Do Corporate Event Planners Know How to Source An Ideal Target Audience?

August 3, 2019 Susan Serena

It’s truly important to understand what the key drivers are to the success or failure of an event. Publishing promotional ads are one of the most significant layers in any event marketing strategy because that's how Corporate Event Planners draw in attendees and boost ticket sales. However, attracting a large audience means nothing if you’re just filling seats with no science behind it.

Who are these people? Are they future customers for the brand? Are they the right age and gender? Do they live local to the brand? Do they need the products or services the company offers?

If you don’t know how to measure the value of your target audience, you’ve lost.

Besides understanding who your target audience should be, you also want to consider how many people they will share the brand’s story with, will invite other target invitees to come with them, and have the spending dollars to become customers.

Understanding the value in properly sourcing your target audience will unlock a world of opportunity for both the event and the brand.

In the remainder of this post, we will review some key components for corporate event planners to add to their event marketing strategy to help identify a valuable target audience.

Analyzing & Utilizing Data to Source a Valuable Target Audience

Part of a top corporate event planner’s job is to gather attendee data effectively in order to understand who the event’s promotions are attracting. If you’re advertising on social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, you’ll have the ability to choose the metrics for your ad. You can’t only count on the settings you entered in the section that asked you to enter the demographics. Sure, that does filter out who will see your event ad, but you want to ensure that these viewers are potential customers for the brand in addition to becoming attendees for the event.

What we’re saying is, your event marketing strategy must include knowing how to allocate the marketing dollars towards online channels that will help you learn more about the target audience who is showing interest in your event. You can do that by using tools like:

  1. Google Analytics
  2. Surveys

Google Analytics

Many corporate event planners rely on Google Analytics to gather key metrics about potential attendees. This analytics platform helps you learn who your target audience is and what their preferences are. It gathers the information from the people who are visiting the event website. You’ll also learn which online channels is pulling in your website visitors which helps you understand where to advertise more because you’ll know which channel is driving traffic to your website and increasing your ROI.

Surveys

Surveys are not only effective to collect post event information. It’s also a significant module during the event research phase to understand WHO your most valuable attendee is. While someone may not want to answer a dozen questions before requesting or purchasing tickets to an event, just a few key questions will help you scale your target audience.

If the potential attendee who clicked on your event’s promotional ad to buy tickets is not willing to answer a few questions before checkout, chances are they are not part of your ideal target audience.

Part of your event marketing strategy needs to deciding which 3-5 questions are valuable enough to help filter out who the actual potential customers will be for the brand. Include those questions in the checkout or registration process of your event so that you can begin creating a list of your ideal target attendee.

For more tips on marketing and branding for an event, keep checking back on our blog each week to stay on top of the latest in event marketing strategies.

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