Events are made for people, and people have expectations. Meeting those will result in higher engagement rates and greater satisfaction, driving the success of your event. Attendees expect to build and expand their network at events, providing business matchmaking is offering them what they want.
Our core competence is the matchmaking at events, and we developed an entire event management solution for it
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Attendees, Attendees, Attendees
In today’s consumer-driven and interconnected world, attendees are more than just tickets sold. No wonder that 91% of event organizers measure the success of their events based on attendee satisfaction. They and their opinions are the key drivers of your event’s success.
Attendees clear their schedules for your event, and since every person attending is a potential repeat attendee, such as an indicator of event success, their satisfaction should be prioritized.
If an event met or exceeded the attendee’s expectations, 85% are likely to repeat attendance and 89% are likely to recommend it to others. So, focusing on attendee satisfaction will not only result in lower acquisition costs for your next event but also in the best possible PR — word of mouth.
This means, you as an event organizer want to offer attendees the best possible experience. But to do so, you must first know their expectations.
Understand Attendance Drivers
However, this can be challenging as each attendee has own unique interests and goals. But there are some common goals though. The most important reason for people to go to events of any kind is the ability to network, besides educational purposes (92%) and the event destination itself (78%).
Understanding the factors determining attendee’s decision to attend is essential for event organizers to build their event experience and attendance promotion strategies.
Participants want interactions that will help them build their professional network, and you are responsible to give them what they want. The fact that it’s important to 76 % of attendees is a convincing argument to figure outthe best way to ‘get them together’ on-site.
As events grow, chances that attendees by coincidence will meet the right people are low. To simply offer unregulated networking sessions or coffee breaks is not sufficient enough. Because 88% of attendees hope that an event will save them time by bringing many vendors together under one roof at the same time, you must make it easy and efficient for them to meet and connect.
Here, business matchmaking enters the scene. It is a more efficient and goal-oriented approach to typical networking and certifies that every minute of an attendee’s schedule is worthwhile.
The hot water and clean linen of events
According to the Kano model, which is used to analyse customer satisfaction development, it is essential to meet and stimulate attendees basic expectations first, before you really can spark excitement with surprising aspects of your service (event).
For example, when you book into a hotel, you’d expect hot water and a bed with clean linen as an absolute minimum. It does not make you jump into the air because of excitement.
This article should have made it obvious that business matchmaking is the hot water and clean linen of an event.
The importance of business matchmaking and benefits that result from it explain why already 27% of event planners are investing more in their attendees meeting design. Yet, it also shows that many event organizers have not noticed the significant role it plays. What does this mean for you as an event organizer?
Take action - next steps
Give attendees what they want, offer business matchmaking and make sure your event adds real value for you participants and everyone leaves with connections that matter.
This is best done with a tool, like b2match. We know what you think, not one more tool I have to manage. No worries, we have got you covered. B2match is an all-in-one event management system that offers everything to manage your entire event, with a clear focus on business matchmaking.
Read more about our matchmaking solution
or have a look at some real events Explore usecases
