One of the biggest challenges to event marketers is building their show’s exact target visitor audience. This isn’t helped by the diversity of the sector, so many unique events each catering to a specific target audience. So, it’s no wonder that marketing teams spend an average of 16 hours a week on researching, qualifying, and adding target contacts to their marketing database, that’s over 40% of their working hours per week!

This is typical as many event marketing teams source their leads in one of two ways; either by subscribing to a third-party bulk database or by sourcing leads in-house. Here’s why both methods waste time, effort and budget which could be better spent driving registrations.

Third-party databases

Where to start? Although well-known for industry lead generation, these tools are inefficient, inaccurate, and result in time wasted through admin/qualification.

First off, quantity is promoted above all else. “Over 150 million business contacts” ring a bell? Size is one thing, but these databases rely on software to categorise and qualify their contacts, leaving your team to qualify them through human ingenuity. Event marketers, therefore, spend painstaking hours combing through large volumes of data to find the odd nugget of gold. Often up to 40% of selected contacts can be inaccurate, invalid or outdated.

In-house data research

For exprom/visprom teams who value a uniquely qualified target audience above all else, researching prospective visitors in-house is the most common solution. Marketing teams know their event’s audience better than any third-party database and there is a huge amount of open-source information to manually build their marketing data.

The rate of this research however is very slow, and often delegated to junior members of the team without experience in research and quality control. This results in a slow turnover of 2-3 contacts researched per hour. A large and costly team is therefore needed to achieve the required database 15x larger than their target visitor turnout. It is estimated that on average a marketing executive takes around 40 minutes to deliver a qualified contact with a validated executive email address.

How to reclaim time for registration sign-ups

So how can a team save time and budget whilst also focusing on registration generation activities to secure the attendance of qualified contacts? The secret is finding a reliable and qualified data research provider like The Data Business, we work to the event’s precise target audience brief. Suddenly all those hours spent researching can be replaced with a 15-minute consultation and brief write-up.

We then go away and create a bespoke exprom/visprom data build which is made up of freshly validated contacts and tailored to your show’s event. Giving your team more time to create engaging, inspiring content and marketing plans to convert these MQLs into visitors.