The ROI of Event Marketing
When I started my career in Event Marketing, the word Marketing was conveniently omitted from the job title. I was an Event Manager. The only Marketing involved was letting the Marketing team know how many people had showed up to the event. Those were simpler times. As the old saying goes, ignorance was bliss.
Fast forward to 2016, 12 years later, and the old saying has been changed completely. Ignorance is no longer bliss, it is just ignorance.
We can no longer just throw money at events and hope for the best. As budgets are scrutinized more deeply, and companies depend on all aspects of Marketing to be an income generator, rather than a cost center, we are now responsible to prove our actions and decisions.
But how do we prove the unknown? Where it was once acceptable to show a full theater as a KPI achieved, we now know that a good portion of those guests may not have been potential customers. Where it was once demanded that we stay within budget for an event, we now know that budgets should be more fluid based on the desired outcome of the experience.
So how do we move from “Ignorance is Bliss”, to “Data-Driven Event Marketing”? It is easier than you think. I’ve put together a list of 7 data sets that I have found to be the most important and impactful for proving the event was worthwhile, and worth repeating, or more importantly, not worth repeating.
1. Email/ Digital Invitations
Design 101 says that the packaging is the most important part of the delivery. From your subject line, to your messaging, all aspects of your invitation must be taken into account before hitting the send button. Is it an email you would open? If the answer is no, don’t send it. Make sure you test, test, test, and preferably with an unbiased, outside source.
If you can enlist your marketing team to back up the event with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter posts, as well as website updates, blogs, and newsletters, so that your guests are more familiar with the content, location, time, guest speakers, entertainment, etc., you’ll have a much more successful open rate.
2. Open Rate
It is very important to know your audience. Knowing exactly who you want to attend your event will ensure a better open rate for your invitation based on relevance and interest. The greater open rates will begin to prove the worthiness of the event itself. A greater open rate equals a greater attendance of the appropriate people.
3. Attendance
So, the event is starting in 15 minutes and only half the chairs are full. Where is everyone? Rather than set yourself up for day of panic attacks, make sure you do the following. Send out weekly reminders to your “Yes” list. And always send out a “Day Of” reminder to maximize butts in seats. If you’ve followed steps 1 and 2, the “Yes” attendees should be the right people, so let’s make sure they actually show up!
4. Socialization
Were your attendees breaking down the four walls of your event and sharing the information they learned to a larger audience? Did you create low friction opportunities for them to share your information? Was the event #hashtag properly utilized pre-event and displayed prominently during the event? Were your speakers’ LinkedIn profiles and Twitter handles displayed on slides, printed materials, and on the website? Are you planning on having a dedicated person or team available on site to communicate with your audience members who are engaging your brand/ speakers/ other guests on social?
The post event social metrics are a valuable addition to your overall event ROI reporting. If your social footprint was low, look to enhance your social efforts for the next event with the suggestions above.
5. Spend vs. Return
This is probably the most important ROI aspect, and also the hardest to capture. For my events, I work toward a 5X return. That is to say, for every dollar I spend on an event, I want to make five dollars back. Tracking this information depends on a vital partnership with your sales team, as well as someone who works within your CRM platform. To use Salesforce as an example, your CRM platform manager must create a campaign within Salesforce with the name of the event you’re tracking. This way, when your sales team enters prospect/ customer data into Salesforce, they can mark which event that person’s sales cycle began. This allows that sales cycle to be tracked, and thusly their spend can be attributed back to the event that was marked in the CRM platform.
Having your CRM manager send you monthly reports showing the customer lifecycle spend helps you prove, over a number of months, the actual ROI of your event, and gives you definitive proof of whether an event is worth repeating.
6. Overall Annual Event Comparison
It’s also important to look at your entire event calendar holistically and see your winners and losers. This is especially helpful when planning for future events. When plotted on a chart, perhaps an event that only made 2X ROI isn’t so bad if another event had a 6X return. Rather than cutting the 2X return event, maybe this is an opportunity to adjust, rethink, or experiment with a different approach.
It is also a great way to show leadership why you are making certain decisions. It is much easier to agree and accept a decision based on objective data, vs. subjective date.
7. Post Event Surveys
Although surveys have a typically low open rates, when people do choose to open and take your surveys, the data captured can be vital feedback. I always recommend both an external and an internal survey. Feedback and criticism are extremely valuable tools for improvement. And we always want to be improving.
In short, we can no longer operate in vacuum. As Event Marketers, we have to be able to definitively prove the value of our events, and argue in favor of our budget asks with clear, objective data that leaves our leadership without questions.
-Tom Spano @TomSpano
Director, Event Marketing
SteelHouse, Inc.
Event Marketing: Strategy, Content, or Channel?
In the chaos that is marketing today, I read with interest Samuel Scott’s recent blog “How Google Analytics ruined marketing”, and from there his previous blog “Everything the tech world says about marketing is wrong.” Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly in today’s marketing world dominated by Digital Marketing buzz, there was no mention of Event Marketing in either of those posts. I found this very ironic given that most tech companies spend upwards of 20% of their marketing budgets on event marketing!
Coming back to the topic of this blog, I was nevertheless intrigued by Scott’s argument that most marketers today do not understand the basics of marketing and confuse strategy vs. content vs. marketing channels. That led me to ponder where event marketing fits in? Is event marketing a strategy, content, or channel? Or something else?
On the face of it, one could simply state that event marketing is just another channel to deliver a message to a target audience. Similar in concept to how email is a channel to deliver a targeted message to a set of recipients. However, the more I thought about it, the more interesting it got… and here are my thoughts. I would love to hear yours.
In general, Event Marketing is a unique, and one of the most complex, marketing tactics. It is the only marketing tactic that brings customers and prospects in direct face-to-face contact with brands and brand ambassadors (employees, sellers, marketers, retailers, etc.) in the pre-sales process. In the process, events:
Provide a channel for content delivery: Deliver content to the audiences as a marketing channel and create awareness (e.g. through exhibits / booths, presentation sessions, publicity through sponsorships, etc.)
Provide a source for content generation: Generate content through discussions, audience engagement and feedback (e.g. focus groups, special interest group discussions, expert sessions, etc.)
Create a high-touch environment for audience engagement: By bringing together brand ambassadors, experts, visionaries, executives, engineers and others in a focused setting, events uniquely create opportunities for strong audience engagement that could lead to new ideas and opportunities yet to be discovered.
Consequently, events can contribute the following benefits to marketing, and to the business:
Leads – strong interest in a product or service offering with inclination to consume in the short-term. These are direct indicators of sales potential for the brand requiring immediate follow up from sales and marketing
Publicity / Buzz – as measured by sentiment expressed, or feedback given by the audience. This may or may not indicate an interest in making a purchase, but it can generate valuable awareness and publicity
New ideas – for a product, service, message, or engagement. These cannot be directly translated into revenue-related metrics in the short-term, but, could provide guidance for the company’s direction, its products and services, and best channels for engagement
So, when considered holistically, event marketing is more than a simple channel for marketing. It can be much more. To make it much more, event marketers (and marketing strategists) should plan well for the different benefits events can bring by working with different stakeholders. Here are some examples (some obvious and some not-so-obvious):
Sales and Marketing: Impact on generating new leads, influence existing pipeline, and cross-sell / up-sell to existing customers
Content: Creating / generating content is not easy, and can also be very expensive. Rather than create content only by hiring expert writers, find ways to capture content that gets generated at events. Plan ahead to capture videos of presentation sessions and ad-hoc interviews. You will be amazed how much content you can generate with very little additional cost
Idea Generation / Validation: Doing focus groups and market-based testing of new concepts and products can be very expensive. You can save a lot of money and time by simply engaging with your event audiences and having them test drive your products, services, messages, etc. while at the event
References: Happy customers attending your events can be a great source for developing valuable references. Hosting customer-appreciation forums and recognizing successful customer deployments can all build goodwill and generate valuable references
You can elevate your event marketing efforts by thoughtful planning, proper execution by collaborating with your different stakeholders, establishing measurable outcomes, and meticulous tracking and reporting of outcomes.