Third parties have been considered by some hotels & venues to have become a bane and drain on their resources, with costs bemoaned by many owners and management teams alike. The costs are not only in terms of hard cash but also - and sometimes more obviously to hotel & venue operations teams - in terms of wasted resource, due to poor business conversion and the high-volume of poorly qualified business briefs sent their way. It can be a common problem when taking business via third parties, and - incredibly - one that has been exasperated and compounded through the use of listing platforms, with the average third party Meetings & Events (M&E) conversion rate of circa 5%-6% plummeting to under 1% via many online listing platforms. But how is this so? Isn’t technology supposed to help improve things?
Eventopedia knows and understands these frustrations and pains because our board & major investors have over 100 years of hospitality industry experience, from working within independently owned & managed country house hotels, to unique city of London venues, national hotel chains, three of the largest global hotel chains, to caterers and two of the UK’s leading event management agencies. The team has experienced that frustration and pain, and used a lot of the online platforms compounding those issues.
In fact, Toby and Alan, the two founders of Eventopedia, met when trying to resolve precisely this problem. Alan was a senior manager for one of Europe’s largest event management agencies and Toby was part of the executive team at a large City of London venue.
Eventopedia provides intelligent revenue generation solutions for global hotels & venues, and is built by event professionals for event professionals. Eventopedia’s objective is to increase hotel & venue profitability by blending great technology with an intrinsic understanding of the events & wider hospitality industry. This squaring of intelligence (technology and industry experience) transforms a cost into an investment, which is measured in terms of revenue and positive returns.
Eventopedia provides solutions that add value through each stage of your sales, marketing & distribution processes.
Eventopedia’s specialist targeting is better than Google at mining quality leads, and usually more effective than doing it in house.
Utilising the www.eventopedia.com distribution platform as your landing pages for targeted campaigns, enables us to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns, provide you with business intelligence on all leads and hand them over to you to nurture and close.
The Eventopedia VSI (Video Site Inspection) tool (e.g. Hyatt Hotels Showcase) assists venues in nurturing leads and closing deals, by engaging more customers and quickening their purchasing decision, helping you close more, faster. Our media spend management solution also helps to target, re-target and re-engage customers who are known to visit 30+ websites before they make a buying decision. It is no longer enough to attract a customer to your website. You need to keep that customer engaged and know how to consistently re-engage them to enable you to win the business.
Eventopedia is trusted by some of the best known names in our industry. Case studies with ExCeL London, Hyatt, Hilton, IHG, Marriott, Wembley Stadium, Arsenal FC, and many more, demonstrate 60X - 112X returns in 12-months, with up to 43% more leads generated than doing it yourself. Eventopedia also works with independent venues, restaurants and private clubs, to help drive new venue hire business.
Toby has owned and operated private venues in the City of London, has consulted for prestigious UK country house hotels, and was one of the senior management teams brought in to breath new life into a renowned City of London events venues catering for up to 800 guests for banquets. Utilising a range of digital techniques that are now part of the Eventopedia blueprint, Toby and his team, increased turnover by 67% in three years and it has now - seven years on - increased by over 100% utilising many of those techniques.
In the agency world, Alan had realised that the general agency approach needed to change having repeatedly heard venues and hoteliers complain about third party conversion at industry forums and roundtables, bemoaning the need for agencies to hold four, five, six, and sometimes up to nine or ten options per enquiry. With responsibility for 30 Operations staff (booking meetings & events for corporate clients), as well as management of all the agencies’ global venue & hotel relationships, Alan found himself in the fortunate position of being able to drive change. It struck him that holding four, five, six or more options per enquiry wasn’t only wasteful for hotels & venues, but it was an inefficient way for the agency to be working.
‘Why would we be doing all that work if we had the knowledge and expertise to closely match venue options to the clients’ brief, and if our clients trusted us?’, he asked himself.
It made zero business sense in respect to operational efficiency, supplier relationships, or delivering the optimal service to clients. It was impacting company profit and the profit of their hotel & venue partners, so something had to change. Over a number of years, he undertook rigorous programmes of training and cultural change to implement a different method of working and - at their zenith - achieved an average of 1.9 options per enquiry, significantly improving their service and becoming one of the most respected agencies in the UK; an agency venues actually wanted to do business with because they regularly converted business and wasted minimal time and resources.
In 2009, Alan was head hunted by a well-renowned global event management agency and implemented a similar programme of change, helping to reduce the average number of options per enquiry to 2.3, greatly improving supplier relations, operational efficiency, commercial performance, and client service.
It was during this time that Toby was reviewing the performance of agencies at his venue and noted that Alan’s agency had sent through 60 enquiries the year prior with a zero rate of conversion, which - as Toby put it to Alan after finding him on LinkedIn - was “a complete waste of time for everyone.” Alan agreed, noted that it was an anomaly within the organisation, but nevertheless one that required resolution. They met to understand and resolve the issues, and quickly started to convert business.
Toby and Alan continued talking about how widespread the aforementioned issues were and why they felt there needed to be a change, as agencies required a champion driving change to ensure their philosophy of efficiency and 360º benefit could become an industry norm rather than the exception. They discussed how technology providers were compounding these issues and that technology should act as an enabler, a tool (or suite of tools) that improves performance not worsens it. So, Eventopedia was conceived to provide intelligent revenue generation solutions for global hotels & venues, focussed upon delivering high-quality enquiries with a greater likelihood of conversion. Eventopedia has achieved this with an average conversion rate of 20% during the time of operation (3X higher than traditional channels).
Many of the newest online platforms operate a hybrid model between the old listing sites and a traditional bricks and mortar agency, in some cases charging both marketing fees and commission, yet delivering less value than traditional agencies due to the high number of irrelevant enquiries sent to venues.
There is an innate aspect of our psychology that translates abundance as good and thus valuable, even when it is not the case. Many of the hotels and venues we speak to voice their discontent at the sheer volume of ‘irrelevant’ enquiries they receive from such platforms, yet still equate number of enquiries sent to value, and even more so if a booking should materialise. However, the total value of that single booking may have been dwarfed by a combination of the marketing fees, commission fees, and the large amount of wasted human resource associated with managing responses to all the irrelevant enquiries from those same platforms. There is very limited, if any, qualification of leads via these channels and so there is a tendency to be inundated with enquiries that have a limited chance of converting because they’ve also been sent to multiple venues, and/or may not have been suitable for your venue in the first instance. It’s a perpetual industry problem.
Boiled down to the simplest single factor, this is chiefly why Eventopedia is different. We take this market knowledge & experience, blend it with leaders in the technology and media sectors, and ensure that it is represented in everything we do. We consider the impact to both sides of the market and tailor the services accordingly to deliver the best value to all.
Commission and advertising models skew search results and often preference venues that are unsuitable for many event briefs. When Alan was in agency and they tried using a number of the existing platforms, they quickly become frustrated by the unsuitable options returned in the search results, which reflected what was commercially best for the platform rather than what was best for their event briefs. So, they stopped using the platforms because they weren’t helping the agency deliver the right options to their clients.
The Eventopedia model for distribution services - Eventoepdia.com - is democratic because there is no commission and/or advertising fees, so the search results are the closest match to the inputs entered by the event planner. We operate a freemium model, enabling venues to up-grade to our annual pro-active inbound marketing subscription services, which comprises specialist storytelling and omni-channel inbound marketing campaigns targeting event planners and funnelling leads through the platform and on to one of three actions;
We measure conversions at different stages of the lead generation process to determine marketing successes.
On average, Eventopedia premium clients receive an increase of 480% in click-throughs to their listings compared with free listings, and some of our clients have had 1,000+ high-quality leads in 12-months.
Eventopedia is backed by a community of senior event planners, which is led by an Eventopedia Committee supporting the on-going development of our services. Our teams are involved in a handful of event planner focus groups, which enables us to tailor services according to the current needs & requirements of the community.
In some instances, location dependent, this enables us to manage ‘invitation-only’ fam-trips and/or dinners with venue clients, where a highly-curated audience of senior event professionals, PAs/EAs, PRs, and/or agency planners can attend.
Our long-established senior hotel group relationships enables us to consult with hotels & venues, allowing us to continue to understand the implications of changing trends to hotels & venues, and how we can continue developing solutions to alleviate those pain points.
It is critical to find the right balance on both sides of the market to avoid the seesaw effect we often see in the industry where one side of the market often gains most of the benefit with the other experiencing most of the pain. It doesn’t have to operate like this. Balance is achievable where everyone wins.
The superior user experience (UX) of the platform is especially prevalent in the search results, which enables event planners to filter by a range of categories, such as ‘classic’, ‘contemporary’, ‘funky’, ‘ballroom’, rooftop bar’ so planners can find precisely the type of space to suit their event.
Eventopedia also provides a Google style free text search providing the ease of use of Google with more refined search results than Google can provide, which are thus specific to the meetings & events industry, helping planners to be razor sharp in their selection of possible venue options and reducing waste in the much-loathed RFP process.
The power of video for digital marketing has been much touted in recent years, with 86% of online video marketers now using video content*. Google’s purchase of YouTube - who boast 5 billion videos watched every single day - for $1.65bn in 2006 was a strong signal that video would be an important development in the future of the web. Many of us now stream videos, movies, and our favourite programmes online and don’t think much of it, but despite the overwhelming statistics supporting the value of video, it is still slow to be adopted in the hospitality industry.
Eventopedia integrated video into the platform from inception and provides an interactive video [link to interactive video content blog] production service with the specialist Video Site Inspection (VSI) tool for hotels and venues, which has been extremely popular with event planners.
Eventopedia knows and understands the RFP process well, having been through it ourselves from both sides of the market.
The Eventopedia approach is to find high-quality meeting and event planners (leads) and connect them directly with hotels & venues. There is no one better to nurture and close than you, so we don’t step in the way or dictate the format in which you may wish to send a creative proposal back to a prospect. However, Eventoepdia does provide tools that help expedite the nurturing and close stages of the sales cycle.
In 2016, Eventopedia partnered with Microsoft and secured sponsorship as part of the BizSpark+ programme (Now Microsoft for Start-Ups), and built the most technically advanced platform in the industry utilising a new Microsoft technology. Eventopedia was the 2nd start-up globally to use the technology.
What does this mean? Eventopedia has a highly scalable, flexible platform that enables us to integrate with any hotel or venue system, enabling a more seamless and fluid flow of data through the sales funnel, from lead generation to close.
Using lean & agile development methodology, the platform is a web application that enables us to quickly develop and roll out new features based upon customer feedback. We’re all familiar with Apps on smartphones and how frequently new features are added to the Apps. Well, eventopedia.com operates in the same way and is a powerful and flexible tool for hotels & venues. This means Eventopedia always listens to its customers and, upon reaching enough peer consensus, can quickly develop new functions to meet the daily challenges of hotels & venue professionals.
This has extended to consultative conversations with a handful of hotel groups, backed by Eventopedia’s experienced Chief Product Officer (CPO) and technology team, who are pioneers of the lean approach to digital product development. Through over 23 years of building groundbreaking web platforms with complex back-end systems including the UK’s first eProcurement platform (mymarket.com for Bidvest Group) to being Apple’s first iPhone developer in Europe and actually building components that were used by Apple in the first iOS SDK, many developers now follow the processes and techniques that Eventopedia’s tech partners first pioneered.
Eventopedia’s CPO also built the first hybrid app by repurposing the web view component to display XML driven UI components, allowing the app to be updated without an App Store update. They have also produced apps for every other mobile manufacturer with direct work for Microsoft, Samsung UK, Sony Ericsson, Palm and Blackberry. Eventopedia is at the next stage of that journey focusing around Lean development teams and lean product management to create better, more efficient, user-centric products.
As seasoned events professionals, we wanted Eventopedia to challenge the status quo. We wanted to create the events platform that we could never find, that delivers what hotel & venue professionals actually need rather than what someone from outside our industry thinks we need. We want to provide the help we would have liked when our teams were overstretched. We have created the virtual back up team for our peers that would have helped us connect with the customers we wanted to connect with. Our mission is to build a platform where great technology is underpinned by our innate understanding of what we know hotel & venue professionals need. We want to make hotel & venue professionals’ lives easier and more profitable.
*Source: Social Media Today
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/40-video-marketing-statistics-for-2019-infographic/545887/