Apple dream of greatness. IKEA dream about providing people with opportunity. Microsoft dream to have a computer in every home. Henry Ford wanted a car in every household. What’s your brand’s dream?
A thought provoking comment that came from the recent UFI conference in Basel. Your dream may not be technology related, but that doesn’t mean you’re not likely to use it.
We as an event, are just an instrument in marketing for a company. Each industry and sector has a unique customer journey. So you need to clearly identify those, even within subsets of your own data and how best to engage with them.
Before you get started in reading, I know this is a long post. Ideally that this should be broken out into four or even more blogs, but I wanted to get across the quantity and quality of information from the recent UFI Conference in Basel and hopefully give a little bit of insight into how this information could be used in your own campaigns. So perhaps make yourself a cup of tea, sit back and get reading. I tried to be brief… it’s tricky when there are so many ideas to talk about!
Event Technology.
It influences experience. Sponsorship. Marketing. Insight. Sales. Our future.
If you use event tech on your own events, you will be influencing at least one of those core areas of vertical mentioned above, if not more, through various technology products or resources.
#EventTech is probably one of the most talked about subjects in any industry conference, session, networking event. That and digitalisation of your brands.
Which was the overarching subject of the UFI Open Seminar 2016 which took place last week in Basel. Below I ‘ve offered some thought on my key take aways from the event.
Huib van Bockel, an expert in both marketing & media, shared insights from his experience in ways companies can use social media slightly differently to engage with their audience.
To make social change, you need the leader to lead the direction.
Huib reiterated in a few different ways the annoyance of retargeting. You know, those washing machine ads that follow you around the internet, once you’ve looked at any department stores website? Hands up if it annoys you? Hands up those of you that have paid for a premium app because it bans ads? Hands up if you bought Spotify premium to get rid of the ads? Hands up those of you that have utilised retargeting in your own campaigns?
Retargeting can have an adverse effect of what you deployed it for. It could in fact turn people away from your brand if it gets too annoying. So don’t constantly bombard your audience. Set some rules. Follow them. We use it within in our marketing, but it did make me think about how we use it to be more informative and to keep to our already strict “follow” campaign to not over target people too much.
With social, you have one second to engage
We live in a Tinder society. With one swipe, click, refresh, you could have lost that person forever. So how do you succeed? You need to remember to not just be ON social media, but to BE social media. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean tickety box, we’ve got a Twitter account. You need to continue to offer engaging content for all audiences you interact with, but remember, regurgitated content is dull and boring…just don’t do it. That and offering free stuff. If you offer something free, it’s basically saying “here, have this if you attend my event, because really we can’t think of any more valuable reasons as to why you should attend”…
Let your audience share for you – they will, if the content is right.
Huib gave an example of the Danny Mkaskcil video that he worked on at RedBull. I remember at the time when this video came out thinking how amazing this was and how clever the brains behind it were (including Danny’s for the idea). But compare this with the more product placement style videos that other companies offer.
Danny’s video is real content that people want to see, but is branded. It’s not being forced into your senses to “drink my drink / eat my food / do what I want of you.”
Of course this type of content comes with serious budget (how many of us can work with a tank in our campaign?), but you can achieve this relatively easily yourselves too. Think whitepapers that aren’t sales focused. Think short topical interviews (ie industry views). You could also pick out a selection of exhibitors, for example and blow up what they do. Really showcase it. This will help get them coverage and have others wanting in on the action. Free PR? Better relationship? Thank you very much. Get out of your comfort zone and #dothingsdifferently
Before you roll out your next campaign, just think:
Do you want to interrupt and annoy? Or do you want to add value?
Next up on the agenda was one of the best sessions I’ve attended yet on Millennials. I really dislike classifying people into millennials (I’ve written about it in the past) or generation this that or the other and to be honest, I sighed when I saw the title included millennials within, as I believe that any type of person is just that, a person with a slightly different need or want for interacting. (They still are by the way…).
But I liked this session. Not only because I discovered that I’m still a millennial (where have I been?!), but because Tessa van Asselt, a social & behavioural scientist, showed us ways that they are interacting beyond just telling us that “they’re on mobile” as has been repeated so often in the past. Tessa had us thinking. Ideas were flying.
As much as millennials are very into their sharing and caring, Tessa also shared some research on the addictive nature of our latest technology. Something that could be prove to be a problem in years to come. Not just for our industry sector, but for our future. Why?
In short, a group of millennials had access to the internet, their phones, technology completely cut off for 24 hours. Their brains were then scanned. The result? The MRI scans showed the same levels of addiction to that of a drug addict. That’s an entirely different subject to talk about here, but one that needs to be thought of for our future!
If I can summarise Tessa’s content, I think it comes down to this. Millennials think more like this:
- I have knowledge, I can share it.
- My network has knowledge, I can use it
So how do you engage? Look at Barcamps, popular across the tech sector. They are user generated conferences often with no agenda. People get together, ask questions, provide answers, build relationships… There is no programme, but people start to understand more of what their customers want, or what questions they may ask or they work on how to solve a collective issue. So perhaps you need to start your own industry Barcamp? Why don’t you be the pillar of your industry, beyond just days 1, 2 and 3 of your event?
It was made very apparent that your competitor isn’t just your closest rival event. It’s everything else around it. It’s everything online. It could be the secret pop up shop that opens down the road from your event. It could be that you’ve seen on social media everyone else is going to another event you didn’t even know existed (with no relevance to your market btw). It could be the latest release of Game of Thrones. It could be a promotion that some store has on that afternoon.
There’s a lot to distract your audience. So you have to make your content more compelling and more unique than ever. The question was asked “How do I target different groups within my sector?” The answer? You cannot please everyone. Multiple events. Will we see large scale exhibitions break out into smaller more targeted events in the future? Maybe…
Tessa mentioned briefly about Tam Airlines and how they engaged differently with their audience. If you want to look at how big data is being used, check out their video below. Hopefully it gives a little inspiration about what is possible…
Not wanting to give everything away from Tessa’s session, we also enjoyed a thought provoking session from Bernd Heinricks, an innovation expert from Cisco, who believes there has never been a better time to solve tough challenges in business and society with technology.
He offered some real world examples, that not only save people on time, but that could actually help contribute to bettering our environment as well. For example, garbage bins that send messages when either full or particularly smelly, which could result in more efficient bin collection services. Or apps that notify you of car parking spaces become available, which can reduce effects on both noise and environmental pollution instead of driving around your block consistently. The point? Everything around us is evolving, so if you choose to not evolve, neither will you or your brand.
You could look at exhibitor days for example. Why are they typically only attended by 20-30 exhibitors of a pool of 300? They’ve not evolving. Look at your structure. Look at your content. Is it just show and tell or do you engage your audience? Who cares what your floorplan looks like, how does it affect me?
Perhaps most importantly, in the age of digitisation and cost cutting, don’t forget what is most important, beyond your teams and your customers. Content. If you build it, they will come.
We can create value. we just need to step out of our tunnel vision.
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And now the crux of the content is out of the way… something fun. MCH Group, who hosted us for the event, shared a “timelapse” in celebration of their 100 years of being in existince. It’s pretty cool and worth a view.
Oh, and if you missed it, something refreshing at this event was the inaugural UFI Running Club – but you can read more on that “new” type of networking here.