relevant communities and like-minded people.
