Clarion Stopped Treating Its Audience as One Big List

When your CRM is “gold,” blasting the same message to everyone is a fast way to burn it.

That was the reality facing Clarion Events North America as competition intensified across its markets. Instead of piling on more prospect lists and email volume, the company began building an intelligence layer on top of its first-party data to understand not just who was in its audience, but what they were interested in and when they might be ready to act.

The idea was to put that intelligence to work across the event business: identifying sponsors ready for a sales call, tailoring marketing to where prospective attendees were in the buying cycle, shaping agendas around what audiences were researching and finding new sponsorship opportunities after an event ended.

“We needed to be able to grow more audience, but we also needed to enrich our own data and be able to showcase to our sponsors and our exhibitors more than ‘here’s a name, here’s a title, here’s an industry,’” Liz Irving, CEO of Clarion Events North America, said on stage at SISO Leadership in Seattle in August.

Developed with Jaime Schultheis, head of global data partnerships at Bombora, the approach has already generated 600 new sponsor prospects and 12 contracts worth about $27,000 each, while producing better-performing attendee campaigns and new sponsorship inventory. It has also prompted Clarion to create a full-time position—the “audience architect”—to sit between its data, marketing and sales operations.

Beyond the Volume Play

Clarion’s brief, Schultheis recalled, was clear: stop treating the top of the funnel as a sheer numbers game.

“It really was to change how you were addressing the top of the funnel, and you wanted to be more prescriptive about it,” she said. “You wanted to change the model from this kind of traditional volume play of top of funnel… to something that was much more precise.”

The starting point was Clarion’s own data: exhibitor history, registration and web behavior. Bombora enriched that information and overlaid external research signals from a data cooperative spanning event operators, associations, media companies and brands. In aggregate, Schultheis said, the co-op sees about 20 billion page views a month across roughly 200 organizations.

The goal was to “triangulate” three views of the same companies—who they are, how they engage with Clarion and what they are researching elsewhere—to identify warm sales leads and create more precise audience segments.

Irving said the important part wasn’t simply adding more information to Clarion’s database. It was using behavior to determine what to do next.

“What I loved about it most of all that we’ve actually leveraged is all of the behavior and intent,” she said. “It’s not just about enriching what you have today. It’s about using the behaviors to watch what people are doing, how they’re doing, where they are in that journey… to say, ‘Here’s the right point in time and the right message to send to convert that customer.’”

The Rise of the Audience Architect

Clarion quickly discovered that buying more data was the easy part. Getting an organization to use it consistently required someone to own it.

“We hired an audience architect, which is a great title, by the way,” Irving said.

Rather than hand new tools to every marketer, Clarion centralized the expertise in a role connecting its marketing and sales teams with its data partners.

“I didn’t get a license for all the marketers; that would have cost me too much, quite frankly,” Irving said. “I focused to find somebody who had experience here who could actually teach us.”

The architect sits “at the center of the organization,” initially working with shows that have the clearest understanding of their ideal customer profiles. What began as an experiment is now a permanent part of Clarion’s structure.

“In the last 18 months, I have doubled down on the business around data and research and the audience architect because I believe that is what we need to have as organizers today to be able to advance us forward,” Irving said. “So it’s a full-time position. I’m hoping to add more.”

Finding the Right Moment to Sell

Irving provided an example of an event where, rather than asking salespeople to work through a list of lapsed and unsigned sponsors, Clarion combined its CRM data with 18 months of engagement and research behavior to identify accounts showing signs of renewed interest.

Salespeople received daily guidance on which accounts were heating up.

“That information was fed to our sales, who would say, ‘Hey, look, on a daily basis, take a look at this guy. For example, on this screen, [company x]—they’re a hot customer right now. Let’s talk about what [company x] is doing. Let’s pick up the phone. Now’s the time to convert them,’” Irving said.

The program generated 600 new prospects and 12 sponsor contracts worth about $27,000 apiece, according to Schultheis—roughly $324,000 in revenue.

Beyond the immediate return, Irving said the approach helps protect the long-term value of Clarion’s database by reducing the temptation to repeatedly market irrelevant products to the same people.

“Your CRM, your contact, your database, it’s gold. It’s your business,” she said. “You don’t want to churn through that all the time… to make sure you’re not churning through and just repeatedly emailing people for something that’s not of interest to them was really key.”

Applying the Same Logic to Attendees

Clarion has taken a similar approach to attendee acquisition, breaking prospective customers into three broad stages and changing both the message and marketing channel accordingly:

Early: broader, cheaper programmatic campaigns to build awareness

Mid: retargeting once prospects show interest

Late: abandoned-cart prompts, timing and pricing hooks

“We want to build top of funnel, like we all want to do,” Irving said. “But the approach we took was to break it up to say, what stage do we believe this customer was at, so we could tailor our message, but also tailor what the action was we were asking them to do.”

One campaign for an event with tickets costing about $3,000 produced 295 clicks and eight registrations.

“Eight at $3,000, I’ll take all day,” Irving said, noting that the campaigns also delivered lower CPCs and higher CTRs than previous efforts and industry benchmarks.

Beyond Marketing

The more consequential shift may be what happens when the same audience intelligence moves outside the marketing department.

Clarion has begun using 18 months of content consumption to test whether its event agendas reflect what target audiences are actually researching—and to identify topics that could support new sponsorship products.

“We can then look at our agenda and say, are we hitting the right tone? Are the right topics there? Should we do more or less of this?” Irving said. “It wasn’t just we think this is what we should do. This is data and facts to say, actually, here’s what we should be playing.”

The data has also changed what Clarion sees after an event ends. In one case, the company found a 62% increase in views of certain show-related topics after the event, leading it to develop new post-show sponsorship packages.

“A lot of us, as we know, we drop off post-show, but this clearly is showing us in this case there was more to be had, and we were leaving dollars on the table,” Irving said.

The partnership formally kicked off in December. By August, Clarion was applying the model across sponsors, attendees and content. The company runs about 50 shows a year in 12 markets, and Irving said other teams are now “knocking down the door” to adopt the approach.

“I want the partnerships to be open, but at the end of the day, I want Clarion to own the how we do it,” she said. “Finding partners who are willing to go on this journey with us, willing to partner, to share to make us better, is what we’re going to continue to look for.”

For Clarion, the experiment started as a way to get smarter about the top of the funnel. Less than a year later, it is influencing who sales calls, how marketing spends, what goes on an agenda and what sponsors can buy. The data itself may come from multiple places. Clarion’s bet is that knowing what to do with it should become an internal competency.

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