Why is Event Visibility Important in Marketing
Welcome to the world of event visibility
Take a breath and relax. You are now entering the realms of global event visibility with PredictHQ. At first it can be slightly overwhelming but as a marketer it doesn’t need to be. It’s something that should be embraced and used to drive greater profitability at scale.
The point of this post is to help trigger your marketing mind into what the possibilities are when relevant and dynamic event visibility exists with the PredictHQ API. Heck, you probably already have a million and one ideas so this might just reaffirm what your next actions need to be.
Timing plays a large role in either improving your conversion or mitigating your potential losses in relation to events that could be impacting your business. Gaining scheduled or real-time visibility of events that occur around the world provides you with an essential tool that lets you plan campaigns for important events or react to real-time events. For example:
Scheduled event – Term 3 New South Wales School Holidays
Real-time event – Earthquake in San Francisco
How do you and your team currently achieve event visibility? A manual search here, a Google doc or Excel spreadsheet there? What about being alerted in a timely manner not only based on an impending event but also events that are happening in real-time?
To achieve visibility the last thing you want your team to do is manually search multiple sources for events that might be happening in each of your respective markets, then capture them in an incomplete, non-standardized and static spreadsheet … then having to do it all over again every week, month or year – and more importantly, actually remembering to do it.
Relevant event visibility creates the ability to scale your efforts across all markets. You no longer have to scramble to understand why sales in Germany are decreasing due to school holidays or how you missed the boat on an increase in sales in Mexico thanks to the impending Spring Break.
Using generic sales communications to persuade a customer to buy your product or service is relatively rudimentary and lacks intuitiveness. Rather than pushing the same messaging every time, why don’t you try informing them? Use the information they input to search your website for products and services as the criteria to help return messaging which puts things in context and makes you believable and relevant.
For example, if someone is searching for a last-minute present before Father’s Day, remind them why stock is limited: “Father’s Day is in five days so buy now to avoid disappointment”. Or if someone who is super-efficient and likes to book their flights early, reassure them that they’re making the right decision so they book with you then and there instead of continuing to look around competitor sites: “Congratulations, you got a great price but availability is about to decline and prices will increase due to Columbus Day Holiday on October 11th”.
Using the PredictHQ API, businesses have been able to implement higher yielding conversion tactics which you can read more about here: How to Create Urgency & Improve Conversion in Travel eCommerce.
Events can drive a huge amount of demand so knowing about them in advance can help you plan promotional campaigns around them. By using events within your advertising campaigns and delivering them at the right time, you can inform or remind the potential customer (relevant to where they are in the world) of that impending holiday they could book a vacation for, or to buy that Nespresso coffee machine for Father’s Day.
But it’s not just scheduled events you can leverage overtly in your marketing campaigns. Thanks to the ever-evolving world of mobile and geo-targeted advertising, you can also harness real-time event visibility to generate demand. If there are severe airport delays, how about targeting people with airport car rental ads to help get them from A to B? Or heat pump servicing if a major winter storm is bearing down on a particular city?
The great thing about PredictHQ is that we help you discover what events could impact your business, then you can create Saved Searches to monitor when these types of events are going to occur (scheduled) or currently occurring (real-time) in the cities or countries that your business operates in.
Your response to events does not always need to be overt to extract optimal conversion for your marketing campaigns. There are covert methods you can strategically apply to ensure your business and its call to actions are being displayed at the right place and right time.
If you know when an event that impacts your business is occurring, then you know customers will be out there searching for a product or service like yours in the lead-up to this event. Some of the best results we saw in PredictHQ’s testing was simply increasing our share of voice at the right time before competitors knew what was happening.
When did we know when to start increasing ad spend? By using the API to calculate the average lead time of when people started to book relative to the event. For example, 16 days out from a major sporting event is when 65% of transactions for that date occurred.
It’s true: you may have a good anecdotal grasp on what events are coming up in your city or maybe even country, based on a bit of local knowledge and a few hot tips you overheard while sipping coffee at your favorite cafe. But in reality, is this representative of what’s really going on in the world around you? Is there a clear line of communication for your team to act on? Do you know how it impacts your business? What happens next time this event or one similar occurs?
With PredictHQ, event visibility becomes easier to manage and a key marketing tool which can:
Give you macro or micro views of events occurring around the world or locally – even down to city level, for real-time or future events. It’s up to you.
Help you identify, by location, what events might have impacted your business around a certain date, thus causing your transactions to be higher or lower than usual.
Let you create team projects and tasks associated with events and even set reminders for your projects to recur so you don’t forget all those clever tasks you did last time.
Notify you about events that are most important to you using our advance notification platform.
*Bonus* – Ideas to get you started
Use local event visibility as a way to engage with geographic segments of your social media audience – operate globally but act locally.
Supercharge your SEO and start planning your content strategy with more relevant and timely articles based on events happening in the markets your business operates in. But don’t do this four weeks out from events; start planning and publishing this content three to six months out from a meaningful event. This gives your content the best opportunity to seed and rank in search engines like Google or Bing for greater organic results in the build-up to the next Burning Man or Coachella event.
Use Saved Searches to get notified about the exact event visibility you need. If you only care about severe weather with a PHQ ranking of four and above occurring in New York, London and Sydney, then create a Saved Search – and we’ll take care of the rest.
Use our event Signals to not only find out what events could impact your business the most, but also the optimal lead time. If you operate a business like car rentals, flights, accommodation or even a chain of beauty salons where a consumer needs to make a booking for a future date, we can calculate the average lead time relative to an event, which means we can estimate when most people are converting and therefore when you should be increasing your ad spend to convert them.
