A look at two must-have data sources to improve your event marketing and drive new campaign data.

While creativity is a significant component to successfully marketing an event, the effective use of marketing data can be a big factor in improving or enhancing event marketing efforts.

Marketing data provides valuable insights about audiences, engagement, buyer intent, event marketing effectiveness and more. But finding new, quality data is a constant challenge for event organisers and marketers, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of the potential data sources. 

In addition to increasing the visibility of your event, event PPC campaigns provide a wealth of new data — in our experience, upwards of 60 percent! Of course, when using event PPC to generate new data, don’t forget to maximise existing campaign data for remarketing, brand search, and generating event awareness for people who haven’t quite decided whether or not to attend an event.

Here’s a look at using these two must-have data sources to improve your event marketing:

Content marketing — the marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing online material (such as whitepapers, surveys, videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to generate interest — is typically thought of as a strategy to attract audiences, the practice can also be used to generate data for future remarketing campaigns.

For example, some website visitors will have the right job title but they might not be ready to register for the event yet, so they need to be educated throughout the event cycle. These visitors need to be pushed to download the content.

To download this whitepaper or another content marketing piece, a site visitor must first provide their name and email address. 

So even though the visitor didn’t register (yet!) for an event, now the organiser has valuable contact information that can be used to generate retargeting ads on social media and display networks. Using those ads to provide additional education, or highly relevant offers such as an early bird or special registration discounts, increases event visibility. 

Used wisely, content marketing provides event organisers and marketers with new sources of data for remarketing to drive registration conversions or exhibit sales.

In digital advertising, a cookie is a small piece of code called a pixel that is placed on a website to store information on a user’s computer and later retrieve it. Aside from websites, cookies and pixels are also used in combination with social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Every time a new visitor comes to a site with this special piece of code, the website’s server drops a cookie onto a user’s computer or the internet browser. Each new cookie creates a unique identifier code — the user’s “digital name.”

Site visitor activity data is tracked from site to site and collected and compiled into a profile, which includes browsing behavior, interests, and demographics (but no email).

An organiser or event marketer can then utilise machine learning with those compiled sources of data to build “look-a-like” audiences — meaning audiences with similar characteristics and attributes. This approach creates a new audience ideal for remarketing to promote event attendance, registration, or sponsorship. 

Another benefit? Building cookie lists is also typically more cost-effective than securing new sources of traffic. 

A few other tips to ensure the success of your new data collection efforts:

• Exclude all existing web traffic from campaigns to prevent remarketing to those who have already visited the site — including those who may have already registered. 
• Create multi-layered remarketing campaigns that follow the funnel: display for the top of the funnel and email for the middle of the funnel.
• Determine the quality of new audiences by tracking clickthrough (CTR) and bounce rates. For example, if metrics show 100 new people have visited the event website, but the bounce rate is 98 percent, then the remarketing campaign should be revised. 

For more information and to learn more about how to use paid advertising to reach new event audiences then watch our webinar here: http://bit.ly/2Hym15y

If you’re interested in finding new sources of data for your upcoming event campaign, talk to the Tag Digital team about getting started with event PPC.