Event marketing is hard. Measuring the results of event marketing efforts is even harder. If you’re like a lot of event marketers or professionals, you’re setting time aside this month to reflect back on this year’s event success –– but you’re not quite sure where to begin when it comes to measuring event roi.
I’m here to bring you comforting news: You’re not the first to be perplexed by the idea of measuring event success. But lucky for you, we’ve done this a time or two. Plus, we’ve helped most Splash customers integrate Splash with Salesforce and configured endless amounts of dashboards so they can understand the quantifiable business outcomes their events create.
We all love to talk about how many people registered for our last event. But if only a fraction of those registrations converted to live attendance, you’re not telling the whole story. And that is what I like to call a vanity metric: something that seems like a huge win at face value, but actually means nothing after you dig deeper. Think social media likes and comments versus clicks to the shared content.
This requires a little bit of homework before diving right into measuring because, let’s face it, if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, will you ever get there? The first step to successfully measuring your events is to define what success is. Here are some good examples:
And because I can't resist, here are some examples of fluffy, vanity metrics that won't get you that same fat event budget you had this year:
I’m not saying you should forget about these metrics, but I wouldn’t lead with them.
Pro Tip: Just because the vanity metrics don’t tell the whole success story, they still matter. For example, if one event landing page had significantly more views than normal but had a lower conversion rate than expected, it’s worth reporting. It’s also worth a deeper dive into the tactics used to promote that particular event and understand how you can increase the conversion rate for future events.
At 21%, events occupy the largest share of the marketing budget and yet only 33% of marketers can measure event ROI. For the other 66%, this means — and I don’t intend to burst your bubble — that you’re running an event strategy on good faith and measuring it with feedback from the on-site team. But don’t you really want to know how many dollars got back into your pocket as a direct result of the event? (Trick question — of course you do.)
Ticketed events are naturally much easier to measure ROI for because it’s simple math: Subtract all expenses down to the last name badge from the total amount of ticket revenue, divide by the total cost, and multiply by 100 (since ROI is typically observed as a percentage). For all of you math whizzes, here’s an example:
Total Event Cost: $50,000
Total Ticket Revenue: $57,125
[(57,125 - 50,000) ÷ 50,000] x 100 = 14.25% ROI
But Hannah, the event program I run doesn’t involve ticketed events. Can I still measure ROI? Glad you asked! The answer is yes, but I call it something a little bit different: event influence.
Great! You’re still with me even after I threw an ugly math equation at you. I wish I could say that is the nerdiest we are going to get in this post, but it’s really just the beginning, so buckle up.
Remember above where I mentioned the only way some teams can measure event success is by the feedback from the on-site team? Well, this is how you add some hard evidence to that feedback: measuring event influence on pipeline and revenue.
While ROI is a powerful metric, this one takes the cake in my book. While it may seem daunting to start the process of connecting a live touchpoint back to a hard number, it’s actually a breeze if your event and CRM systems are integrated. Assuming your Salesforce data is mostly accurate and you track attendee data in individual Salesforce campaigns, you can extract a campaign influence report to understand how many closed-won opportunities were influenced by the event.
Pro Tip: To decrease influence inflation, only measure influence of people who attended the event. You can include no-shows, cancellations, or invitees, but I recommend weighting them differently and compiling a separate report.
After you’ve mastered the art of influence, your next step is figuring out how many new contacts your events created and how meeting these people in-person can be attributed back to pipeline and revenue goals.
If you’re part of a large organization with a sizable marketing team, this part might fall to your marketing operations team as it requires prerequisite lead scoring and qualifying. But if you’re like many event marketers, you have a small team and this metric lives in your wheelhouse.
One of the unique advantages event marketing has over digital marketing is the fact that we actually get to talk to our prospects and customers face-to-face –– somewhat of a foreign concept these days. This gives us a leg up because we don’t have to fight tooth and nail for email opens or responses. Instead, we can just have a conversation and qualify someone as a prospect in minutes.
After each event is complete, you update Salesforce campaigns with relevant statuses and enter new contacts into the system; or it all happens automatically because your event tech is integrated with Salesforce. At the end of the year, you’ll want to create a report of any qualified new contact who had a “first touch” at an event. By appropriately correlating opportunities to the new contacts, you’ll have visibility into how much pipeline and revenue can be attributed back to your event program.
Pro Tip: The sales team is likely making the new connections and entering new contact data into Salesforce. Take the extra step to educate them on how you’re measuring event success to ensure that all event data is correctly entered into Salesforce.
Measuring any marketing activity can be completed in a slew of different ways and every organization has its nuances. But, every organization wants to understand exactly how their hard-earned dollars are being invested. If you can master the art of measuring event success in the major areas outlined above, you’re off to a great start and will be poised to receive the fat event budget you’re aiming for in 2020 to create even more powerful, scalable, and measurable experiences.
