A variety of studies confirm that we are looking at our smartphones all day long. One metric says the average person checks their phone 150 times a day! When someone is at your conference, these numbers do not change much. In fact, if you have a great mobile event app, the smartphone becomes a great way to increase audience engagement at your conference. One of the fantastic side effects of mobile apps is that you can track this interaction with tools like Google Analytics. For example, you can see how often attendees look at a page and how much time is spent on it.
This information becomes an easy source to generate revenue. In terms of brand awareness, sponsors want to know how often their brand is impressed. With the page analytics discussed, you can deliver real data on the frequency in which a corporate image is presented to the attendees. With a classic mobile event app you have some very basic, but powerful, ways to market your sponsors:
- Splash page. This is the page the attendee sees when the app is being loaded either the first time or after restarts. Our studies show that the average attendee consistently views the splash page 5 to 10 times per show. If you have 1,000 attendees that is over 5,000 impressions! The other good thing is the splash page takes a few seconds to load, so it is a lasting impression.
- Home page. After the splash page loads, this is the first page – the home – of your app. This typically is automatically seen after the splash page is loaded. Since attendees will tend to click on the Home page link out of habit, the viewing rate of this page will be higher than the splash, though the impression time may not be as long.
- Rotating Ads. These are ads that scroll at the bottom of selected pages. At its most basic, these ads can show the sponsor’s message. Even better is to take the attendee to the sponsor’s web site when the message is touched. Ads can be deployed in different ways.
- One ad dedicated to each page.
- Ad on a given page is chosen at random
- Show a scrolling ad that changes the message after a preset period of time (such as 15 seconds).
- Exhibitor and Sponsor Listings. On your pages that list sponsors and exhibitors you can highlight the mobile app sponsors.
- Promoted posts. If your app supports push notifications and emails, you can also use this to highlight your sponsors. The good thing about this technology is that it can be highly targeted. For example, if you have a workshop that may be pertinent to a certain product, you can send out a notification for that item five minutes after the workshop ends.
Include these techniques as part of your general sponsorship strategy in order to cash in on these revenue opportunities. You can either work them into your general sponsorship portfolio or create a mobile-centric sponsorship package. Either way, you need to make it clear to your prospective sponsors that mobile makes it easy to increase brand awareness.
Talk to us to find out how you can generate revenue with your mobile app!
