How Can Location Intelligence, Improve Event Management Planning?
Ok, welcome back and thanks for reading, remember at any time you can get a free account with Mapsimise. I think first I should tell you a story about planning an event without considering location and the impact it can have. When I started my career sometime ago, the software company decided that it would have a lunch event in Birmingham UK. As it knew that there were 5 or 6 customers there and several more in the surrounding areas.
A venue was found, the invites set out, the catering organised, and the day came, but only 4 people turned up. Embarrassingly there were more employees from the company than there were guests, but what went wrong.
The reality was the event was booked for 9am, but it was on the wrong side of Birmingham. The guests would have had to either face rush hour traffic or drive across the city in the early morning traffic.
How This Could’ve Been Avoided
Had the organises just had a location intelligence tool, and had they mapped all their customer data they would have seen very quickly the error, that made this event a total failure.
Yes, I was there, and I ate a lot of cakes. But that one event influenced later life decision when building software solutions. It made me always remember that you should go to where your customers are.
Let’s now take a look at some of the key features of using such tools. Tools that will help you understand customer location and hot spots, locations when events could be held. The question is are you looking to take your event planning to the next level?
With location intelligence and tools like Mapsimise, (ok, let’s face it this is the Mapsimise blog) you can ensure your events get a better chance of attendance. All by pinpointing the perfect locations and reaching your target audience effectively.
It is very likely that you will have a CRM system and process or even a spreadsheet of customers. By getting your data mapped you can very quickly see where your customers are.
Now, Let’s dive into how you can leverage location intelligence for seamless event management and planning.
Identify Optimal Event Locations:
With Mapsimise, you can easily map out potential event locations and analyse their proximity to your target audience. By understanding where your customers are located, you can choose venues that are convenient and accessible. This increases the likelihood of attendance and engagement. We recently showed a customer that having several smaller events would probably work better. So instead of getting everyone to travel, the customer created a road show of 12 events. The attendance was higher and over all the cost was about the same.
Visualise Attendee Distribution:
One of the great things about location intelligence is you have the ability to visualise data. With event planning this means you can view the distribution of prospective candidates and attendees. All on a map identifying clusters and hotspots in a single view. This insight allows you to tailor your event marketing efforts and outreach strategies to areas with the highest concentration of potential attendees. This maximises your event’s impact, and dare we say return on investment.
Optimise Event Marketing:
You can very quickly segment your target audience based on geographic location and preferences. By delivering personalised event invitations and promotions to individuals in specific areas, you will be able to increase engagement and drive attendance. We tried this for a customer and in the invite included a little information about the local area. So not only was it personalised for the invitee, but by location. What was surprising was the read rate to these smaller tailored groups. It was far higher than larger groups with generic emails that were just personalised to the person.
Measure Event Success:
If you have the data, after the event you can analyse very easily attendee data by location to measure the success of your event and gather valuable insights for future planning. By trending where your customers are, who was invited and who came you get an understanding where attendees are coming from and how they engage with your event, product, or service. By doing this you can refine your strategies and improve outcomes for future planned events.
Sales and Marketing Tips:
We all know the importance of Data. All the activity we are doing including events, marketing and lead generation has to lead to sales. Including location intelligence into your sales and marketing strategies will help with enhancing targeting and segmentation. By understanding the geographic distribution of your target audience, you can tailor your messaging, your outreach, and in some cases resource allocation efforts, this hopefully will help resonate with specific regions, driving higher conversion rates and ROI.
Ok, thanks again for reading. Lets now conclude what we have covered off. Including location intelligence with tools like Mapsimise into your sales, marketing and event planning process can help you get better return on investments, reduce waste and find the right location and the right people for your events. Remember in the age of time and less travel, we all want to use less resources. So taking your team to a local location is far more productive than expecting 100’s to come to your event.
By going where your customers are and using data-driven insights to inform your decisions, you can create memorable events that resonate with your audience and drive business success. So why wait? Start planning your next event with location intelligence and get more from what you already do.