Who should be in the room at our event? The way companies identify and reach relevant target audiences has changed significantly in recent years. Audience Intelligence helps identify the companies and individuals that matter for a B2B event before invitations are sent. When networking, business development or entering new markets are among the event objectives, having the right decision-makers, prospective customers, partners and industry influencers in the room is crucial to its success.

Why companies need to rethink how they identify their target audiences

For a long time, target audience communication followed a push model: companies defined their target groups and distributed messages through advertising, mailings and sales. With websites, newsletters and especially social media, this increasingly evolved into pull communication: interested people found their own way to the company and from there into the CRM. For events, companies could then draw on these existing contacts.

But at a time when social networks are flooded with AI-generated content and many companies want to enter new markets and reach new target audiences, this approach alone is often no longer enough. Reaching people via social media has become more challenging. At the same time, data protection and consent requirements make it harder to build new contact databases. Contacts and responsibilities within companies also change more quickly today, while entirely new roles emerge. A contact who was relevant two years ago may no longer be the right person today. And while databases may contain contacts, they do not tell you who is relevant for a specific event. This changes the key question companies should be asking: no longer “Who do we have in our database?”, but “Who do we need in the room to achieve our event objective?”

That is exactly what matters. The 2024 Invitario Event Study surveyed 119 event managers: for 75 percent of them, networking is a key objective of business events. Identifying the right guests and systematically building new contacts are therefore important prerequisites for successful live events.

How VOK DAMS identifies an event’s target audience before invitations are sent

In most organisations, target audience definitions are created at a specific point in time and rarely reviewed afterwards. But markets, organisations and responsibilities change. That is why our starting point is not the existing guest list, but the objective of the event.
At VOK DAMS, we use the term Audience Intelligence for the strategic process of identifying and understanding the target audiences that are relevant to an event. We first look at the market, then at the relevant companies and finally at the specific individuals. We work with publicly available sources such as annual reports, trade media, association directories and speaker programmes from industry events. Job postings are another important source. They can reveal where a company is currently building expertise and which topics have internal priority. Step by step, this creates an up-to-date picture of who is actually relevant to the respective event objective.

How the right invitation increases RSVPs

Identifying the right people is only the first step. The next challenge is to actually reach them and show them why attending the event is worth their time. That is the Reason to Come. For this, we use Digital Doppelgänger – AI models of real target audiences that can simulate their behaviour in advance. This allows us to address guests with the issues that genuinely matter to them: a question, a topic or a professional benefit that fits their role. An invitation becomes a relevant proposition that increases the likelihood of a positive response. And when the composition of the audience is right, the entire event changes. Conversations take on a different quality because the people in the room genuinely have something to offer one another. A contact can become a relationship, and a relationship can develop into a joint project. Live events and B2B events can therefore become a powerful tool for companies looking to enter new markets.

Audience Intelligence creates the foundation for inviting the right guests to an event and engaging them with topics that are genuinely relevant to them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Audience Intelligence?
At VOK DAMS, Audience Intelligence describes the strategic process of identifying an event’s target audience before invitations are sent. Using publicly available sources, we determine which companies and business areas are relevant to the event objective and identify the people currently responsible. Only then do we compare these findings with the existing contact database. We then build Digital Doppelgänger of the target audience to simulate their behaviour. This allows us to address guests individually with topics that genuinely interest them. 

When should target audience identification for an event begin?
Target audience identification should begin during the concept phase. If the target audience is only clarified once the format, location and programme have already been defined, the insights can no longer fully inform the event itself and can only be used to adjust the invitation. A significant part of the potential therefore remains untapped.

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