Winning budgets with the effective use of data

Chloe Richardson, VP senior corporate relations at Explori, shares how using the right data is a powerful tool in pitching to senior management:

Budgets have always been a thorn in the event professional’s side, and in the current climate, with rising interest rates and macro political factors impacting the supply chain, money seems to be keeping senior event marketers up at night more than ever.

Splash That reported that event planning makes for 21% of total corporate marketing budgets, so it should not be a surprise that senior leaders are now taking more of an interest in tightening the purse strings.

We are seeing this business interest play a part in budgets across the event ecosystem. In the recent Explori Exhibit Leader Insights report that we released in collaboration with EXHIBITOR Magazine and the Exhibitor Advocate, we saw that the key challenges corporate exhibit marketers expect to come up against in the next three years – both internally and externally – are all cost-related. Top of the heap comes internal budget pressures, with 68% of respondents citing this as a major challenge.

Tricky balance

So what is going to help us overcome this tricky balance of rising costs and flatlining budgets? Having the right data to communicate event impact and value to the wider business, while seeming an obvious concept, is going to start to rise to the top of the priority list for corporate event teams over the next 12 months. After all, we do not lose budgets because what we’re doing is too expensive; we lose it because the business does not see the value in it. We need to make them see.

Communicating event performance and impact to your wider organisation in a language the business understands is the only way to demonstrate impact and value, and therefore defend event spend and justify budgets.

Putting it into practice

First of all, we have to reframe the type of data our event teams are collecting, breaking through the noise and data distractions with a very clear focus on specific data that is both robust and scientific enough to speak to senior leadership, while being adequately driven by event programme objectives to be of real strategic use to the events team.

Sentiment data

New budget defending data collection is going to start to use sentiment data specifically. In a time where we need so much more than revenue generated or attendee numbers to justify event spend – the power lies in leveraging proactive data, and this is where sentiment data comes in.

Sentiment data allows you to understand the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, future behaviours, and attitude of your attendees. This data tells us why people did what they did and what they intend on doing, holding the key to understanding the true impact of your event through attendee experience metrics including NPS, CSAT, loyalty, propensity to purchase and value for time. It is often the missing link in the measurement and stakeholder communication process, but it should not be - because it compliments and enhances all the other data points you collect, allowing you to quantify event impact.

As the single point of truth and collected at a point where your audience is most engaged, sentiment data delivers a level of insight that cannot be gained through analysis of demographic and engagement data alone.

Healthier position

In the next 12 months, as more sentiment data is collected across an entire event programme, if leveraged properly and consistently, moving way beyond the anecdotal feedback we are accustomed to, will put teams in a much healthier position when it comes to talking money with the business.

Realistically, I anticipate that as we start to harness our sentiment data to communicate back to senior leadership, we will see a shift in business mindsets. As our c-suite begin to truly understand and appreciate the value and impact our events programmes deliver whilst driving company-wide objectives; we’ll stop having to fight battles to justify event spend and defend our budgets.

Source: M&IT