Society of Petroleum Engineers
Offshore Technology Conference
Event Apps
New Features
Event Details
Pre-event engagement was key to driving a record number of event app downloads for the Offshore Technology Conference.
Our client, the Offshore Technology Conference, is where energy professionals meet to exchange ideas and opinions to advance scientific and technical knowledge for the safe, environmentally friendly, and sustainable development of offshore oil and gas resources.
OTC is consistently listed within the top 30 events on the TSNN Top 250. OTC is sponsored by 13 nonprofit organizations in the energy sector, who work cooperatively to develop the technical program. Revenue from the not-for-profit event directly benefits the advancement of the energy sector by supporting these societies, whose members also receive discounted conference registration.
Megan Magaña, Marketing Manager for the Offshore Technology Conference says the 2017 show was their most successful use of the event app. “We’ve been using the Core-Apps event app for three years now. The first two years I was just getting used to incorporating an event app into my marketing plan, but this year I was very familiar with the value proposition so we had a more strategic approach to promoting event app downloads.”
Some of the ways the OTC team promoted the app were with the website, email, videos, and social media. She says they always started their communication with where to find the app and how to download it, versus ending their talking points with this message.
Even though 2017 attendance was comparable to the previous year, app downloads were up 6%. I attribute this to our active promotion of the event app and the fact that we were very clear in every communication on how to download the app.”
She explained that this year’s conference also included a video series that was shown throughout the event.
“This year we worked with Freeman AV to include a video spot with our OTC Board Liaison talking about how to download the app and to search for ‘Offshore Technology Conference’ in the app stores. Daily downloads increased significantly during the show because of the promotion.”
The team also reacted to past attendee surveys and added more first-timer engagement that was also promoted through the app. “At this year’s OTC we debuted a first-timer lounge to help answer questions for new attendees, which included training people on how to use the app.”
She also offers some additional tips for Organizers to consider for app promotion:
- Review your survey results and consider how you can use the mobile app to create a better experience for next year.
- Keep the download call to action (i.e., “Search ‘Offshore Technology Conference’”) at the beginning of any copy about the app.
- Consider a walk-in slide: a PowerPoint slide which rotated in the session rooms during breaks and when people were filing into their seats. It was in these slides that OTC inserted the video from this page where one of the board members offered advice about downloading.
- Wi-Fi slide: whenever someone would log onto the venue’s Wi-Fi, a promotion for the app was one of the splash images. The image was optimized for desktop and mobile.
- Drive home the message of download the app before you get to the event because Wi-Fi might be spotty