Creating a successful MarTech solution for Big Events

If you're looking to build a martech solution for large events, focus on the features that generate revenue, get to know your audience's pain points and develop adaptable revenue streams. Don’t sleep on the quality of research your competition.

Thanks to Alena Tim for sharing this story and her insights ??

How to simplify the process of developing a technology solution for marketing needs

Marketers often know what solution they need to solve their work problems, but creating that solution can be challenging.

Finding the right technologies and communicating effectively with developers can be tricky.

The story

We organized big events a couple of times a year to showcase new technologies and use cases.

The marketing goal was to sell as many solutions as possible to as many people as possible in a short time.

Tight deadlines and too many vendors to approach were the biggest problems.

The Challenge

We realized the need to create a technology solution that would be valuable for marketers and event participants.

After research, we found several problems the solution could help solve:

• The audience didn't know which lectures to attend. We might try to guess their preferences, but it would be great if we could know in advance what topics the audience is interested in.
• The audience was not engaged, and there were few network options available.
• The content of the conference was created by engineers and was hard to understand.

Developing the App

Our team decided to go with a cross-platform mobile app. The goal was to launch the first version of the product for the huge tech forum we organized, test it there, and then introduce it for all our events and the events of our vendors and partners.

We assumed that the organizers of events were our core audience.

What we prepared:

• The event’s agenda was divided into several streams. Each lecture was a stand-alone slot that users could like if they found it interesting.
• Each slot had a complete description of the lecture given, the names of the speakers, and their roles in the company. We also asked vendors to attach files that could summarize or enrich their presentations.
• We created a gamification module to engage attendees in the conference activities more.

What we decided to postpone:

• Virtual rooms for networking via 10-, 15-, or 30-minute calls.
• Introduction of virtual business cards for each participant to find their perfect match for networking.
• Quizzes to support the speakers during their lectures.

Shifting the Target Audience

As we learned in the process, our target audience was not the companies that would buy our application to register for their events in advance. It was the event agencies that organized the events.

Finding the Key Value of the Product

We decided to focus on statistical data and analytics. We managed to answer which exact topics were more valuable to the audience. According to the laws on protecting users' personal data, we couldn’t disclose all the data to our suppliers, but we could share the cohort statistics.

Analyzing the Results

We created the app in 1.5 months and had no crashes during the event. We also provided some statistics to vendors after the event, which they used in their sales pitches later. However, for the local market, our price was too high, and agencies were not ready to pay us even when they liked our solution. We needed to change our monetization model.

Tips for Creating an Appealing Solution

To create a great solution, marketers should understand the problem of their audience clearly, come up with flexible monetization models, prioritize tasks and features, find a person or a team to build the solution, and keep the solution affordable. Always research competitors a lot before building a solution to stand out among them.