Event marketing has emerged as an effective strategy for strengthening customer relations, generating goodwill and building a trustworthy brand image. For this reason, it becomes imperative to measure event marketing performance as it plays a major role in determining the overall success of an enterprise.
Besides, events are a great opportunity for consumers to interact with brands so that they can get a clear picture of the company’s perspective and ultimate goals. In this article, we will explain how you can measure your event marketing efforts and ROI by employing the right metrics.
Why is it important to measure event marketing performance and ROI?
When it comes to organizing an event, businesses know it very well that it requires some investment. Measuring performance and ROI is of utmost importance as it will allow you to make the required rectifications so that you can hold better events in the future.
Events make it easier for consumers to learn about the brand. For this reason, it’s critically important to measure each event’s performance consistently. Without proper measurement, businesses cannot improve their future events, which are crucial for overall growth in today’s corporate world.
What are the right metrics?
A lot of resources and time go into organizing a corporate event, so keeping track of how things went during the event is of utmost importance. Let’s take a look at the various essential metrics that provide can provide accurate measurements:
1. Measurement of event marketing performance
Here are the important metrics that you must take into consideration for a precise measurement of your event’s performance.
- Session attendance—Taking session attendance into consideration is the first step to measure your event marketing success. Maintaining a record of when attendees arrived and left your sessions can help you determine the total amount of time they were present at your event.
- Session engagement—Another important metric that should be considered is session engagement. The total amount of time that a user spends on your application in a particular session is perceived as engagement. Everything from the length of session, frequency, and rate of return is a great way of measuring your event marketing performance.
- Social media engagement—These days, social media is at its peak and businesses can benefit a great deal from it. As the name suggests, social media engagement refers to your overall audience reach on online platforms. Since customers are online most of the time, social media engagement is an essential metric for measuring your event marketing performance.
- Event application engagement—This is another efficacious method of keeping track of your event marketing performance. It requires consumers to download certain applications for evaluation of the interaction they had with your brand during the event.
2. Measurement of ROI
Here are the important metrics that you must keep in mind while measuring Return on Investment (ROI):
- Overall expenses and expected revenue—When it comes to measurement of ROI, the first thing that you can do is calculate the overall expenses that you would spend on the event. This consists of upfront as well as hidden costs. Upfront costs such as catering, venue, etc., are usually considered a part of the budget, and it is not very difficult to measure it. On the other hand, hidden costs comprise time-related expenses and payment made to people.
- Customer retention—Customers are the heart and soul of businesses. Similarly, customer retention is an excellent metric for measuring ROI precisely. Not only that, events attract potential consumers, who could turn into loyal customers in the future. There may be no immediate sales or profits, but is important for businesses to treat customers and prospects with utmost diligence to ensure that they’re wholly satisfied. Furthermore, events make customers come closer to your brand, and this actually drives desired results.
3. Brand impact
The image of a brand in the eyes of consumers is everything for the business, and positive perceptions about a brand influence the decisions of potential buyers. Brand measurements are considered to be highly effective tools for assessment of subjective determinants of brand execution in a given market.
This is so because brand measurements make it easier for businesses to figure out the actual ROI. Besides, this metric considers the alterations in the perception of people towards a particular brand. For a brand to take full advantage of marketing, it should assess the perception changes for that particular dimension as there is a multitude of dimensions which have to be reviewed.
Final words
Owing to the ever-rising competition in the corporate world, businesses around the globe are employing event marketing as a strategy to seize lucrative opportunities. Over the years, event marketing has gained a lot of popularity as it helps businesses achieve their goals with minimum investment. In addition, events facilitate direct interaction between the customer and brand, thereby giving a reliable image to your business. On all these accounts, consider the metrics discussed in this article for getting a precise measurement of your marketing performance and ROI.
