The more customer insights we have, the better we are equipped to deliver meaningful messages. Customer insights essentially assist in creating content that will appeal to the audience. Once you know what information you need, you’ll be able to paint an accurate picture of your customers and their preferences; With technology evolving, collecting audience insights has become a less onerous task. Having various tools at our disposal, there is no excuse for not digging deeper regarding audience acquisition. Gaining a new understanding of your audience and their preferences has now become easier.
Surveys
Surveys are the most common tool that event marketers pay attention to on a regular basis. To get the best result, keep your surveys short and to the point; covering only those relevant aspects and insights that best determine can shape your audience acquisition plan. Assessing the right parameters will help you garner better feedback after the event. Finally, you can further fine-tune your plan by using the survey to collect audience information and communication preferences. Here’s a detailed insight that will guide you further.
Attendee polls
Digital media makes it relatively easy to ask your prospective attendees what they’d like to see and experience at your next event. Use your own media to circulate an informal “What matters to you?” type of polls. Or get specific and ask your event community to provide more direct input, such as voting on particular topics. Get influencers, partners and sponsors to help you promote the question, and maybe even offer an incentive (such as coupons and gift vouchers) to garner more interest and encourage people to participate.
Mobile app data
If your mobile app integrates social interaction, crowdsources information, drives live Q&A and polling, or collects surveys, then there’s a gold mine of information you can gather. Do your research on conversation threads on internet forums to find topics that matter to your attendees and accordingly build compelling messaging.
Email opens and click-through rate (CTR)
By tracking email opens, you can see which messages are resonating and motivating prospects to take action and which are not. Use CTRs in a similar fashion. If you see that a certain email is driving a much higher click-through rate, compare it to those that are not performing as well and determine the differences. Once you know what is sparking your recipient’s curiosity, you can tweak your messaging accordingly.
Social analytics
Most social analytics platforms provide information that helps you understand the behaviour of your attendees before and during your audience acquisition plan implementation. But, before you start, you need to understand the general sentiment and engagement of your prospective audience (based on the past year’s data). Not only can you learn what messages appeal to your target audiences, you can also see the impact your efforts are having.
Google Analytics
With Google Analytics, you can get your site visitors behavioural patterns including their traffic source (earned v/s organic), time spent on our site, what content they visited and which content is popular amongst much else. This information can help you determine what content is most valuable to your audience. It can also help you understand what other media channels prospective attendees are using, and how many touchpoints you might need to drive a conversion.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps give a detailed view of what visitors are doing on your site. Find out how, and if, users are scrolling to see content on your pages. Learn if they’re seeing your call to action. Discover what content and images are attracting attention.
Ad performance data
Reviewing your ad performance data from last year’s event can give you some clues about the type of content that your audience might relate to. Tracking and measuring ad performance during campaign execution will enable you to optimize your content and timing to better meet the needs of your audience.
Review sites:
Building a brand’s reputation is not something you do overnight. It requires time, effort and a darn good communication plan.
You need your audience and users to spread the good word. Here’s where review sites come in handy. In fact, a large chunk of audience trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, so it’s clear that getting customer reviews is a necessity if you want your business to survive the growing competition along with audience acquisition.