Digital is an Enabler

I couldn’t agree more. This is where I’ve seen the most value added to events businesses in the past 20 years I’ve been in this industry. Whether it’s part of a Value Creation Plan, a Transformation Program, or just a good old-fashioned (but infallible) fixing-the-basics approach, focusing on your digital enablers will propel your underlying business to new heights. But with so many possibilities, where to start?

Naturally, this will depend on your business's size, maturity, and available talent. However, we can generalise the operating model of B2B event businesses to a certain extent. In my experience, B2B events businesses operate in the cadences below:

1- Retaining existing customers, finding new customers, convincing them of the value we’re providing, and booking them.
Your marketing and sales teams deliver this, and this is where you’ll find the quickest returns on any investment you might consider making in your digital capacity. You might consider a SPEX data strategy project, add telemarketing outsourcing to qualify your leads or focus on lead generation as a whole category, introduce Sales Performance Management, train your salespeople, or work on your Sales and Marketing alignment.

In any of the projects cited above, you’ll need a solid digital backbone supporting the initiatives you’re trying to build.

2- Making it easy for our customers to maximise the value they get from our product.
Your Customer Success teams do this. Oh wait… you most probably don’t have one. This is the most neglected part of the events customer journey. We’re great at (pressure) selling and delivering the show we promised, but what happens in between is (generally) not our most significant concern. Imagine paying thousands of pounds to exhibit at a show months in advance, then being left to your devices with pages of forms to fill and suppliers to wrestle, let alone the travel bookings, etc. I think it’s a good idea to exhibit just for once to fully understand this pain…

There’s just so much to be done here. You can set up an exhibitor portal with a one-stop shop for everything they need, pre-fill the forms that need sorting, flow your data better between (the multitude of ) systems you’re currently using, and just simplify anything you can find. I’m sure you have NPS as a metric. Try to introduce the Net Easy Score into your system and see what happens.

3- Deliver ROI and ROT and a great experience to our customers
All hands on deck, it’s show time. This is what we know best: connecting buyers with sellers face-to-face. There is so much you can do to enhance your buyer-seller interactions digitally without getting in their way. You can work at getting more and higher quality buyers via more targeted messaging and instigate more meetings per visitor by showing them the relevant exhibitors at the right time, or introduce digital information exchanges between buyers and sellers and so much more.

Getting this right requires a very advanced level of customer insight and the ability to put those insights into action in real-time. The digital enablement of your show is the biggest driver of your product quality > customer satisfaction > rebooking > growth!

Then we rinse and repeat.
In this neverending cycle, you need to identify what you need to get better at, and prioritise well. For this, my personal favourite is the Value vs Effort matrix. Depending on your business’ maturity and resources, you can make Big Bets, get some easy wins, be happy with incremental changes or go for more than one of these at the same time.

Where does digital come in?
I’ve always advocated for Digital to be a Strategy Taker, not a Strategy Maker. Your digital team needs to respond to your business needs, not lead them. A digital for the sake of digital approach (not that you’d allow it) is so 2000s. When you decide what part of your operating model needs fine-tuning, deploy your digital talent towards that.

I think I can go on forever about this, I’d better stop here.

Let’s chat if you’d like to hear more.

Barış