Table of Contents

How to use Data to improve your Event Marketing Strategy

Online forms a big part of what event marketers do nowadays to promote and market their events but the journey often is based on gut-feel. Using a data-driven approach, event marketing could evolve into something very different, and also something very objective to help in the marketing decision-making process.

Here, we take a look at a 5-step approach to using a data-driven approach for event marketing.

1)   Competitor Insights

Do you have a competing event that you want to benchmark against? Using tools like SimilarWeb, you can benchmark the overall web traffic and uncover data sources that drives traffic to the website. Similarly, you can also uncover using tools like BuzzSumo what content drives the best engagement, where people love and share the content on social networks.

 

2)   Uncovering User Behavior Data

Have you ever incorporated a search bar at the start of your event homepage? At an early stage of your event campaign, using tools like Google site search will help you uncover what your audience are looking for on your event website, where the keywords can then be studied based on the user inputs, before you design your detailed event content based on user search data. This will subsequently help you design your event content strategy based on relevancy to what your target audience are looking for.

3)   Campaign Data

After step 1 and 2 are done, you pretty much have a good idea on how to structure your content, and your marketing channels. Subsequently, when you share your content, either via email, social networks or partner sites, it’s always good practice to tag it to a campaign using the Google campaign URL builder, so that you can track it as a traffic source under Acquisitions in Google Analytics. You can also later attribute the effectiveness of the traffic acquisition down to conversion, which is covered in Point 5 below.

 

4)   Engagement Data

So how engaged are your audience vis-à-vis the content on your event website? In Analytics, you can track based on the standard metrics of time-on-site and pageviews/visit, but at the same time, you can also track the common exit pages and pages with high bounce rates, to see if the user journey is what you had planned for, or if selected pages need further optimization in terms of content and design. Social sharing data (using tools such as Addthis) are also good indicators if your content is engaging the audience.

Tip: Resources not permitting, focus on the Top 5-10 pages/ sections that gives you 70-80% of your overall traffic for optimization.

5)   Conversion Data

Tracking what traffic sources convert into registration will help attribute the real marketing ROI on your event marketing spend. You can easily do this via Google Analytics, where you can import the conversion goal from Google Analytics Solutions Gallery (if you are a Gevme user) to easily track your event registration conversion.

Using a data-driven approach will help subjective decision-making and bring your event marketing to the next level.

Photo Credit: dullhunk
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Level up your events with Gevme’s omnichannel event platform

Share this article

We are pleased to announce updates to our privacy policy, reinforcing our commitment to safeguarding your rights. Please click here to review the changes.