SAACI NEWS

Utilise marketing technology tools for your meetings and events

Meetings and events planners are always considering how best to enhance various aspects of their planning, promotion, and execution. Through leveraging MarTech (Marketing Technology) tools and platforms, meetings and events professionals can streamline their processes, enhance attendee experiences, improve marketing effectiveness, and gain valuable insights for future events.

By Glenton De Kock, chief executive officer of SAACI.

For some, you may not necessarily want to embrace all available tools or platforms and as such, it is essential to carefully select and implement MarTech solutions that align with the specific needs and goals of your event.

In recent years, we have witnessed an improvement in event registration, ticketing online registration platforms, and ticketing systems to streamline the registration process for attendees. These platforms can automate registration, collect attendee data, and facilitate secure online payment processing. Our industry has become comfortable with the utilisation of these platforms.

Being linked to ticketing platforms has led to email marketing and automation tools enabling communication with attendees before, during, and after the event. We have all received personalised emails, event reminders, updates, and post-event surveys.

Social media platforms and promotional posts drive event-related conversations and engage with attendees pre and post the event. In addition, targeted ads, hashtags, and influencer marketing is also used by many meetings and event planners to grow audience awareness.

An area that we still need to get participants to help us is the utilisation of our survey tools and feedback platforms. The data collection is needed as it provides valuable insights from attendees.

As an industry, some work needs to be done on this, in order to gauge satisfaction levels, gather suggestions for improvement and measure the impact of the event.

Notwithstanding, the use of a wellmaintained customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage attendee information, track interactions, and personalise communication. This integration helps to nurture leads, track engagement, and facilitate targeted marketing campaigns.