You are likely already well aware of the power of personalized recommendations. The biggest examples in our day-to-day lives are Netflix and Amazon. Did you check that one new baking show last night? Netflix is likely going to serve up more food-oriented content for your consumption. Bought some new golf balls on Amazon? You are most likely going to get suggestions for golf gloves, tees, etc.
Now, what if you could harness the power of recommendations for your event community, serving up content to your participants based on their interests and previous behavior? You would be able to present them with options that are more suitable to them, ensuring that they get more value out of your event, thereby making it more likely that they’ll renew for next year.
At Sherpa, we recognize the importance and power of personalized recommendations. That’s why in 2017 we launched the first iteration of our enterprise-grade AI-driven recommendations engine. To date, it has been used at over 1,000 events, helping attendees and exhibitors alike achieve greater outcomes.
Matchmaking and recommendations are a fundamental element of all Sherpa solutions, which include:
Everything we do at Sherpa is with the goal of improving experiences for your participants. Our Matchmaking and Recommendations functionality is designed to help you serve more relevant content to your audience. Some of the benefits of this include:
- Increased discoverability: making it easier for participants to prepare for your events and find people, content, and products that are relevant to them
- More efficient events for attendees and exhibitors, leading to greater business outcomes
- Increased retention of attendees and exhibitors, leading to more revenue for your organization
At Sherpa, we are obsessed with optimizing the event journey for attendees and exhibitors alike. Greater preparedness will ensure that attendees and exhibitors get more out of your events, thereby making it more likely that they renew in future years. As evidence of this, our internal research shows that buyers who shortlist exhibitors before an event spend 2.7x more time in their booth and shortlisted exhibitors receive 2x more traffic during the event than those who are not shortlisted.
Matchmaking and recommendations are critical to the event discovery process and your attendees’ success. First-time or infrequent attendees and exhibitors often need gudiance to find content that is relevant to them and to have a more productive experience at your event. They need help to identify what to do at your event, where to go, and who to meet so they have a successful event, reach their goals, and decide to make the show a must-attend in the following years.
Returning attendees benefit from recommendations that connect them to new opportunities. This helps them venture outside their comfort zone to discover new content and continue to gain value from your event. For instance, over the last seven years, we have observed through Pinpoint (our indoor positioning system with accuracy within six feet) that repeat attendees often tend to go on auto-pilot and follow similar patterns to previous events.
For exhibitors, matchmaking and recommendations also allow them to identify target prospects at the event, identify the size of their business opportunities, book more meetings, increase revenue, and improve their ROI of attending the event.
How do Recommendations work in Sherpa?
We use machine learning to create recommendations for participants in three main ways:
- Collaborative filtering: based on how other users like you have interacted with content
- Content-based: recommending content similar to what the user has interacted with in the past
- Popular or trending: recommending content that has received the most interaction at your event
We also use the correlated cross-occurrence algorithm (CCO) to use data from multiple sources at the same time. This allows us to gain a deeper understanding of user preferences and increase the relevance of recommendations.
The Sherpa platform is AI-based, meaning that content is displayed to users based on the recommendation score for each user. All strongly recommended content is then shown with the “For you” tag.
It is important to note that our recommendation engine does not require any additional configuration from the event organizer. Organizers can create flexible business rules to customize the weight of each factor in the recommendation process, but this is not required and the recommendations engine can be used with its default settings.
How is Matchmaking different?
Matchmaking is done by using the recommendations engine to suggest new people and companies to connect with.
These recommendations are based on two specific types of properties:
- Interests: which categories of content you are interested in
- Profile roles: which types of users you are looking to meet - this can be based on registration categories, business titles, or user roles at the event (e.g. “I’m looking for a distributor”, “I’m looking for a manufacturer”, “I’m a manufacturer”, etc.)
At this stage, the recommendation engine still uses collaborative filtering to create its recommendations.
For example, let’s say a particular user listed themselves as “looking for manufacturers”. The engine will suggest users who are manufacturers, but will also consider
- Who the user is already connected with
- How other users who are looking for a manufacturer have interacted on the platform, and who they are connected with
- Manufacturers who create products that are among your interests
- Manufacturers from the same country as the user
Note: if it does not have enough data, the recommendation engine will show the most popular or trending company/manufacturer.
Ready to get started?
The events industry is changing. Exhibitors and attendees have higher expectations than ever before. Sherpa is your guide to help you navigate the new world of professional events with fully customized solutions, white-glove service and implementation, game-changing analytics, and more.
We are not a SaaS provider. We are a business partner that helps you grow your events year after year. Since 2009, we’ve worked with over 3,000 of the world’s biggest events in the most demanding environments. For instance, we’ve worked with Reed Exhibitions US, Vision Expo West, and Global Gaming Expo for over a decade.