Unleashing the power of event data
RX’s new Exhibitor Dashboard ushers in an exciting new era of data driven event performance analysis, enabling exhibitors to measure their return on investment, and take actionable insights to improve their performance and increase their market share.
Imagine exhibiting at an event where every physical sales lead and online interaction is digitally captured, where you can view all this event data in one place, in real time. Export your leads and upload them to your CRM system to track sales and ROI. And gain clear insights on how to improve your event performance and benchmark it against your competitors.
RX imagined it. And then we built Exhibitor Dashboard. Today it is in use across 100 of our events, with more in the pipeline, and it’s transforming our customers’ understanding of how they can use RX events to build their businesses.
“Exhibitor Dashboard brings event marketing and measurement into the 21st century” said Product Manager, Caroline Goes. “Available in two versions – ‘Basic’ and ‘Pro’ ‒ it is our response to our customers’ need for transparent and quantifiable data which highlights the business value RX delivers. It seamlessly integrates data from our registration, matchmaking, show directory and lead retrieval systems into one clear and simple to use dashboard, so exhibitors can assess their performance in real-time, and gain critical insights to improve their ROI and competitive standing year on year.
“The past two years have seen an explosion of digital technology in the events industry, as organisers have sought to augment the power of face to face with digital services” explained Gaby Appleton, Chief Digital Product Officer for RX worldwide. “As a result, exhibitors can find themselves confronted with large volumes of disparate lead data, with little ability to make overall sense of it.”
“RX is fortunate to be part of RELX, which has a deep capability in data analytics and technology” she continued. “By developing our own proprietary stack of digital and data tools, incorporating our web platform, registration system, and lead capture and analysis tools, RX is able to fully leverage our data assets to identify new customer needs and insights, and extend a whole new world of individually curated business opportunities and intelligence to our exhibitors and sponsors.”
“Exhibitor Dashboard brings event marketing and measurement into the 21st century.”
“The past two years have seen an explosion of digital technology in the events industry, as organisers have sought to augment the power of face to face with digital services.”
“By developing our own proprietary stack of digital and data tools, incorporating our web platform, registration system, and lead capture and analysis tools, RX is able to fully leverage our event data assets to identify new customer needs and insights, and extend a whole new world of individually curated business opportunities and intelligence to our exhibitors and sponsors.”
Leads, leads and more leads
Attendees visit exhibitions to source new products, solutions and suppliers. And thanks to RX’s innovative range of digital engagement and event data capture tools, exhibitors now have more opportunities than ever to connect and do business with them:
- Over 90% of our 7 million annual attendees use our online exhibitor directories to schedule their show ahead of their visit. Premium Listings, incorporating product carousels, offer enhanced opportunities to increase brand visibility, capture leads and secure one2one business meetings at this crucial time.
- Mercury, our registration system, uses attendee data and AI to recommend exhibitors to individual visitors based on the products and solutions they are searching for.
- Additional recommendations are generated on our event platforms based on visitor website navigation to suggest further qualified matches.
- Emperia, our badge-scanning mobile app, allows exhibitors to quickly and reliably capture and score leads on the show floor. These leads are informed by Mercury, enriching and qualifying the lead data.
All of this captured attendee data is consolidated in the Dashboard, where exhibitors can see, at a glance, how many times their company profile has been viewed; which products are generating the most interest; how many people have been redirected to their show website; how many visitors have added them to their show plan; how many times they have been recommended by RX (and how many of those prospects have actually engaged with them); and how many sales leads they have captured using Emperia.
Dashboard also collates, in real-time, the contact details of all the leads they have generated and makes it easy to analyse and export them. They can be segmented by job title, product interest, geographical location and more, and downloaded for timely follow-up and conversion. And because a surprising number of exhibitors still fail to follow up their show leads, Dashboard also nudges them to do so.
“It's great to be able to track the number of people visiting our directory profile and to then see who has moved through to our website. It's helpful in providing data to match our attendees’ comments and findings.”
Quantifying value, improving performance
As well as giving RX exhibitors quantifiable data on the business value RX events deliver, Exhibitor Dashboard also offers them clear insights on how to improve their event performance year on year.
“RX event data consistently shows us that the more content our exhibitors include in their online event directory profile, the better their overall show performance” revealed Caroline. “More content means, quite simply, more clicks. So, every Exhibitor Dashboard contains a ‘Profile Completion’ widget which shows how much of their profile they have completed and encourages them to take further action by highlighting potential increases in digital engagement. This can be done seamlessly within Exhibitor Dashboard, making it quick and easy to add engaging new content.”
Given that many visitors start scheduling meetings and conference sessions weeks in advance of our events, completing their profile early is the best way for exhibitors to maximise their leads. But even while the event is underway, analysis of their Dashboard will show how adding content to their directory listing, such as images and product profiles, can significantly increase customer engagement.
Similarly, by knowing which products are attracting the most attendee interest during registration, exhibitors can change their online directory profile to push those products with the click of a button.
RX customer response to Exhibitor Dashboard has been extremely positive with over two-thirds saying the product is easy to understand and offers clear benefits.
Competitive benchmarking and business building
Exhibitor Dashboard Pro is an enhanced version of the tool which also enables users to benchmark their performance against their competitors and gain insights into what is trending at the show, and in the wider marketplace.
“In today’s data-driven business landscape, there is an increasing need be 'in the know' as emerging players disrupt the status quo, however B2B competitive insights are traditionally expensive and problematic to obtain” explained Carlos Rodriguez, VP Digital Strategy, who is driving the rollout of Exhibitor Dashboard Basic and Pro in the Americas.
“Unlike most insight providers which track historic data from similar consumer-based sources, Exhibitor Dashboard Pro provides a unique view of real-time behaviour based on the trade show ecosystem – an environment which is dominated by new product launching and sourcing, and particularly good at uncovering new players and trends. Millions of buyers visit our digital platforms, websites and F2F shows each year. Their interactions and behaviours give us data that helps our exhibitors track multiple market signals to develop a data-driven assessment of their performance against their competitors.”
Exhibitors can uncover visitor/buyer engagement patterns filtered by product interests, geographical region, company size, and more, enabling them to benchmark their performance in relations to their competitors, and identify new opportunities for growth.
For example, Dashboard Pro shows them how many online visitors engaged with their brand in the run up to the show compared with their competitors, and how many leads they captured at show relative to the best performers. It also helps them to understand what the category leader is doing differently within each filtered category to achieve class leading performance.
“Growing a business is changing, and so are we” concluded Gaby. “By harnessing the power of data and analytics we are helping our customers to build their businesses in new and exciting ways, whether by maximising their ROI at our face to face events, connecting with new audiences remotely around the world - or gaining unique competitive and market insights that open doors on new opportunities for growth.”
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