How to Prioritize Pipeline and Increase Your Event ROI

Marketing professionals recognize the vital role that events play within their overarching marketing strategy. If planned and executed right, events have the potential to easily turn into revenue-generating powerhouses. 

According to a study conducted by Visme, 83% of brands say that event marketing has consistently increased their sales. And given the significant time and resources involved in planning and executing events, understanding the performance of events is pivotal. Measuring the return on investment (ROI) across your events can be a challenging task. The complexity becomes even more pronounced when dealing with multi-session events, that extend over multiple days and are hosted at various regions and global locations.  In this blog, you will learn how to make the most of your events and drive revenue while maintaining a funnel of potential customers for your products or services.

Have the Right Systems In Place

It’s important to prioritize technology as part of your event planning process to ensure your sales and event ROI is a success. The key is to integrate and connect your technology platforms so that your events and sales pipeline run smoothly. Your setup should include a CRM system, a marketing automation platform, and an end-to-end event platform. The CRM system helps you track campaign performance, leads, opportunities, sales, and pipeline generated plus keep all data related to past and current customers in one place. It allows your sales team to better manage communication with leads, customers, and partners throughout the sales process.

Choose an Attribution Method

In the context of prioritizing sales and ROI in your event planning process, it’s essential to recognize the significance of quantifying and assigning credit to your actions. Marketing attribution is the process of identifying the marketing activities that contribute to a sale or the achievement of a specific goal. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

• First touch – the first action a prospect engaged with you to be considered a lead. 
• Last touch – the last action a prospect took before converting into a lead.
• Multi-touch – this approach involves considering every touchpoint within the customer journey and assessing the significance of each touchpoint. While this provides a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey, it also adds complexity. The choice of the appropriate multi-touch model depends on your specific business context and the marketing efforts you have identified as the most effective in acquiring new clients or customers.

Attribution is necessary for effectively identifying the impact of activities and where to invest resources to drive sales and ROI. It also reveals where customers are in the funnel. Without it, efforts may be wasted on strategies that don’t actually make a difference.

Create a Replicable Event Process 

Establishing a consistent pre-event procedure, encompassing campaigns and a marketing orientation, will instill the practice of prioritizing outcomes. Having a well-defined, repeatable process for every event enables you to effectively monitor event success and ensure that you’re maximizing your sales and return on investment. For optimal outcomes, your event process should adhere to the following sequence:

1. Generate the event as a campaign within your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
2. Set up event registration within your event management software.
3. Categorize your audience lists, and provide additional details if you are offering multiple products or services.
4. Craft and dispatch targeted promotional emails to reach your intended audience.
5. Enable the sales team to review and cross-reference this information with their own account lists.
6. Initiate proactive outreach initiatives to engage or extend invitations to potential attendees.
7. Develop automated notifications to promptly inform your sales team when an attendee has checked in.

Track Your Event Metrics

Evaluating the effectiveness of your events is vital for gaining insights into the returns generated by your efforts. This necessitates the systematic collection of data for objective analysis. To accomplish this, you should monitor various metrics for each event you organize, including:

1. The number of (new) leads integrated into the company database or CRM.
2. Your total event revenue.
3. Comprehensive reach on social media, impressions, and hashtag usage.
4. Any noteworthy press or media mentions.
5. Interactions with potential clients or existing clients.
6. The overall progression in the sales pipeline, from leads to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to opportunities.
7. Assessment of the event’s influence on the existing pipeline, if applicable.
8. Relevant survey results and event ratings.
9. The number of deals secured during the event or post-event as a direct consequence of the event.

Monitoring these metrics will furnish you with valuable insights into the performance of your events and guide your future efforts effectively.

Turn Leads into Customers

In event planning, the conversion of leads into customers plays a pivotal role in achieving the desired ROI, and it hinges on the various touchpoints you utilize throughout the process. In fact, statistics indicate that prospects typically need about 15 interactions before they recall your brand and take decisive action. To ensure the success of your event planning process, you must comprehend the dynamics of a sales pipeline and the process of converting leads into customers or clients.

Familiarize yourself with your sales cycle, which is the time it takes to transition a casual individual into a prospect and eventually into a customer. Identify the actions or touchpoints that elicit responses from them. Do you employ lead-scoring to gauge their interest based on specific activities? For instance, attending your event signifies greater interest compared to someone who simply clicked on a link in your event email.

In this process, once they’ve displayed interest, you may elevate their status to a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), someone the sales team can follow up with because you know they are genuinely interested. Ultimately, the goal is for this individual to make a purchase, effectively becoming a customer or client.

While this may appear overwhelming, particularly for those unaccustomed to consistent data tracking, it’s important to remember that part of our responsibilities as event planners is to also function as marketers. Establishing a system that not only monitors the numbers but also strategizes around them can substantially impact the future success of your events.

Certain Event Management platform enables marketing professionals to create, promote, engage, and reach attendees and target audiences. For more information on how Certain’s suite of products and services can help you, contact us and we’ll show you how to drive greater revenue and results from your events.