Richer delegate experience…richer organiser data
The holy grail, silver bullet (or whatever your choice of hyperbolic metaphor) for event organisers is tangible, actionable data on your event whilst giving a seamless and value-added experience to your delegates.
Discovering which sessions are most popular, which breakout areas generated the most buzz and perhaps, most importantly, undeniable, concrete proof of traffic to exhibitors or sponsors booths is gold dust to an event organiser. With this information, you can prove the worth of your event to exhibitors, sponsors, delegates, and speakers.
However, the historically established solutions for tracking delegates at an event are imperfect and problematic in providing useable data but also reduce the client experience in terms of the exhibitors/sponsors and event delegates.
Let’s consider the two most popular historical solutions; Badge Scanning and Wi-fi Tracking.
Firstly, badge scanning. We have all been to events where we have ventured into event venues, carefully hiding our badges to one side, under our jacket. Then, whilst distractedly retrieving something from an inside pocket, our badge swings loose on the lanyard and WHOOSH! out jumps someone from a nearby exhibitor stand and “bleep”, your badge is scanned. Your details end up in a sterile list of email addresses and contact details that are sent to the exhibitor a few days later (GDPR dependent hopefully!) so you can get the same standard e-mail follow-up. A clunky and sub-standard user experience.
From the exhibitor/supplier point of view, this is also a sub-standard experience. There is no context behind the raw data as to the type of conversation held or the strength of the prospect. Often promising conversations are awkwardly ended by a badge scan.
At the session entrances, the event organiser has to position staff, at a significant cost within an already stretched budget, to scan delegates in and out of sessions to see which were popular and which were not. Even worse, it is often several days until the data is ready to be interrogated.
Badge scanning is expensive, human-intensive, horribly intrusive to delegates, not real-time and produces flawed, non-contextual data.
Secondly, Wifi tracking. Wifi-tracking solves the intrusion and human capital elements mentioned above but still has significant compromises. To start with, it’s random. It fully depends on who joins the wifi. Given most cities have excellent 3G/4G capability, not to mention game-changing 5G technology, a significant portion of delegates won’t join the wifi at all, hence their data is lost. Event organisers receive only blunt force data on certain hotspots but no specifics. There is no way of knowing if your high-valued attendees are being tracked or just the students that have turned up to take advantage of the free food and coffee on offer.
In addition, it’s not precise in its location positioning. It will locate in general spaces but can’t give you specifics on which booth/exhibitor has been visited let alone by which profile of attendee. For this reason, wifi tracking usually has to be deployed alongside badge scanning delivering the worst of all possible worlds.
Want to add tracking to your next event? Call the Event Builder team on 0121 796 5800
So let’s consider the best current method for tracking your guests and providing useable information, bluetooth.
Bluetooth technology is not new – it’s been around for a long time. After all, it was invented by Nokia (remember them?) who named it after the Viking warrior, Bluetooth. Its low power, low cost and low frequency (so it doesn’t affect AV or other systems such as wifi) characteristics make it perfect for event tracking. Delegates are tracked from their lanyard rather than their phones and the locations generated are very precise.
VenuIQ’s proven tracking solution provides a whole range of benefits which we’d be happy to demo in more detail, but here are just a few:
• It’s extremely quick to deploy. With training, it can even be deployed by event organisers themselves meaning a huge saving on professional services
• It’s a non-intrusive deployment with no need for power or permanent fixings. It can be deployed within a couple of hours in even the biggest event spaces
• The nature of Bluetooth technology means that delegates are only tracked in the areas you deploy the solution. As soon as they leave that area they are no longer tracked. It also means private areas and toilets can be excluded, unlike wifi.
• Delegates can fully opt-out of being tracked from the event app on their mobile phone
• Event organisers get real-time data pushed to their VenuIQ dashboard
• Full APIs are available to link data back to other systems such as CRM or ERP
• It can track which delegates went to which stands or booths. Fully segment this data by job roles, profile, industry, geography (just to name a few) to give insightful data to exhibitors whilst simultaneously removing all intrusion to the delegate. For those rich connections that represent proper opportunities, the event app can be leveraged to prompt relevant follow-up
• Track who went to which session, and for how long with no need for scanning or staffing. Plus, it’s real time!!
• If appropriate to your event, the event app can show where delegates were “last seen” in terms of a room, space or hall. This helps get the delegates’ heads out of their phone and promote proper “serendipitous” conversations.
• Prove to your sponsors/exhibitors with undeniable, irrefutable, tangible data that shows the traffic delivered to their stand. How their representative and their marketing then attract delegates for proper conversations is up to them but fight the generic feedback of “we didn’t have any valuable traffic” by proving exactly who visited and passed by their stand.
Want to add tracking to your next event? Call the Event Builder team on 0121 796 5800
