PARIS — Three professionals from very different fields of event marketing—Mike Seaman, CEO of Raccoon Events; Luke Bilton, Chief Growth Officer of Expo Platform; and Kathryn Frankson, Director of Event Marketing at Informa Markets—shared their successes and failures in building digital communities over the past year during the latest UFI Connects webinar.
Three themes dominated the conversation: personalization, data, and experimentation.
After a rocky start trying to replace Informa’s trade shows with online replicas, right down to the booths, Frankson and her team concluded that wasn’t a solution. “You can’t do what you do live virtually. The audience doesn’t come and there’s no revenue,” she said. Instead, they opted to dig deep into each audience niche Informa serves to create more customized programs. For the restaurant industry, for example, online programs need to be short, sweet, engaging and held at a time of day when the audience can actually attend. “That’s where we’ve found success.”
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A data-rich environment
Technology has allowed marketers to learn much more about audience behavior than they could in the days when all a trade show organizer had was the registration list, said Bilton, who joined Expo Platform in January after serving as vice president of digital at Informa. “It’s a fascinating time,” he said. “Rather than using technology to groom people and send them to an event, we’ve been able to drill down into micro-communities and see what content they’re consuming and who they’re engaging with. Now we have to ask ourselves how can we leverage all of that data.”
Seaman, who focuses on B2C events in the running and wellness sectors, says it’s important to experiment with social media platforms and approach all the different communities with curiosity rather than cynicism. “We embed ourselves in the communities that our customers use. So right now we’re flirting with Clubhouse and using LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.” His company even offers grants to enthusiasts to create their own online groups and also sets up tribes of micro-influencers who act as ambassadors for their live events. “We give them a t-shirt, a goodie bag and promotional access and we have a small army of about 100 people who promote each show.”
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Experiment with omnichannels
The key for all three speakers is to experiment with different strategies. Frankson says her team will take a piece of content and ask how to slice it up appropriately for all the different channels: social, quotes, graphics, stories, videos. “You have to have a strong omnichannel presence,” she said.
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Digital events will continue to be one of those channels, even as live events resume. Seaman’s live event, the 17,000-person National Running Show South, is still scheduled for July and is selling out faster than ever, he said, “but that doesn’t mean you have to abandon this incredible new tool you learned last year. You have to continue to do virtual events, too.”
The webinar, sponsored by UFI, the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry, is now available on-demand.