How to Calculate Event ROI by Driving Better Results and Reducing Operational Inefficiencies
Marketing campaigns generally conclude with the same question: was it worth it from a return on investment (ROI) standpoint? What seems straightforward can often be a tricky thing to figure out. Event marketing success can be measured in many ways including:
- Registration goals: How many attendees do you need to drive? Do you have paid registration goals? What’s the number you need to hit?
- How you personalize your registration drive to prospects customers
- How much demand will you generate at the event? How many qualified leads?
- Pipeline influence and creation from the event. For example, how many upsells will originate from the event?
- The percentage of marketing budget going to events
- How long it takes to follow up with leads and customers after you’ve engaged at the event
In the end, event ROI should be calculated based on the following equation: (driving better business results) + (reducing operational inefficiencies) = a good ROI.
To find out more about both of these elements, let’s look at what can be done before, during and after events to achieve both, with some solid examples from companies that are already employing best practices.
Pre-event: increase registrations.
Personalization is the key to making an attendee feel welcome, at home and excited about engaging and partnering with your company. A personalized approach can make or break registration through key touch points as social engagement – one the channel your prospect wants to be communicated on – email marketing, advertising and landing pages. It’s important to capture that correctly and use it correctly to increase registration from serious prospects. Before an event gets under way, the data gathering potential is limitless. CA Technologies increased registration by 42 percent through personalization of registration invites and landing pages.
During event: increase in pipeline
The pipeline is all important at an event. Therefore, it’s crucial to nurture it with customer and prospect engagement, both of which ultimately drives pipeline. This can be accomplished through collecting real-time data on engagement that can be used for more accurate and engaging marketing, which leads to new or accelerated pipeline (data on session check-in, booth demo check-in, sessions being tagged with Product X, Y or Z or pain points, surveys, polling, custom questions, etc). Live data capture is even appealing to more traditional B2B and B2C companies, which are increasingly turning more to events to generate demand.
Post-event, increase in speed to lead
After an event, everyone is focused on leads: how many and how good are they. In a recent Certain survey, we found that 80 percent of senior marketers said they wish they had more data for follow up and over 70 percent said in the same lead follow-up survey that it takes over four days to follow-up with leads after an event. Utilizing technology that sets you up for success with accurate data and a personalized message will not only drive better business results by closing deals faster, it also reduces operational inefficiencies by automating the follow up. Read more about how National Instruments went from an average 4-14 day follow up to same day.
The ROI calculator is foolproof if you’re working with the right data for events. To learn more about Certain, request a demo.