As Pico’s Chairman points out in his latest Headline Finance column, event promotion has come a long way from yesterday’s ‘push’ methods of organising celebrity-laden cocktail parties. Today is the era of ‘pull marketing’, and its aims are to greatly increase attendee engagement and use events to build interactive relationships between target audiences and brands.
The first step to accomplishing this can be summed up in one word: data. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to collect information on what makes the audience tick – and the behavioural trends that will make them tick in the near future. A good data picture not only enables planners to extrapolate how brand messages and various types of interaction will likely resonate with the audience, but also provides the datum from which the whole campaign’s ROI may be measured.
On the other hand, a failure to collect enough data – or data that is relevant – will effectively render event planners and marketing professionals ‘blind and deaf’. Failure to analyse the data thoroughly is a guaranteed recipe for wildly off-target marketing.
As the Chairman concludes, it is important to understand not only that data is the key, but that there are many layers of data – behavioural, market, audience profiling, etc – that each provides a part of the overall picture. It is those who have the whole picture and who tend to create the most successful events.
*The above is a summary of the original Chinese article. In case of dispute, the Chinese version shall be regarded as definitive.
