hen Cisco Systems Inc. entered a new market through acquisition, it wanted to learn everything about its new customers’ challenges, needs, and hot buttons as quickly as possible.

The company devised a research plan to get inside the heads of its new customer segment. At its heart: a series of eight, half-day events, each with about 30 attendees. Cisco limited its presentation to a five-minute thank-you address at the close of each session, after a third-party moderator had led attendees through a wide-ranging discussion about their challenges when working with large-scale networks.

Billed as expert idea exchanges rather than focus groups, the forums equipped attendees with proven insights and tactics from their peers. Perhaps more important, the events gave Cisco the insider information it sought about customers in its new market.

Face-to-face events such as the ones Cisco created seem like an ideal place to conduct research. You have a captive audience. They’re spending valuable time with your company. They’ve come to learn and to network, and understand that you wish to learn from them, too.

In reality, events can be a challenging forum for meaningful research. There is a natural bias since attendees have paid to attend your event. Plus, while attendees understand you want their feedback, their first priority is their own learning.

Cisco’s success comes from its focus on three well-defined attributes:
1. Purpose: Why it is conducting research in the first place.
2. Strategy: A research vision aligned with its corporate business objectives.
3. Approach: An understanding of why and when event-based research is the right solution for its objectives.

By focusing on the same three criteria — while broadening your view of what research is — you can make the most of your face-to-face research opportunities, as well.

First Things First

Before developing a research plan that will use one of your events as a venue, be sure there is a clear reason for the research. Are you asking a question that connects to a larger corporate business strategy? If not, you’ll end up with research data that answers the wrong questions, cannot be built upon or tracked over time, or simply creates more questions.

Too often, the reason for research is dubious or limiting. For example, salespeople can be very reactive, and think only of their latest selling challenge. They want research to help them overcome or counter that challenge. As a marketer, you’ve probably heard this line: “If only I had research that tells me X, I could sell more stuff.”

But when you chase the latest sales objection you won’t uncover information about the big, broad theme of what the objection is really about. For example, if you simply ask about pricing structures, you may miss the real issue: Why aren’t customers finding value in your product?

Is That a Strategy or a Tactic?

To head off these inevitable requests for moment-in-time research, you need a strategy that defines the research projects that will be valuable for your company or event program. That strategy must align with your company’s business strategies or goals.

Business goals are typically articulated in tangible terms: grow market share by 6 percent, launch three new products, and improve customer-satisfaction indices by 10 points. Your research strategy, then, must include activities that support progress toward those goals.

But remember that the activities themselves are not the strategy. Think of it like this:
Strategy: How you intend to use research over time to uncover actionable information that addresses your company’s challenges, goals, and long-range plans.

Objective: How each research project will support that strategy.

Tactics: How you plan to conduct each project. Tactics are things such as methodology, sample selection, and questionnaire design. These are essential to research success, but should not be the starting point of your planning.

More than Surveys

Among the most powerful things an event marketer can do when thinking about a research strategy is to look beyond focus groups and surveys.

Simply using your company’s customer-relationship management (CRM) system as a research tool can be incredibly valuable — and incredibly cost effective. For example, consider adding a data point to your CRM database that indicates which customers and prospects have attended which of your corporate events. If there is sales movement over time from customers who have attended events or a conversion increase among prospects who have attended, it proves your events’ value.

At Ziff Davis Media, we asked salespeople to indicate in the CRM database which of our research studies they had presented to clients within the past 30 days. We then analyzed accounts where research was used to see if the business engagement grew. We quickly saw which research projects were more frequently used; and if research showed up in accounts where there were sales upticks we could conclude that the research contributed in some way to the increase. It was hard data that helped us understand which research expenditures produced results.

Events as a Research Venue

To determine if an event is the right place to conduct your research, first think about your objective. For example, if you want to better understand what your prospects think about your brand, there are two ways to capture that information:
A Qualitative Study: You can talk to some prospects in person and collect rich information that is not necessarily projectable. As Cisco’s listening tour proved, events can be an effective venue for this type of directional information gathering.
A Quantitative Study: You can conduct a survey with a larger sample size that represents more of your prospects and gives you results you can track over time.

Although feedback surveys (such as session evaluations) are common in event settings, larger surveys that delve deeply into a given question or issue can rarely be accommodated comfortably in an event environment.

When properly used, feedback surveys can provide a wealth of strategic information about your company and your event by looking beyond the usual content and speaker ratings.

Say a company objective is to take market share away from a particular competitor. You can ask attendees in a brief feedback form about your company vs. other vendors. What products are they currently using? What is the most important thing they need to know or believe before they could buy your product? Which vendor is their primary supplier? If it’s not you, what can you do to be considered a more strategic supplier? Provide four or five options, and always include an open-ended option. This simple tactic is probably the best tool in an event marketer’s arsenal. Open-ended questions will bring you information you didn’t even know you wanted.

Like any forum, events have advantages and limitations as a research venue. On the plus side, your customers are already there. It’s a cost-effective place to gather directional information that can lead you to other research initiatives. And interviewing people face to face allows you to follow up, to clarify confusing questions, and to read body language and sense confusion or excitement. You can’t do that through the mail or online.

The disadvantages are that people want to absorb as much as they can during their limited time with you. That means they’re rarely interested in answering numerous detailed questions. And the information you do gather must be reviewed with several caveats:
Sample Demographics: Event attendees are not fully representative of your audience. They’ve chosen to spend time and their own money to attend your event. This can mean their perspective is naturally biased.
Sample Size: Will you bet a company decision based on talking to 10, 25, 50 people? Probably not. View your findings as directional, and follow up with a quantitative study to validate them.
Lack of Anonymity: At a corporate event, your customers may agree with you or speak highly of your products or brand simply because they’re at your event and they want to please you. With a focus group or survey, you can keep the sponsor anonymous. But at an event, you can’t.

Research about Your Events

The same three caveats apply when you’re asking attendees for feedback to help you improve or plan your own events. View information collected through in-person interviews as anecdotal and back it up with survey data to ensure you’re addressing the right opportunities.

Short pre-surveys have helped us manage issues at our own events that have tremendous strategic significance. For example, when we’re planning breakout sessions, we want to plan rooms properly so we don’t have 30 attendees in a room that seats 200, or vice versa.

Seems tactical, right? It’s basic load balancing. But it’s strategic in that it affects attendees’ perception of the content. If they walk into a room that looks sparse, they may think the content isn’t valuable, or that the conference was poorly attended. That’s not the message we want them to share with others after the event. We conduct research ahead of time — usually via a quick online survey — and up to 50 percent of our conference registrants tell us which breakout topics they plan to attend.

Research as Event Content

Research can also be a tremendously effective event-content centerpiece. A research sponsor recently built an event program around a major study it had conducted in its market. The information was highly valuable to the company’s customers. In a series of events, it presented the findings to its key audiences, and distributed printed copies of the highlights. The content solidified the company’s position as a thought leader, customers appreciated the business-critical insight, and the increased time spent with customers during the events helped the company reach its sales goals for the entire year.

Regardless of whether you plan to use events to collect information or to share it with your customers, remember that research — like marketing — is both an art and a science. The easy part is asking questions. The hard part is making sure those questions address the real needs of your company. Keep your strategy focused on your company’s goals and find the right ways to use events as a research venue, and you’ll be amazed at what you learn. e