Optimizing the Total Experience for Your Audiences

Breaking out of our siloes to consider the overall buyer journey

2022 was just about the closest the world had come to being “normal” since 2019, especially in the events and experiential industry. While the beginning of the year started off understandably cautious and slow, in-person events finally returned. But as we all know, the events and experience space is not quite the same anymore, and the question every event professional should be asking is, “What’s next and how do we get ahead of it?”

Positive brand experiences have never mattered more than they do today. Every touchpoint drives customer satisfaction and affects your buyer’s view of your brand. Notably, a recent study by Forrester Research on customer experience shows that – after two years of being patient with brands and brand interactions – our customers’ patience may be wearing thin. From your brand experience to your brand purpose, dissatisfied customers and event attendees are voting with their clicks and their wallets.

At InVision, we believe that the north star, the “new normal” for brands and event marketers going forward, will be delivering the optimal TOTAL EXPERIENCE (TX) for our customers and key audiences. TX encompasses the complete brand experience, from the employee to the customer to our digital interactions…through the customer lifecycle to the end-user experience. Bottom line: thinking about events in a broader context and adopting the TX approach across your entire portfolio will drive better business outcomes in the long term.

Let’s break down the components that bring TX together as a whole to gain a clearer understanding of how everything ties together and the role event marketers play in it.

The Employee Experience (EX)
The employee experience is the foundation of business success.

You cannot achieve optimal business outcomes before first building a solid foundation of engaged employees. Studies show that when an employee understands and embraces your organization’s vision and understands the role they play in delivering against that mission, they find meaning, passion, and purpose in their work.

A strong employee engagement foundation enables excellence in your customer experience—which we will dive into next—to the tune of 89% greater customer satisfaction and 60% greater customer loyalty. And as we know, customer satisfaction and loyalty are what breeds business success.

The Customer Experience (CX)
Events play a very important role in the CX journey because post-pandemic, attendees at face-to-face experiences are often arriving at your event much further down the funnel than ever before.

According to a 2022 study by Trust Radius, almost 100% of B2B buyers now report that they want to self-serve part, or all, of their buying journey. So, when they arrive to your event, they are ready to pull the trigger more than ever before. And as we know, events and experiences play squarely in the CX space. It is up to us as event marketers to offer our customers a seamless, engaging CX that align where they have been and where they want to go, to drive the relationship forward.

The User Experience (UX)
And finally, there’s the user experience. As event marketers, you might be thinking that there are other departments like R&D teams or product teams who own the user experience. However, in thinking about events and your communities…who is closer to your audience? Who has more opportunity to discover and define what they want and need from your products and your brand?

Events are the last mile of your brand expression.

Event marketers are the ones who gather people together, who understand their user personas and demographics, and who understand where they are in their organization’s decision-making process. We have the unique ability to reach audiences more than others in an organization through various touch points like customer focus groups, user group discussions or product demos onsite.

This gives us a great opportunity to influence the user experience by bringing the brand to life across all channels from environmental design to digital experiences, the content we share, the demos we provide, in the training we offer, and in the sales conversations that happen at our experiences.

Where does all of this lead us?
Think of it as a math equation. The Total Experience is driven by an inspired Employee Experience, which enables our employees to deliver a better Customer Experience, amplified by a User Experience that drives renewal, repurchase, word-of-mouth and customer satisfaction.

Asserting an event marketer’s place in the overall TX equation will give us a more important seat at the table in delivering quality Total Experiences to our audiences. We need to step out of our siloes and recognize the power we hold to drive consistency in messaging and experience across the customer lifecycle.

It is more than just improving the experience of one constituency. It is understanding the role events play in the equation that helps us improve all brand experiences across all channels at the intersection of multiple constituents, which allows us as brand leaders to deliver transformational outcomes for the business.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you optimize the Total Experience for your brand, contact your InVision Account Director or at info@iv.com.

Optimizing the Total Experience for Your Audiences

02.01.23