Investing in event technology for your conferences and trade shows costs a pretty penny. However, the value you gain from these technologies are significant, as you not only add value to your events, but also to your attendees’ event experience. According to Forbes, “when designing event experiences, a number of touch points slip naturally into the attendee journey: registration, networking, keynotes, breakouts, etc. but taking the time to understand the full potential of these steps can enhance the experience for your attendees and the return for your company.”

Knowing this, what you do with the event tech needs to lead to a significant outcome for yourself as an event organizer, as well as your attendees.   

Take in the Attendee Journey

The features available in your event tech need to be optimally utilized.  To do that, you need to put yourself in your attendees’ shoes, identify the attendee journey, and address any ways you can improve this journey through your event tech features. 

Stage 1: Content Introduction and Personalization

Introducing your attendees to the content you’ll be showing at your event can start way before the event days.  

Pre-Event Content 

Your event website will be launched weeks before the event starts, allowing public access to your event platforms without login requirement. Your audience will then be able to access the essential elements of your event, including the sessions, venue floor plan and layout, as well as the participating sponsors and exhibitors for your event. 

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By doing so, you are getting your attendees ready for the event in advance by allowing them to explore the event web platform to get a grasp of what your event has to offer.  A public-facing platform is also capable of reaching beyond the attendees, as it also allows the general public to catch a glimpse of the event, which makes it a good way to promote the event. This is what the Jublia Public Hub feature allows you to do. 

Promoting a public facing aspect of your event is key to generating interest and sign ups. To make sure that you can maximize this opportunity:

1. Make sure you have set your Open Graph protocol on the link to a public directory or hub to ensure that the preview image, description and more is attention grabbing on social media.
2. Allow your prospects to engage with your digital event content publicly and create their own favorites or bookmark lists which they can come back to in future visits. 
3. You can also share sponsored sessions on your social media channels and link to your public hub to not only provide more exposure for your sponsors (as part of their sponsorship package), but also entice your audience to explore your public-facing platform.

Personalized Agenda 

Personalization has a massive contribution to a meaningful event experience for your audience. Similar to when you plan before a trip, those attending your event tend to want to research and create their own unique itinerary for your event. As such, promoting such a feature helps to ease your audiences into your event journey better, with a ready to use digital planner (and better still, powered with AI recommendations!).

To promote personalization value better, it is important to:

1. Craft your marketing message leveraging on the warm perception of a helpful digital planner that is actually part of your event journey, as opposed to a cold introduction to a digital platform for the event. Don’t just mention it as a feature, but really send a targeted message about the benefits.
2.  Have a simple 3-5 step visual guide to access the digital planner, be it through the web or native app. Taking a multi-channel access approach to your digital platform ensures that you have the best reach across your attendees' access preference. 
3. Avoid setting up an overly detailed huge PDF guide which users may not even look at. Worst, it can create the wrong perspective that this is going to be a cumbersome experience for a user.

Stage 2: Network Building

Networking is undoubtedly one of the main reasons why attendees go to events, whether it’d be to get new contacts or to touch base with existing ones. Facilitating opportunities for meetings and networking is a crucial part of event planning and organizing.

AI Matchmaking 

The data your attendees input in their profiles not only aids in content personalization, but also enhances business matching possibilities. This is an innovative solution in the events industry, with machine learning as its backbone. Get recommendations as to who you can and should meet based on information inputted and interests, whether it be those from similar company backgrounds or industries. The benefits of this AI matchmaking function should not go unnoticed, and should be promoted for your event.

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AI is a strong value proposition itself, but it will not auto-magically create the best matchmaking in the room if your attendees are not involved. Hence you will need to:

1. Bring across in your messages the tangible value on how the AI will fast track their ROI at your event. Do not mention AI for the sake of AI.
2. Learn from your stakeholders and promote successful cases of how AI smartness has enabled them to discover and capture the right prospects at your event. If they can, so can you.

Lead Capturing 

Your attendees and sponsors are sure to mingle at your event, and better yet, exchange contact information. This is where the benefits of lead capturing features come into play. It is a necessary tool for exhibitors to track leads and boost sales from the start. Yet, we cannot assume that your event stakeholders will readily be aware of the use of this feature on their own.

As lead scanning is a relatively well known requirement for exhibitors, what really matters is to capture the right timing (usually the week before and during the event) to reach out to the exhibitors and sponsors on how to best activate this feature. This include:

1. Making it obvious to them on why this is better than collecting physical namecards. In Jublia Scan, you can opt to provide more information than what a typical name card can!
2. Have existing onsite surveyors/promoters visit each exhibitor/sponsor to make sure that they are guided in activating the function during the first morning of the show.

Stage 3: On-site Guide

Event days can be hectic, so your event digital tools should have features that can help your attendees move about more efficiently while on the ground. 

Navigation and Wayfinding  

Events, conferences and trade shows come in a variety of formats and sizes. Navigating your way through event venues can be a challenge, especially in larger venues. With a feature like AI Maps, your sponsors and attendees can view the event venue in advance.  

Jublia AI Maps is ahead of the game, eliminating siloed maps and static floor plans. Jublia’s AI-powered maps and web platform allows attendees to explore and understand the event space event during the pre-event phase, with seamless integration between maps, searches, and listings. 

Furthermore as a map is highly visual, you can always spice it up with key logos to demarcate important areas (and even monetize on that aspect!). Hence, being able to promote your interactive map not only helps the attendees find their way, it also keeps sponsors happy with their visible brand awareness.

Since maps is a significant aspect of a live event, you can easily use it as you promote your event through these methods:

1. Announcing your event with a ready interactive map to create excitement around the available space that your stakeholders can partake in your event
2. Create onsite touchscreen kiosks that display the interactive map, increasing the visibility of your maps (and sponsor logos!) plus having a kiosk that serves a great navigation purpose. Hitting two birds with one stone!

Pocket-sized Source of Information

All of the above features should be accessible in an all-inclusive event app. What could be a better way to provide your attendees with all the event information, including their personal agenda and meetings schedule, than in the palm of their hands? 

An event app allows for a number of communication and interaction channels. Event planners or event exhibitors, can send any message or update to everyone's device, ensuring that both attendees and presenters are constantly up to speed, sponsored sessions and company collateral can also be promoted and displayed in the app, allowing the app users to gain full visibility of the content of the event, and access to more information on participating sponsors.

These are fantastic values that a native event app brings to the table, and the key on native app promotion is to capture the best timing to promote to your attendees, and that is usually right before or during the event. Hence we recommend to:

1. Make sure your digital billboards, printed materials (posters, within a badge or a booklet) give exposure to the app. Better yet, showcase your official event app through your website from before the start of your event to further spotlight it as a beneficial tool on-site.
2. Make sure that your native app access is simple and seamless; users should have a single sign on experience rather than fumble around with yet-another-password.

Feature Promotion and Feature Adoption

By promoting these features to your attendees, you are encouraging them to make use of these features to the fullest to create a valuable event experience. Encouraging feature adoption can be challenging, so make sure you know the tips to tackle these. Jublia has a recommended framework to follow to track feature adoption along with the metrics you can use to evaluate the success of your adoption rate. 

Create Powerful Event Experiences with Jublia

Leveraging event technology to maximize your event’s potential is an essential strategy to take your event to the next level. This is especially true when you know what features of your event tech you need to promote to ensure your event audience are fully engaged and are getting the most out of their attendance.

Find out how Jublia’s solutions and features can help you achieve this and more by speaking to our Solution Specialists at info@jublia.com, and don’t forget to follow our LinkedIn page to get the latest updates!

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